Chicken Bone Broth
Don’t throw away those bones! If you’ve had a whole roast chicken dinner with wine and it’s late, don’t compost the bones. Chuck them in a bag in your freezer until you have enough bones for a huge potful.
Warm it up and drink it by the cupful.
Use it as the base for soups, stews, casseroles, gravy and even porridge. Freeze it in ice-cube trays and drop one into your green smoothie for a collagen kick. Pass a mug to anyone who is sniffling. Take a jar to someone who is sad or grieving or so unwell that they just can’t face food.
Have it in your fridge and your freezer and see what happens if you replace one caffeinated beverage a day with a mug of bone broth. You might find yourself all evangelical about it too.
Makes approx. 2.5L (85 fl oz/10 cups).
Ingredients 8
1 chicken carcass, ideally pasture-raised, see my tips
1 onion, skin on, roughly chopped
3 garlic cloves, unpeeled
2 bay leaves
2 tsp sea salt, see my tips
1 tbsp black peppercorns, whole
2 l water, more or less as needed
2 tbsp apple-cider vinegar, more as needed
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Method 7
Take one free-range and put it in a stockpot. You can use the bones raw or cooked, though roasted bones tend to lend the broth some extra colour and flavour. Use all the pan scrapings, including the chicken skin, in your broth.
Add the (use the skin too for added colour), , and . Add the (see my tips) and the .
Cover the bones with and add approximately 1 tablespoon of per litre of water. This helps draw the gelatine and other goodness out of the bones.
Bring slowly just up to the boil, then reduce the heat to a simmer. Put the lid on, slightly ajar (we usually prop the lid open with a wooden spoon on its side).
Simmer slowly for 6–8 hours for a lovely, mineral-rich broth. You need to simmer it on a low enough heat that it does not evaporate. For a lovely jelly-like finish you don’t want to be adding too much extra water as it cooks.
Strain out the vegetables and bones.
Store the finished broth in the fridge for up to 2 weeks. It also freezes really well for 6 months.
Buena Vista Farm's tips
The reason you want to use pasture-raised or grass-fed is because the difference in the animal’s life makes a big difference to its bones. Pasture-raised animals that live with more robust nutrition throughout their lives tend to have mightily more calcium in their bones. A good example of this is if you pick up a cooked bone of a conventionally grown chicken from the supermarket. You can usually snap it. This is not the case with a pasture-raised meat chicken. You actually cannot usually even break the bones with two hands
This nutrition, of course, is extended to the broth made from these bones. It’s more expensive to grow chickens in small batches on pasture than it is to grow them by the thousands in large, temperature-controlled sheds. It’s less economic to give cows heaps of space and manage them in rotated paddocks than to grow them in yards feeding them grain for quicker growth. Please pay the extra money and buy pasture- raised and grass-fed, for sustainable farming, for a better quality of life for the animals being farmed, and for your own very good health.
Salt: You can freeze this broth in ice-cube trays and throw frozen cubes into your green smoothie for an extra mineral hit. If you’re planning to do this I would not salt the broth.
