Listen to me, and listen closely. If there is one thing you’re going to make from scratch, it should be this bone broth.
Seriously. I’m not effing around here.
This recipe yields about a gallon and a half of clear, limpid, chintan-style golden broth with the miraculous ability to pick up and amplify the absolute shit out of any flavor you add to it. Make it. What do I have to do to convince you to make it??
The Pros and Cons of Making Bone Broth From Scratch
I know! Let’s do a pros and cons analysis! And just to be fun, let’s start with the cons. Or really con, since there is only one problem with this recipe. In order to do it in batches big enough to make it worthwhile, it is a super huge, gigantic, 100% pain in the ass. But you wouldn’t be on a from scratch cooking blog if you gave two shits about things being a pain in the ass, so let’s just overlook this con altogether and get to the pros, shall we?
The pros, on the other hand, are legion. This is, bar none, the most perfect soup base that has ever based a soup. It’s extremely high collagen content has a ton of great health benefits but eff those, let’s focus on FLAVOR.
The fats and proteins suspended in this broth during the cooking process are like little mini blank canvases, ready to pick up any other flavor you introduce and turn it up to 11.
Making ramen? Toss some shoyu tare into this broth, and it will melt your face off with how face-meltingly good it is.
Want Pastina? No problemo. Saute up your basic mirepoix, thyme, bay leaf and add this bone broth and a bit of parmesan. Basta, you’ve got Italian Nana comfort soup that will heal your cracked and broken soul.
Making potstickers? Add a quarter cup of this to your meat mash and burn the hell out of your mouth with the resulting explosion of delicious juiciness.
Add it to literally anything that calls for “chicken soup stock” and it will, I guarantee, elevate your game, and without the metric tonne of sodium that comes in that canned shit.
Notice how I said “Add stuff to it” in every example of how to use it. By itself, this bone broth is some bland-ass stuff. You’ll boil this miracle elixir down for hours and at the end, you’ll dip that spoon in and burn your lips tasting it- and it’ll taste like almost nothing.
It’s cool, dude. It’s ok. That’s how it’s supposed to be. It picks up and amplifies other flavors. If you’re super paranoid about how good or not it’s gonna taste, put a wee pinch of salt in a bowl and spoon some of that bland-ass broth over it and give it a try. Knock your socks off. You can trust me completely.
How to make the pain in the ass worthwhile? VOLUME BABY! This recipe yields somewhere between a gallon and a gallon and a half of soup stock for you to freeze into 1 qt portions that I find are perfect for soup for two, and use for the next few months. (Or few weeks if you’re me. I eat a lot of this broth.)
It is magic.
Bone Broth From Scratch Recipe
Course: SoupsCuisine: AmericanDifficulty: Medium1
gallons1
hour8
HoursA few notes about this recipe. It’s meant to make a LOT of stock that you can then parcel out into reasonable serving-sized quantities and freeze for later. It is a magic panacea of a broth- suitable for literally everything that calls for “chicken stock,” from Nana’s pastina to Obaasan’s ramen.
In order to follow the recipe you need some seriously big stock pots. I usually use turkey-fryer 32 qt pots which are bigger than you need, but are great for keeping the stock at a nice simmer.
Ingredients
1 3 Lb OLD Chicken*
2 Lb chicken leg/thigh joints with all big globules of fat cut off. (Age doesn’t matter here.)
8 Lbs of meaty pork bones, I usually use some combination of shanks, back and neck bones. Whatever’s freshest, it doesn’t really matter.
4 gallons of fresh or filtered, GOOD water. **
1 whole onion
2 heads of garlic
1 6 oz piece of ginger
Directions
- You’ll be using two pots to make this stock. One pot will be used to par-boil the meat to remove blood and impurities. The other will be used to cook the actual stock. fill the pre-boil stock pot 3/4 of the way full of water (enough to at least submerge all your meats in) and bring 4 gallons of good water in the actual soup stock pot to a simmer.
- While water is coming up to a boil, rinse all the bones and carcasses in water as hot as you can stand. If you have the forethought, let them soak in that hot water for as long as you have had forethought to pre-soak. It helps shorten the next step.
- Par boil all the chicken for 5 minutes. It will release blood, grease and other mystery “impurities” into a nice disgusting scum on the top of the water. Get rid of the scum and pull the chicken out, transferring it to the other pot that should be barely simmering. Make sure you don’t’ take any of that nasty scum with you.
- Next, CAREFULLY PLACE the pork bones into that hard boiling water and boil them for around 10 minutes, or until you don’t have to constantly skim all the grey scum off the top of the water. It is very important to “clean” the pork bones in this manner. You’re not losing any flavors you want, trust me. Boiled blood tastes like ass. Once you’re confident you’re not taking any lazy shortcuts, get those pork bones under some running water to get the last of any scum off them and toss them in the pot with the chicken.
- Adjust the heat until there’s the barest bubble of a simmer and then Let. That. Stock. Sit. I mean, by all means skim off any extra scum that floats to the top because you shortcutted step 4, but for the love of God, if you want a nice, clear golden end result rather than a murky mess (which will still taste good, but looks gross) DON’T DISTURB THE BONES. Just let them poach gently for literally ever, or at least 8 hours which will seem like forever.
- When your stock has reduced by about ⅔ remove it from the heat and let it sit for 5 minutes to settle. Now it’s time to Disturb the Bones. With the care of a grave robber worried about a curse, gently, gently lift those bones and carcasses out of the bone broth and put them in a strainer set inside a bowl. Let them drain and then pour the amazing juices back into the broth.
- Use a fine mesh sieve with a piece of cheese cloth over it and ladle the hot broth into whatever plastic storage containers you want. I usually store them in meal-sized containers, but you do you. Just don’t put them in glass, ok? Cause you’re gonna freeze them, and they’ll burst the glass. (I only know because I did it once. Leave all the headroom you want in that ball jar, she’s still gonna split.)
Notes
- *I usually buy one of the frozen ones from the local asian market, since they are usually older birds and come intact with head, feet and neck, all of which attributes make them really flavorful and add to the collagen content of the stock.
- **Look, this is super important. Water is the main ingredient to this recipe by volume so don’t mess around. We have well water that tastes decent, and which we filter extensively so it tastes even better. However, when I’m putting forth all the effort to make this enormous volume of broth, I go ahead and buy the best, most neutral tasting water I can find. I could travel to an artesian spring in the forests of Japan, I would, but I can’t so I make due with bottled spring water.
There you have it. Golden delicious magic broth that makes every single dish you put it into taste and feel better. You’re welcome.
Cook well and happily my fellow masochists!
Equipment I Use
- Pre-Boil Stock Pot (doesn’t need to be as big since I only need enough water to cover the bones.
- Soup Stock Pot It’s huge, I know. Trust me, it makes everything SO much easier when you don’t have to worry about liquid hot magma splashing out of the pot.
- Cheese Cloth
- Quart Storage Containers: These stack really well in the freezer and the locking lids are super hardcore. By far my favorite storage container.
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