Have I mentioned that I love gelatin and bone broth?  Cause I really do.  It’s great for your guts, helps with hormones and it’s awesome for skin and hair health.  In case you haven’t heard me preaching the health benefits of gelatin before, check out my article here. There are seriously so many benefits to having bone broth!

At a recent visit to the local grass-fed butcher, I saw a big ol’ bag o’ beef-bones for all of $3 and it reminded me it was time to make another batch of bone broth.   From this bag I made two batches of broth and it took roughly 4 days (with maybe 40 minutes time actually attending to it total) but this does include some procrastination on my part which dragged the whole process out longer than it needed to be.  I cook my broth for a fairly long time to get a dark, thicker result but if you wanted a more golden colored, thinner broth you could halve the cooking time.  I’m essentially making bone jelly, not broth.  I also make broth out of the same bones twice, as I reduce it so much.

It’s soo easy to make bone broth.  You can use a slow cooker, a pot on the stove or even a pressure cooker.  You’ll need a big strainer, a few bowls to sort it out and strain into once it’s ready and a jar or two to store it in.

The process.

I put some of the meatier bones aside for Chewie’s dinners, and plonked the rest in a roasting tray and cooked in the oven at 200C until brown or for about 1 hr.  They then went into my slow cooker and got covered with cold water.   Set to high, with a heat mat underneath the slow cooker as this baby will be going for a while.

I put in a big splash of apple cider vinegar to encourage the bones to release their goodness, and added some vegetable off cuts from what I had prepared from dinner (the ends and skins of some brown onions, garlic skin, peelings of jerusaleum artichokes) as well as a few pepper corns and a roughly diced carrot and stick of celery.

Leave for 2-5 hours on high, then turn on low for another 12-15 hours.  Turn off and allow to cool.

At this point you can sort out the broth a few ways: you can strain the lot all together before it’s cooled too much and then place the broth into the fridge to allow the fat to solidify and then scrape this off with a spoon and discard.  You can let it cool in the pot, scrape the fat off from the top and then strain.

I put the carrot and celery aside at this point to add to another dish later, but you can keep them all together if you like.  The liquid does reduce quite a lot when cooking for this long, and you don’t have as much room for liquid in a slow cooker as you would in a big pot on the stove, so by all means you can top it up with water as you go making it into more of a stock.

Once you’ve strained the rest of the liquid put it into a jar or container and refrigerate.  Pick off any remaining fatty parts from the bones, and put the bones and vegetables back into the slow cooker with another splash of vinegar and cover again with cold water, repeating the process.

After a few hours in the fridge your bone broth should have turned into jelly. It’s really difficult to get rid of ALL the fat but I don’t think you need to, in fact it can be quite healing for the digestive system.

Hubby decided to evoke his inner child and smash it up with a spoon before I could take a picture, but you still get the idea.

Use 1 tbsp of jelly to 1 cup water

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