Easy chicken bone broth: the ultimate gut-skin restorative
I love buying a whole organic chicken. I can spend a Sunday giving her the love she deserves: a dry brine, with a few hours uncovered in the fridge to get her skin nice and crispy, then a slow roast, with her juices slowly rendering and coating a base of root vegetables with luscious umami drippings that are so collagen-rich they form a jiggly jelly when cooled. Even after dinner is served, her gifts keep giving with perhaps her best offering: bone broth, long-simmered to extract every last bit of gut-healing nutrition.
You’ll need:
Bones of 1 or more chickens. (You can save bones by freezing them, then add them together and make a denser stock, of just use the one and use the minimum amount of water.)
12-16 cups water
1 tbsp apple cider or white vinegar
Large stock pot, slow cooker or pressure cooker.
Fine mesh strainer
cheese cloth
Ladle
4 32-oz. mason jars and/or ice cube trays dedicated to freezing broth.
Remove any remaining meat from the bones, and put them in a stock pot, pressure cooker or slow cooker along with any saved frozen bones.
Pour in water.
Add a splash of apple cider vinegar or other white vinegar. This will help extract the minerals from the bones.
Bring to a boil and skim off any suds or impurities from the top.
If you’re using a stock pot, put the pot in an oven at 180 degrees F for 8 hours (you can turn off the oven and let it sit overnight, then bring to a boil in the morning). If using a slow cooker, set to low for 8 hours or overnight (a multi-cooker with saute function works well to boil, skim and slow cook in the same pot). If using a pressure cooker, set for 20 minutes, then release the pressure, open and skim off the impurities, them set to pressure again for another hour.
Ladle the stock through a fine mesh strainer lined with cheese cloth into containers.
Store in the fridge up to 4 days or freeze in ice cube trays and store in a sealed container in the freezer up to 6 months.
