Bone Broth + The Science of Cookery
A very scientific approach to making stock and an ode to experimentation.
Lately, on weekend mornings1, Kiddo CWD and I have been getting up before Mrs. and Baby CWD and making something for breakfast. Classic weekend breakfast stuff, really2, but I’ve been enjoying playing around with some traditional Irish recipes from Forgotten Skills of Cooking. Things like brown bread scones, digestive cookies, corncakes, and bastible bread.
This has been a lot of fun for me3. While I’ve gotten pretty comfortable cooking almost anything, baking was never something I felt entirely confident doing. Maybe it was because Nana CWD never did much baking until after I left for college4, maybe it was because I associated baking with something like this, or maybe just because you always hear that baking, unlike cooking, requires absolute precision. Whereas cooking a risotto, once you get the foundations under your belt, allows for infinite variation, to me, baking a cake requires exacting measurements and very little room for experimentation5.
Where’s the fun in that?
But as I’ve played around more and more, I’ve come to realize this isn’t truly the case. Sure, you can’t entirely wing something like cornbread6, but once you start to understand rough ratios, you don’t need surgical precision to bake. In “the olden days,” they didn’t have digital scales, consistent measuring cups or spoons, stand mixers, or clocks. They had their hands and their eyes and their senses. And, yet, they still made bread, made cakes, made cookies. You can and should have some playfulness in baking, especially so if you lower your expectations7. It’s okay to screw up, it’s okay if your sourdough doesn’t rise because you cold-proofed it for too long — if you’ve learned something from the experience, that’s a win in my book.
(There’s a lesson here about the importance of foundations in all things.)
I saw someone, recently, after seeing a gelatinous picture of bone broth on Twitter, ask for the precise ratios used. Exactly how many bones were used? What kind? How much water? For how long did it cook? Was it a roiling boil or a gentle simmer?
Trying to be helpful, I responded with some rough guidelines: use as many bones as you have, cover them with water, and simmer for 8-12 hours. After you cool the broth, it should jiggle like Jell-O. The questioner’s response was something along the lines of “Thanks, but I’ve done this before. Bone to water ratio, cook time, batch size — all this stuff matters. You can’t leave it to your intuition or eye — it’s a science!”
I think that’s about as far from the case as you can get, but, you can’t really argue with that mindset. If you want to think that you need exaction, precision, and atomic measurements for anything in the kitchen8, good for you. Before you take that as dogma, though, I’d encourage you to wing it at least once — you might find yourself pleasantly surprised with the results9.
Fill a large stockpot with as many bones as you can muster10 and then cover the bones with water. Bring the pot to a boil, then cut to a simmer, and cook for at least 8 hours (if using mostly poultry bones) and 12 hours (if using mostly beef, pork, or other larger animal).
Once the stock is reduced by nearly half, strain through a mesh strainer11 or other colander which can stand up to heat, and put the whole thing in the refrigerator to cool overnight. The next day, skim the fat off the top12 and segment the stock into mason jars or other freezer-proof containers. If you did it right, this should be nearly solid13 and will keep in the freezer for a few months or fridge for a week or so14 .
There you have it: bone broth. This isn’t a hard recipe, a complicated recipe, or a scientific recipe. It just takes time. The stock is done when it feels like it’s done. You can use the finished product as the base for a soup (like we did), to braise meat, to cook a risotto, or just to drink straight from a mug like coffee. It’s all deadly!
If you have some accumulated bones, give that a shot this weekend. Throw the pot on when you wake up and take it off before you go to bed. If you don’t have any bones, you can ask the folks behind the butcher counter if they have any you can buy — generally, they do and they’re pretty cheap. Or, roast a chicken and save the carcass.
I’ll leave you on that one to enjoy your Friday. We’re going to be heading up to the Great White North, maybe sneaking in some late season skiing, maybe finally getting out on the XC trails, and at the every least, enjoying some time with the extended Family CWD. However you’re making use of it, enjoy.
I say lately, but actually, it’s been like that for awhile… sorry Mrs.!
See “Weekend Waffles.”
And hopefully for KCWD as well — though she really just likes to eat the batters and doughs raw.
Though now she makes tremendous cakes regularly — and, for awhile, about weekly!
Heck, Uncle Steady’s sourdough recipe is so exacting, I had to buy a kitchen scale to get my measurements right!
We tried that once and it tasted like burnt, bacon-flavored corn dust.
I tried to make tea cookies shaped like bunnies a few weeks ago — while the taste was good, my shaping skills leave much to be desired! Kiddo still liked them, at least.
Or, for that matter, in life!
To think of cooking as a science in any regard is so interesting. Yes, chemically, there is science going on — but when you reduce ingredients to pieces of an equation, the finished product to a mathematical product, you lose out on the magic of cooking. It’s only in the last 100 years or so that any home cook had the ability to precisely adhere to a recipe, nor was that the expectation of any recipe writer. If you look at cook books from the early twentieth century, you’ll notice they are a few sentences with rough instructions.
Here’s the entire recipe, for example, for those tea cakes I tried, from Tried Favorites Cookery Book (10th Edition published in 1909): Cream 4oz of butter, add 2oz of sugar (beating well), 4oz of flour, 1 teaspoonful of baking-powder, 1 tablespoonful of milk and the yolk of an egg beaten up. Turn out on a floured board, roll out, and cut into any fancied shape. Bake 5 minutes in a sharp oven.
I’m not even sure what a sharp oven means, but I love it! If that recipe were to be written today, it would have at least three or four paragraphs rambling about something tangentially related to tea cakes, a exclamation of “Dear reader, these are the best tea cakes around!” and then a 15 step recipe detailing exactly how to cream your butter, mix your dough (batter?), and roll out the cookies. Different times.
It doesn’t matter if they are cooked or raw bones, beef, pork, lamb, or bison. We typically save the bones from everything we make, throw them in a freezer bag, and make a big batch of broth once we run out of room. This batch, for the record, was two 2-gallon freezer bags full of bones and a 16-qt stockpot.
This step is super important since saves you from picking bones out of your stock later and keeps various other debris out as well. The end product is a much cleaner broth, which tastes and looks better.
You, strictly speaking, don’t need to skim the fat, but I’ve found, like straining, that this leads to a better tasting broth. If you used uncooked (and unseasoned) bones, you can save the skimmed fat for cooking purposes, but this is a little much even for my “waste not, want not” tastes.
In case your curious why this solidification is the case, it’s because the collagen in the bones and tissue breaks down during the cooking process and dissolves into the water. When it cools, the protein molecules realign themselves into gelatin. If you want a super jello-y broth, you should use bones that come from working muscles, that have that connective tissue that you need. I like to use the chicken necks that get tucked into whole chickens, shank bones, shoulder bones, rib bones, and back bones — those type of bones that you might otherwise throw away. Marrow bones, despite being popular, aren’t terrific for making stock since there isn’t much tissue there, but the marrow does add some nice flavor, especially if roasted.
Assuming it lasts that long!
I wholeheartedly agree with Lady...couldn't have said it better myself.
Very interesting, but not an instant gratification feed recipe. As always, the dialog compels me to at least consider making my own bone broth, although a carton from the supermarket works just fine for me (I'll make sure it's a high quality version). I'll see what magic you make from the pork bones that you better not forget to take home.
I love you, and will make you a cake.