Bone Broth

The glorious homemade bone broth! It is extremely nourishing for your body, it helps heal your gut, removes toxins, aids digestion, good for your joints, the list goes on... It also is a great way of using up that whole chicken or roast lamb bone that still has some meat on it.

We are very lucky here in New Zealand that all of our Lamb and Beef is grassfed, I sure don't like wasting the bones - especially when I have cooked my roast on the weber, you get the most delicious smokey flavour.

How do you get thick and gelatinous bone broth? When cooled bone broth should be thick and much like jelly! I know that a lot of people struggle with this so I thought I would give you a step by step process.

Ingredients:

• Leftover Meat bones
• 1 large Onion
• 1 large Carrot
• 2 stalks Celery 
• 2 Tablespoons of Apple Cider Vinegar
• Water

Instructions:

1. Peel your onion and chop it into quarters, peel the carrot and dice, remove the flowery part of the celery and chop up into pieces.
2. Place the bones, along with the rest of the ingredients into a large soup pot (you can also use a crockpot). Fill up your pot with water, the addition of apple cider vinegar and letting your bones sit in cold water (with the acv) for at least an hour will give you the best results.
3. After an hour slowly bring it to a boil and then reduce to a very low simmer and cook for at least 8 hours, you can do 24 hours if you want to, the longer it cooks the better as you are drawing the nutrition out of the bones.
4. If you cook the broth for longer than 8 hours you will need to check the water level occasionally, it might need topping up.
5. When you are ready to strain the stock place a mesh strainer over a large bowl and pour the broth through the strainer. At this stage you will have this aromatic liquid that you will want to drink straight away, please don't, you need to cool it to remove the fat. I'm a huge believer in eating fat but when it comes to drinking bone broth it's not ideal - especially with chicken fat. Pour the liquid into glass jars and allow to cool for at least an hour, to cool it down faster place them in a cool water bath, then you can refrigerate.
6. Once the broth has cooled the fat will harden on the surface. This will help keep the broth fresh. The broth will keep in the fridge for up to 3 days otherwise it's best to freeze. keep well in the fridge for one week. You can also store in ice cube trays which makes it easy to use when needed, if you do this make sure you have removed the fat first.