Okay - enlighten me please. I’ve made my own beef and chicken broth for years and years. Roast some beef bones or chicken for 45 minutes in the oven, throw in a pot of water with chopped up onions, garlic, celery, carrots & herbs and boil for many hours, let sit til cool - scoop off the fat and voila - broth. I have a freezer full.
I’m thinking I should open a store - apparently there are bone broth restaurants. I’m not quite sure why this is such a big deal, I can assure you there are no magic powers in mine, it just makes the food taste better and way less salt and preservatives. I see people are actually just drinking it by the cup, but to sell it commercially there must be tons of salt and preservatives. So what gives - am I superwoman because I must use it 3 or so times a week in my cooking?
Bone broth creates a much richer stock than typical broth, that is made from meat only. There are nutrition gurus who say that bone broth is more nutritious (for example, when cooking down bones, the bones gelatinize which is reputed to minimize inflammation), plus it also puts reputedly more minerals into the soup broth which help immune function and the like (there have been some studies on that, that grandma’s chicken soup was a pretty good thing to have when you are sick), it also reputedly minimizes joint pain as well and the collagen it has in it helps skin, nails and hair. I have seen some outrageous claims about bone broth that seem to me not to have any clinical evidence, but there have been studies showing the health effects of bone broth in the areas I mentioned and others. Plus, of course, it tastes a lot better:)
Novelty drives the diet market and bone broth is now a magical diet food. How our grandparents must chuckle.You don’t need to open a broth store, just a BS store is good enough. I suspect many people don’t buy meat attached to any bones any more so even that is a bit of a novelty in today’s kitchen. The irony is the broth folk buy bones LOL. You know, like your butcher would have given you for your dog (when there were butchers)
It is good stuff, and my hubby says it is improving his hair and skin. I have noticed that when simmering the bones, the best stuff only starts coming out after 24 hours. I usually go for 48 hours in a slow cooker, and that is enough to break the bones down and dissolve all the deep hidden marrow bits. I use bison bones from the local farmers market.
@sybylla:
I think there are real benefits to bone broth, but like many food fads it also is being oversold, no one thing is a miracle food…my mother would be laughing her butt off at this whole thing, as would my paternal grandfather, in how what was once good old fasioned peasant cooking (ie using up what you had) has become ‘trendy’, I am sure at some high end food outlets they are selling bones as “the perfect bones for bone broth, specially raised to give you maximum benefit”, probably will make the price of Fowl go crazy, since they make the best chicken soup stock (Joyce Chen, the tv chef, would beam, she was always telling you to use a fowl). Personally I find that it is better to roast the bones first, but that is one of those things that likely is to cause a group of cooks to come to blows:). You used to be able to get things like smoked ham bones or a prosciutto bone for minestrone soup, for really cheap (they basically almost were throwing them away), the last time I asked for a prosciutto bone I swear by pound it was almost as expensive as the prosciutto.
As far as dog bones go, go to a pet store or even butchers that exist, they are now big business. Pretty much nothing gets wasted, and such things as Esophogas go for premium prices, as do even more exotic things, I wonder if the cattle farmers know just how much money can be extracted from one of the cattle they sell to market. Back in the day, they would give away dog bones, now they charge for them (my local German pork store, the few times a year I limit myself to going there, is actually reasonable). Then again, when my mom was growing up, if you bought 5 pounds of sauerkraut, they would throw in several pounds of pork ribs to cook in the kraut to give it flavor…now ribs are an exotic thing in their own right.
I think the OP’s point is that serious cooks have been making bone broth for years. It’s not a novelty and it’s not hard to make. It just requires patience.
One of my favorite broths requires roasting onions and bones in the oven until they brown, then sauteeing carrots, garlic, and other aromatics in oil or butter, adding the roasted bones onions., and water and simmering until it tastes like stock. And yeah, you do have to use salt, but your homemade broth will have far less sodium than canned or boxed stuff, and it will taste better. You can strain it and freeze in small batches to use whenever you need stock.
@massmom:
It amazes me when I make broth how little salt I really use, in a big pot of soup I might use a couple of teaspoons. I think with commercial broth they use salt to cover the fact that the broth they make is designed to be made as quickly as possible using a few ingredients as possible, so they throw in salt to mask the fact it has little flavor. Given that the war on salt has been put into question (not the massive amounts they use commercially, I mean the whole notion that for most people any salt is bad news), the amount you use is unlikely to be a health problem.
I think cooking from scratch has somehow become a bit superhuman. The fact that we are having this conversation is testament to that. Brothsplaining LOL.