Establishing Supporting Habits Part 2: Bone Broth Boot Camp

The healing elixir that requires very little work, just some planning and passive time. Take your soups, stew, gravies, and nutrition to the next level with this recipe.

Sep 06, 2023

I originally had a different post planned for today but that post can wait because I started feeling very fall-ish this week. It’s been delightfully cool and crisp in the mornings and evenings here in northern Idaho, and that means it’s soup-making time.

As we build a lifestyle on the foundation of the Three-Week Challenge, keep in mind that fasting is meant to be the first step to making many other positive health changes. And making bone broth fits perfectly into that mindset.

Here’s why. While you begin fasting, you experience true hunger for the first time in perhaps months or years. I’m not talking about the munchies that we all experienced continually when we were carb addicts. I mean a true desire to eat the kinds of food that truly nourish our bodies.

This is why I always do my meal planning when I’m fasting: nourishing, protein-rich foods sound heavenly, and it’s a delight to plan healthy meals. Fasting reminds me what a blessing food is.

Furthermore, skipping meals saves time. Not only do you spend less time prepping and cleaning up, but you save the time you would sit and eat the food as well. This means that you have a little extra time to learn a new and valuable fall skill like making bone broth.

Some people come to IF having rarely cooked. Their meals consisted of fast food, frozen pizza, and boxed mac & cheese. But that’s all gotta change now. You‘re going to need to learn to make some things from scratch, and there’s no better time than right now.

Furthermore, when you’re fasting and eating less food, you need to make sure everything you eat is “window worthy,” meaning, worthy of spending your ever-shrinking stomach capacity on. You don’t want to stuff your eating window with just any ole thing. The food you eat needs to be extra tasty and delectable. Boxed mac just doesn’t make the cut. But your meals not only need to taste good now, they need to pack plenty of satiating nutrients in as well.

In our former food life, (a few weeks ago for some), one reason we chronically overate was that our hunger was chasing nutrients that our food choices were hugely deficient in. On a certain level, that may have been protein deficiency. As I explain in this post, the protein leverage hypothesis states that your body will signal you to continue to eat until you’ve met your protein requirement.

But most people in the first world have mineral deficiencies as well. This makes bone broth the star of the show. It is packed with minerals largely depleted from our soils.

Although this healing elixir requires some planning, and you need to be home for the roasting part, the actual time you spend working on it is minimal.

For the next few weeks, I’m going to put a recipe at the end of each post and I’m going to challenge you to learn one new skill each week. You can do this. I promise.

All Things Beef Bone Broth

You can make chicken broth as well but I’m going to focus on beef this week because it’s the healthier of the two. Ruminants such as beef and lamb have more nutrients in their meat and bones than chicken and pork because of the bacteria that live in their four stomachs that process all that grass. I still eat all of the above but I focus on beef. For a thorough discussion of how healthy beef is, listen to at least the first few minutes of this video with Dr. Ken Berry.

Bone Broth Benefits:

The broth is chock full of collagen which builds up joints and connective tissues and makes hair and nails grow faster and thicker. The more collagen you can consume, the faster your body is able to renew your skin and bones. Collagen is the most abundant type of protein in our bodies, making up 30% of the total protein. Collagen is found in skin, organs, connective tissues, ligaments, cartilage, bones, and blood vessels.
Your body can use the minerals in bone broth to build up your bone density.
Many people also notice an anti-inflammatory effect from drinking bone broth.
It’s the best way to break a fast, so I start drinking it a half hour before I eat my first meal of the day to prep my stomach for eating.
Drink it when you have a cold or flu or when recovering from the stomach flu. It’s one of the best treatments for viruses because of its anti-inflammatory effects.
The Journal of Pharmacological Science published this paper reporting that glycine, the amino acid abundant in collagen, improves sleep.
Dr. Shad Marvasti reports that 10-15 grams of collagen showed improvement in bone health in patients in as little as eight weeks.
The American Journal of Physiology found in this study that glycine from collagen improved digestion by supporting a healthy gut lining.
The Journal of Medicinal Food found in this study that collagen can help with glucose control.
This study, also published in the Journal of Medicinal Food, found that collagen protected mice from both cardiovascular disease and hypertension.

Where to Buy the Bones

Most grocery stores carry bags of beef bones in the freezer section. If they are marketed as dog bones, never fear, they will still make delicious stock. Your local butcher will also carry bones.

(For my local readers, my favorite source is Weekes Family Farms. They come to our farmer’s market every other week. They were there on Sept 2 so they’ll be there again on Sept 16. They don’t normally bring the big bags of bones to market so I email them, weekesfamilyfarms@gmail.com, on Friday and ask them to bring them. This past Saturday they bought me two 20 lb bags! Winco also sells beef bones.)

In a perfect world, all your bones would be from a local, organic farm. But don’t get too precious on me here. It’s much better to get whatever bones you can than not make broth at all.

Hot tip: Do you like to eat beef ribs? Never tried them? You have to try this recipe I made this week! Buy yo’self a big ole rack of ribs from any grocery, stick them in a large baking pan (cutting them in half or more if needed), generously season with salt and pepper, and wrap tightly in foil. Bake at 275 for 3 1/2 to 4 hours. I like to drench them with browned butter after baking (recipe here) and sprinkle with flaky sea salt instead of sugary BBQ sauce. Finally, save all the bones and make you some yummy broth with the rib bones!!! Since you just baked them, you can skip step #1 below. When my kids walked in the kitchen after school they said, “What smells so good?” It’s the smell of wonderful, nourishing food. There’s nothing else like it. I sometimes feel a tinge of guilt about how much less often I bake pumpkin muffins, cookies, pies, etc. But then I have to remind myself how many nourishing protein-based meals I’m constantly making instead. My family does occasionally get baked goods too.

Bone Broth Recipe

Preheat the oven to 400 degrees. Place about 5 lbs of frozen bones (no need to thaw them) on a cookie sheet with sides and roast them in the oven for 2 hours, turning the bones every half hour or so. After 1 hour, add a few chopped carrots and onions if desired.
Remove bones from the oven. The bottom of your cookie sheet will be coated with a clear yellow oil that will turn white when it hardens. This is called beef tallow. It is delicious to cook with and is infinitely healthier than chemically-processed seed and “vegetable” oils (soy, corn, canola, etc) which are dangerously inflammatory and easily oxidized, damaging the body.
Strain this wonderful, fragrant animal fat into a glass jar while still warm using a fine mesh strainer to make sure no small pieces of meat get in. Cover with a tight lid and store in the fridge. Use it to brown meat, saute vegetables, make a stirfry, saute garlic and onions—anytime oil is called for in a savory dish. I like to melt it and pour over veggies before roasting or grilling.
Here’s my recent tallow catch from this last week—half a jar of tallow from just one 5-lb bag of bones. It lasts for months in the fridge.
Think about how much money you save when you don’t have to buy as much avocado oil.
Next place the bones, carrots, and onions in a crock pot or a regular stock pot and cover with 5 quarts of water. I sometimes don’t measure the water and just use enough to cover the bones.
Don’t skip this step: add a tablespoon of any kind of vinegar to the stock. This slowly corrodes the bones causing the minerals to leach out into the water. Also add just 1 tablespoon of salt for now, which will barely make it salty. I like to keep it relatively unseasoned so I can season it later depending on how I use it. I also like to add a tablespoon of whole peppercorns. If you have any fresh herbs on hand, thyme, rosemary, or marjoram, throw those in too. But I’ve also made it many times without herbs.

Simmer on low on the stove for 12-24 hours. Here’s my newest thing as I’m constantly perfecting this recipe: I like to boil it down so that it’s super concentrated. Then you dilute it later as needed. I used to add water as it boiled but now I don’t replace water as long as the bones are covered.
Check out how thick my broth turned out. I’m holding a jar upside down of refrigerated, not frozen, broth. It is as gelatinous as Jello Jigglers (which btw have no actual beef gelatin in them).
Here’s a spoonful of it. Have you seen a store-bought version that compares to that? Didn’t think so.
Strain warm broth into glass jars. If I plan to freeze the jars, I use these jars from Amazon because they have straight sides. You can use any jar to freeze the broth, just make sure that if the jar has a shoulder, you fill it about a half inch below the shoulder so the liquid can expand straight up to prevent cracking.
Do you notice the layer of tallow at the top of the jar that is upside down? Don’t attempt to skim that off as it protects the beef broth from freezer burn. When you’re ready to use the broth, scrape off that delicious fat before defrosting and use it to brown whatever meat or vegetables you’re cooking that night.
Are you starting to feel the Little House on the Prairie vibe yet? Look at you: making a meal, using the bones to make broth, saving the fat. What’s next: riding in a buggy?

How to Use Bone Broth

Drink it straight from a mug or use it as the base for soups, stews, gravies, and any recipe that calls for stock or broth.

If you end up with a very gelatinous version like the pic above, you can dilute it with water anywhere from 1:1 to 1:4 depending on how quickly you want to use it. 1:4 will give you something similar to what stores sell. But when I have plenty on hand, I only dilute it 1:1 so that we get the maximum benefits. If a recipe calls for 2 cups of broth, I’ll mix 1 cup of my homemade broth with 1 cup of water. Sometimes I do 1:2 broth to water (twice as much water).

The World’s Richest Gravy

Melt 1/4 cup butter in a medium saucepan. When melted, add 1/4 cup flour and slowly simmer for 1 minute to cook flour. Now slowly add 1 cup (or more depending on desired thickness) of delectable homemade beef bone broth. Add salt and pepper to taste. Drench a tasty pot roast with this yummiest of all sauces.

Fast and then feast on nourishing foods,

Leslie

This post is part of a series that builds on the Three Week Challenge. You can find the post Establishing Supporting Habits Part 1: Time Restricted Eating here.

Fast Well | Feast Well

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