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I’m a huge fan of bone broth. It is one of my favorite superfoods with benefits that range from fighting the flu to building up healthy bones, teeth, and skin. When you make bone broth yourself, it is also one of the cheapest superfoods you can consume, costing literally just pennies to make.
Why Make Bone Broth?
The reason that bone broth is so healthy isn’t just because it contains lots of nutrients. It is healthy because it contains nutrients that we usually don’t get in our everyday diet.
Our ancestors used allparts of the animals that they ate — including the bones which they’d cook down to make broth out of. Today, we mostly just eat the muscle meats of animals. These are rich in amino acids likemethionine. However, the muscle meats are lacking in other amino acids glycine. This causes an imbalance in our amino acid profile, leading to inflammation and disease.
Another reason why bone broth is so good for you is because the nutrients are easy to digest. As an added bonus, boiling down bones causes collagen to be released from them. Thus, bone broth is a great source of collagen.
Collagen, also known asgelatin, is great for your skin, hair, teeth, bones, connective tissues, and digestive system. Gelatin is even great for fighting wrinkles!
Gelatin is also remedy for leaky gut syndrome. If you aren’t familiar with this, read What Is Leaky Gut Syndrome.
How to Make Bone Broth
What you will need:
- Leftover bones from a chicken dinner, heads and feet are especially rich in gelatin! (where to buy chicken feet)
- Filtered water (where to buy a water filter)
- Crock pot, pressure cooker, or just a plain old pot on the stove. (where to buy a great crockpot)
- 1 Tbsp Organic unfiltered Apple Cider Vinegar (where to buy quality ACV)
Directions:
- Our crock pot takes a while to warm up, so we put it on high and add already boiling water. This cuts down on the warm up time.
- Add your bones and let cook! Add 1 Tbsp vinegar (optional but recommended).The vinegar helps extract the minerals from the bones, but it also makes the broth slightly less palatable. It might take some getting used to, perhaps using just a tiny amount the first few times you do this. We find that if it is used to make soup no one notices, so it’s easy to sneak in but when chugging a mug of bone broth the flavor is noticeable.
- Keep adding water if it boils down too far. We usually leave it at least 48 hours.
- Once you’re ready to harvest your broth pour it through a strainer into a pot and allow it to cool.
- Use it, or freeze it for later!
- If you want to put the bones in for another round, by all means do it again. Sometimes we get 3 or 4 crockpots worth of broth from one set of bones!
- When it cools it may have a thick layer of fat at the top. You can certainly eat it but sometimes I find it tough to digest so I skim it off and cook with it instead.
- If your broth looks like jello after its cooled, you are a rockstar.
How to Consume Bone Broth
The obvious solution is to use bone broth in soups. But don’t stop there! If you really want the health benefits of bone broth, you’ll need to consume it regularly.The more bone broth you consume the better.
I drink bone broth straight-up, typically a mug a day in the cold months. You can also use it instead of water in sauces, smoothies, popsicles, veggies, and more.
Is There Are Ready-Made Bone Broth I Can Use Instead?
Making bone broth yourself is really easy. But I get it if you don’t have time. There are a few brands which make real bone broth. The only one that I really like (in terms of quality) is this bone broth by Kettle and Fire.
Why this one? Because it is made with grass-fed cows, so the cattle were healthier and thus more nutritious. If you are going to drink bone broth, you might as well do it right! You can buy it here and have it shipped to your address.
What if I Don’t Like the Taste of Bone Broth?
I’ll admit that it can take some time to get used to the taste of bone broth. Not everyone will want to drink mugs of it like I do.
Instead of making bone broth, you could consume gelatin instead. Gelatin doesn’t have all of the minerals that bone broth does, but it is pure collagen — which is the part of bone broth which really provides you with benefits like fighting wrinkles, improving joints, and strengthening bones.
No, the chemically-made jello packets you find in the store willnotprovide you with health benefits! You need to consumerealgelatin.
My favorite brand is Great Lakes gelatin. Their Kosher gelatin is made from bones of 100% grass-fed cows and is a very high quality. You can buy it here.
Want to learn more about the health benefits of gelatin, and get lots of recipes too? ReadThe Gelatin Secret. You can buy it here.
