Round 1: Broth "Fight"
Alright so check it. I started this post on Facebook and as promised here is the follow through of tips, tricks, and directions. But for those who find this without the assistance of knowing me formally through a social network let me recap. Ingredients:
Bones of 2 chickens with some trimmings and meat left on
Half a red onion
3 cloves of garlic
One bunch of green onions
An Apple
3 carrots
Salt
Thyme
Black Pepper
Bring water to boil, add ingredients, reduce to simmer for four hours! So these simple instructions kind of assume you can get to them, but they also assume you have gone through the kind of frustratingly brilliant hours of picking bones out of your would be soup and their resulting epiphanies. Lets take the ass out of u and me.
Rough chop all of the vegetables. For easy garlic peeling crush a clove with the flat side of your blade and the peels come right off. This also begins the conversion of alliin to allicin. These are the pungent smelling compounds in garlic that we attribute many of their health promoting properties to, but especially their anti-microbial activity. Aliin is relatively inert and the clover requires maceration (crushing) to begin the conversion to allicin "the good stuff." This mimics the process of a bug munching into the clove and finding out it doesn't taste as good as it thought it was going to. But for some reason humans really like a lot of the compounds plants designed to keep predators away! Put all of your ingredients in a straining container of some sort that you can easily pull away from the liquid when its all done.
Here I included a picture of the finished soup versus the finished broth. The broth is in the tall mason jar. Notice the soup looks cloudier, that's because I added grains and potatoes. If it had only been vegetables then the soup would have a nice golden clarity to it.
For boiling the bones, consider that you will need a way to extricate them from the broth. I like the idea of using cheese cloth or sparging bags, BUT TODAY I decided to use one of my pots that has a nested straining pot and it worked well. Also the cleanup for this feels much easier unless you decide to throw out your cheese cloth with the vegetables and bones. I would think that quite convenient as well and I don't even think I'd feel mad about the wasted cheese cloth. ****HINT**** Don't try to use your boiled down veggies and bones for anything else, they're spent, if these weren't chicken bones you could grind it up into your dog's food you know, except for the onions and salt... so how bout not that idea even. Lets save that for another recipe. ****End HINT****
After you have simmered this for two hours you have a broth you can use for any soup you want, today I added vegetables (I promise I'll make a ROUND 2 to describe these processes as well) which I pan roasted and set aside while the broth was simmering. As well as a blanched greens salad with nuts, seeds, dehydrated blueberries, and raisins in a smoked paprika vinaigrette to serve cold before the soup. However the last hour of this soup simmer were used cooking up the split peas, rice, potatoes, and quinoa I added. However, you can cook bones down for days. The more bones and the longer you cook it the better.
So lets focus on the bones part of this broth, today I didn't liberate all of the gelatin from the bones I was cooking, I do however recommend this method to everyone, but especially those of you suffering from arthritis, creaky joints, joint inflammation. Cook your bones on slow, and for as long as you can suffer the smell, because it will get funky. You'll know you're getting a good gelatin pull from the bones when you have a thick yellowish well gelatin forming at the top when the broth gets cold. You'll also have a white layer of fat, you can scrape the two apart if you are worried about high fat food, I don't any more. This is the devil's jello, and you can make it from any kind of bone that you want. My best luck with bone broth has been when I waited and used at least four chickens worth of bones and cooked it with a crockpot. This day was also the day I learned why I would always want to have a cheese cloth or sparging bag to keep the bones separate for the rest of my life. You'll have a pretty good idea its done when the bones are brittle and start falling apart, but this might not always be necessary.
FUN TIP: Freeze your broth in icecube trays and pop some out into a mug in the morning cover with water and microwave, or use boiling water from a kettle. For some reason I want to add lemon juice and sage to this morning broth for a nice winter or watery day hand warmer.
