- 1 roast chicken carcass, with the yummiest meat picked off. This recipe uses all the not so yummy bits from the chicken :)
- Any available uncooked veggies you have (such as carrot, celery, garlic, onion scraps)
- 1 tablespoon of apple cider vinegar
- 2 bay leaves
- 2 peppercorns
- Place all of the ingredients in your crock pot.
- Cover the carcass with cold water.
- Turn on low and allow to simmer for 24+ hours.
- After a couple hours, check on the status and use a spoon to skim the “scum” from the surface of the soup and toss.
- Run through a coffee filter or fine sieve before use.
- When cooled, store in a glass jar in the fridge for up to 5 days (or freeze). Because of the high gelatin content (which is what we want!), it will look a little jello-y after being in the fridge.
Bone broth is high in gelatin, which may not look good to most of us because we’ve been trained to ward off all types of fats or otherwise ‘undesirable’ parts of the animal. Gelatin aids in digestion (by coating the GI tract) and has so many other health benefits.
The ingredients for this batch of bone broth can be used to “feed” another batch – keep replacing the removed broth with new water and the next day you’ll have replenished your stock (pun intended!). Eventually the bones will completely disintegrate and you’ll have pulled all the nutrition out of the chicken.
Bone broth is good just by itself, warmed up in a mug with a little bit of salt for flavor. You can also use it as you would use regular stock – for soup bases, cooking veggies and grains.
You can learn more about bone broths here!
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