To make a really good bone broth you first need really good bones. Get a good mixture of marrow bones, gelatinous joint bones and meaty bones. We are lucky in New Zealand because our beef and lamb is grass fed, you really do need grass fed bones to make nutritious broth. You can also add in any bones left over from roast joints of meat, simply freeze them until you are ready to make your bone broth.

Ingredients

Beef or lamb bones, a good mix of meaty and marrow, enough to fill your largest pan.

1 cup of cider vinegar.

3 carrots.

2 onions.

3 sticks of celery.

Divide your bones up, put the meaty ones in a roasting pan and roast on high for about half an hour to brown and caramelise a bit. Put the rest of the bones in a saucepan, fill with filtered water and add the cider vinegar and leave to soak while the other bones are roasting.

Roughly chop all the vegetables, you can leave the skin on the onions, do not peel the carrots just make sure everything is washed unless it is organic then no need to wash. Then add the roasted bones and the vegetables  to the saucepan along with the soaking bones, vinegar and water. De glaze your roasting pan by adding filtered water  and scraping all the bits off, add this to the saucepan then make sure everything is covered with water and bring to a simmer.

Turn to the lowest heat so that it is barely simmering, for a clear broth it is important that it does not boil vigorously. Cover and simmer gently for 24 hours. This may seem like a long time but for beef and lamb bones it takes this long to release the collagen, calcium and other goodness form the bones. For chicken stock it is a much shorter time. After this time you will see a large layer of fat has built up on top of the broth.

Now it is time to strain the broth, use a ladle to help pull out the bones and let them drain in a sieve over a large bowl. When the bones are cool enough to handle pull out any bits of meat and marrow to use in your soups, sieve everything else, then discard the bones and vegetables. I ended up with two large bowls of broth plus a small plate of soft and tender bits of beef.

You can see from the side view of this bowl of broth how much fat is floating on the top. We need to remove this so put your bowls of broth in the refrigerator overnight and the fat will harden.

Remove the fat and either discard, feed to your animals or use for another purpose if you like to cook with beef fat.

Here are my two bowls of broth, as you can see one is much firmer than the other, that is because that was the second bowl to be strained and was lower down the pan where more of the gelatine and collagen had settled. What you want is a nice gelatinous but clear broth. This nutritious broth can then be used as your base for soups, added to stews, curries  or it can be drunk warm as a healing tonic.

Spoon into containers and freeze until needed. These pots are 900ml each so I got about 5.5 litres from my batch of bones.

1.2gms carbs per 100ml of  bone broth

If you want to learn more about the nutritional benefits of bone broth go  here .