Bone Broth

Bone broth is a Whole30 staple, not just as a cooking ingredient; homemade broth actually functions as a health supplement on the Whole30! It’s a source of minerals—like calcium, phosphorus, magnesium, and potassium—in forms that your body can easily absorb. It’s also rich in glycine and proline, amino acids not found in significant amounts in muscle meat (the vast majority of the meat we consume). It also contains chondroitin sulfate and glucosamine, the compounds sold as supplements to reduce inflammation, arthritis, and joint pain. Finally, “soup bones” include a form of protein called collagen, abundant in bone, marrow, cartilage, tendons, and ligaments. (The breakdown of collagen in bone broths is what produces gelatin.)

Bone broth aids in healing a leaky gut and regulating digestion, muscle repair, and growth; helps balance your nervous system; and contributes to a strong immune system. (There’s a reason your mom always made you chicken soup when you were sick.) The gelatin in broth also reduces joint pain and inflammation, prevents bone loss, and builds healthy skin, hair, and nails.

Unfortunately, broth or “stock” from the grocery store relies on high temperature, fast-cooking techniques, which don’t confer the same benefits. In addition, many contain off-plan additives (like MSG) and ingredients (like sugar). If you just need a small amount for a recipe, compliant store-bought stuff will do, but if you’re interested in the healing properties of bone broth, you have to make it yourself.

As a supplement, we like to drink a mug of it, just like you would coffee or tea. In fact, a warm cup of broth is a great way to start your morning—try drinking 8 ounces a day, every day. Of course, you can also use it in recipes that call for broth or stock and as a base for your favorite soups.

Source your bones from your local butcher, a local farm (ask around at the farmers’ market), a friendly hunter, or your local health food store (if they have a meat department); or order bones online (see Resources). You can also save the bones from a roasted whole chicken, turkey, duck, or goose.

You can use bones from just about any animal—beef, veal, lamb, bison or buffalo, venison, chicken, duck, goose, turkey, or pork. Get a variety of bones—ask for marrow bones, oxtail, and “soup bones.” Make sure you include some larger bones like knuckles, or feet (like chicken feet), which will contain more cartilage, and therefore more collagen. You can even mix and match bones in the same batch of broth—some beef, some lamb, some chicken—but know that will change the flavor. (Most folks prefer to stick to one animal source at once.)

If you’re making chicken broth, planning ahead will allow you to make three recipes with the same bird. First, purchase a three to four pound chicken and roast it whole using our recipe. Then, pick the carcass clean and use the meat in a Protein Salad or Harvest Chicken Salad. Finally, use the carcass to make your chicken broth.

Ideally, you’re sourcing pastured or grass-fed, organically raised bones. The animals have to be healthy to impart the maximum health benefit. Do your best to seek out pastured chicken or 100-percent grass-fed beef bones from a local source.

We’ve given you our basic recipes here, but you can add many different herbs, spices, or vegetables to your broth to change the flavor. Consider adding green onion, leek, mushrooms, garlic, red pepper flakes, bay leaves, rosemary, sage, or ginger. Avoid using broccoli, turnip peels, cabbage, Brussels sprouts, green peppers, collard greens, or mustard greens as they will make your broth bitter.

Finally, for an easy addition of small amounts of broth to recipes, store some broth in an ice cube tray in the freezer. One cube is about an ounce (2 tablespoons), so recipes that call for ¼ cup of broth would take 2 cubes, ½ cup would take 4 cubes, etc. You can store larger amounts in glass mason jars, but be sure to let the broth cool down before transferring to glass. Finally, make sure you leave enough space in a glass container for the frozen broth to expand—otherwise, the glass could break.