BONE BROTH IS ONE OF THE TRENDIEST FOODS AND HOTTEST TOPICS IN TODAY’S CULINARY AND HEALTH-FOOD CIRCLES. IT’S BEEN THE TALK OF THE TOWN IN NEW YORK, WHERE CHEF MARCO CANORA STARTED SELLING IT OUT OF A WALK-UP WINDOW; IT’S MADE ITS WAY ONTO MENUS AT THE HIPPEST RESTAURANTS IN LOS ANGELES; AND WHEN KANSAS CITY BOASTS ITS OWN BROTH BAR, YOU KNOW THINGS ARE SERIOUS. BUT WHILE ITS POPULARITY IS EVIDENT, WHAT’S A LITTLE LESS CLEAR IS JUST WHAT BONE BROTH IS, EXACTLY. AN INGREDIENT? A BEVERAGE? A SOUP? A HEALTH-FOOD ELIXIR? THE TRUTH IS, BONE BROTH IS ALL OF THESE THINGS, AND MORE.
When people ask us why we launched our artisanal, small-batch broth business—Bare Bones Broth Company—it’s tough to summarize all of the reasons in one simple answer. On one hand, we wanted to create a nutrient-rich alternative to the salty, preservative-laden bouillons and stocks you’ll find lining most supermarket shelves. On the other hand, we also hoped to revive culinary interest in cooking with real bone broth by showing everyone just how delicious it is when you make it the traditional way. We started our company because we believe that real food can be sustainable food when you choose to use the whole animal instead of handpicking its most desirable parts and discarding the rest. We set up shop because we wanted to make food that is simultaneously clean and convenient. Bare Bones also came about because we swear by using food as medicine, and we believe in educating and empowering people to make better nutritional decisions. In short, we are driven to show people how they can use food not just to survive, but also to thrive.
Just over two years ago, with a 10-quart pot and a dream of making nourishing foods accessible to everyone, we began simmering and supplying bone broths to our friends, family, and local community in San Diego. At first, Bare Bones was just a passion project. But within just a few months the demand for our broth almost outpaced our ability to make it, and we found that we had become unwitting leaders in a full-blown bone broth movement.
“Broth? Isn’t it just stock?”
Of course, every movement has its skeptics. Those skeptical of the bone broth boom have suggested that bone broth is just a fancy name for stock. And the truth is, a hundred years ago they would have been right. But thanks to the commercialization and industrialization of our food supply, “stock” has diminished over the last several decades to become synonymous with chicken-flavored water that has little, if any, nutritive or culinary value. We bought into the convenience and stopped making stock at home. Unless they’ve had the rare opportunity to sample their great-grandmother’s from-scratch chicken soup recipe, most people today have never seen or tasted traditional stock.
Some call it stock, and others simply call it broth, a derivative of the ancient German word brühe, meaning “brew.” When folks like us started slow-cooking stock the old-fashioned way, we needed a way to set ourselves apart from the mass-produced stuff that bears little resemblance to real broth. Hence the name “bone broth” to make the difference clear. Real broth is made from bones that have been simmered for hours or days. We’re talking about a rich, substantial liquid that brings body, complexity, flavor, and an array of nutrients to the table—not a watery, salty, chemical-filled liquid-in-a-box.
So thank you, skeptics, for giving us this opportunity to explain that bone broth is in fact “just stock.” Real stock. The buzz about bone broth today is only newsworthy because we’re rediscovering, for the first time in decades, broth’s original role as a nutritional and culinary workhorse.
A Surprise Superfood
As a chef and a journalist duo both actively involved in CrossFit, long-distance hiking, and other athletic pursuits, we learned from being a part of the fitness community that bone broth was loaded with nutrients. But we were more familiar with its incredible jack-of-all-trades role in the kitchen—as stock. Kate, a native Southerner, grew up in a house where a pot of bone broth could regularly be found simmering on the back burner in her mother’s kitchen; she watched it get ladled into everything from rice and beans to casseroles. Ryan knew from his years of working in restaurants that bone broth is often the secret ingredient that takes many dishes from good to great.
But when our customers began flooding our inboxes with stories about how they had used broth to treat and ease a vast array of ailments, our eyes were fully opened to this unlikely superfood’s nutritional benefits. We’ll talk a lot more about those benefits in Chapter 2, but some of them include healthier skin, hair, and bones; improved digestion; and reduced inflammation.
One of our first customers, Patti, called us from Palm Desert, California, desperate to get her hands on a full month’s supply of bone broth. She suffered from severe osteoporosis and had just received discouraging results from a bone density test. She felt that bone broth was her last hope. We met with her, then shipped out our largest order ever. A month later, we hand-delivered four months’ worth of broth to help her save on shipping costs. When we saw her, we were amazed by Patti’s transformation: the color had returned to her cheeks and she had a new pep in her step. We had known all along that we were onto something special, but here was concrete proof right before our eyes.
We met another customer, Maria, at a CrossFit competition. She was ecstatic about our broth and told us it had changed her young son’s life. She fed him liberal amounts of traditionally made stock as part of the Specific Carbohydrate Diet, which is often prescribed as part of a larger treatment for autism. She told us that her son was benefiting tremendously from this diet, as the broth helped eradicate his systemic yeast.
Many more have shared their stories of eradicated digestive problems, miraculous acne and eczema healing, and improved autoimmune conditions. Inspired by our customers’ remarkable stories of health and vitality, we started substituting bone broth for our daily coffee. It might sound strange, but the new ritual ended up solving a litany of gut and joint problems. A nearly constant sharp pain in Kate’s left side disappeared, along with her acne and chronic arthritis in her feet. Now instead of leaching calcium from our bones with caffeine every morning, we’re actually supplying our bodies with the building blocks they need to keep our bones strong and our cells healthy. No other beverage offers such a host of nutritional benefits—not even the green juices and smoothies that are all the rage. Broth offers an incredible array of nutrients, without any sugar (some “green smoothies” contain up to 30 grams of sugar or more!). Plus, broth can be used in thousands of other dishes to enhance their flavor and nutritional value. We’ve never met a smoothie that could do that.
The Ultimate Kitchen Tool
From a nutritional standpoint, bone broth offers something for everyone, from pregnant women to athletes, children to senior citizens. From a flavor standpoint, it also holds broad appeal. After all, broth and stock have served as the flavor base for a wide range of recipes across continents and cultures for thousands of years.
In this book, we will show you how to create ridiculously tasty and easy-to-make bone broth–based dishes. Our goal is to show you as many simple ways as possible to include bone broth in your everyday meals, and teach you how to wield this secret weapon of culinary goodness. From morning to night, sweet to savory to spicy, these recipes will cover all the flavor bases and show you how to take a meal or drink from ordinary to extraordinary in no time and with minimal effort—sometimes by simply substituting your homemade bone broth where you would normally use water. And because we don’t eat gluten at home, you won’t find any in these pages, making this the perfect companion if you follow a primal, Paleo, or gluten-free lifestyle.
In later chapters, we will take you step-by-foolproof-step through the process of creating each of our nine base broths and share techniques for making more than 100 delicious recipes for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. We’ll show you how guts can be healed, skin revitalized, arthritis minimized, and athletic potential maximized, with this verified nutritional supplement and culinary star.