Recipe: Chicken Bone Broth—Day 3

If you’ve been following along, you’ve now got a refrigerator full of bone broth. What do you do next?

At this point the broth has settled overnight in the refrigerator. You can see three distinct layers—fat, broth, and sediment. You can skim off the fat to use in cooking if you purchased high quality birds. Otherwise discard the fat and the sediment.

If you used high quality bones, you should notice that the broth has gelled. It has a jelly like wiggle and you can scoop it out in loose chunks. At this point you can put it in the storage container of your choice and freeze or refrigerate if you’re going to use in within a few days.

If you didn’t get gel there are a few reasons why. Most often, I’ve found the problem is too much water. There’s gelatin in there but the broth has diluted it too much for you to see the gel.

Bonus step

The problem of too much water is an easy one to solve and it solves a storage problem for me as well. 2 gallons of broth is too much for even my freezer. Whether I get gel or not, I place the broth in a clean stock pot and reduce it by half. It’s important to keep the broth at a low simmer. Your gelatin is still at risk of being destroyed by high heat.

After you’ve reduced it by half, you have a choice. You can hope that you got gel or supplement the finished bone broth with powdered kosher beef gelatin from a good source at this time. According the the manufacturer, one tablespoon of powdered gelatin will gel one pint of liquid. You can bloom the powder in a little water or just sprinkle it one top of the simmering broth. It will dissolve within 30 minutes.

Even if I got gel, I still gild the lily and add a couple of tablespoons of powdered gelatin. Why not? The whole point is to get more gelatin into my diet.

At this point you can jar up your double strength broth and store as before. Remember when cooking with it that you need to add an equal amount of water to broth to get back to the regular strength for cooking…or not, because it’s delicious!

Uses for Bone Broth

I use the broth for cooking quinoa, rice and steel-cut oats. I use it in my turkey chili, creole sauce, and my chicken mustard gravy (recipe coming soon). I also drink it as a soothing warm beverage at night in lieu of coffee or tea. Just heat up a 1:1 ratio of broth to water and add salt to taste. It’s so good for your digestion and tasty.

Enjoy!

The first and second days can be located starting here.