How To Make Your Own Beef Bone Broth

Beef bone broth is deeply flavorful broth made from beef bones and charred vegetables cooked for 36 hours. This broth is a great base for hearty soups, pho, ramen, molé and other sauces. This freezes well so we like to get a lot of bones and use our biggest pot to make a big batch of Bone Broth. This is a great way to elevate any recipe that calls for beef broth by adding a lot of rich flavor.

Bone Broth is naturally gluten free.

Watch A Video

Here is a video of 2 Cooks in the Kitchen making Beef Bone Broth:

About the Bones

We gather up bones for this. We save some in the freezer whenever we have a bone-in cut of beef. We’ll also buy beef shanks and oxtail to use for this as those both have a lot of connective tissue that turns into collagen when boiled for long periods of time. This is what gives this broth its silky texture. We can also add chicken feet for this purpose.

We sometimes buy marrow bones, extract the bone marrow to make bone marrow butter and save the bones for this broth. An advantage of this is that the bones are roasted before using for broth. This increases the depth of flavor.

Put the bones in your stock pot.

About the Vegetables

We want to add some depth to the flavor of the broth so we will char the vegetables we are adding to the pot. Over the grill or under the broiler, char the onions, celery and carrots. Leave the peel on the onion and just cut it into quarters to char. The carrots and celery can just be cut into large chunks after they are charred. Put these into the pot. One thing you can do throughout the year is save all the vegetable ends you cut off when preparing other food. Rather than putting them in the compost, you can save them in the freezer to bring out for making broth.

About the Water

Now that we have everything in the pot we can fill it with water. You will want enough water to cover everything and we like to fill it pretty full at this point. As this cooks along you will want to add more water to keep the pot full.

About the 36 Hours

We are going to bring this to a boil and then reduce the heat, cover and let it simmer for at least 36 hours. There are healthy things in the bones that break down over a long period of time and we want to give that time to happen. This is what makes for a deeply satisfying broth.

Add more water to the pot whenever the level gets low. You won’t really be diluting it too much, after all we are not really after a thick sauce, we just want to get as much out of this pot as we can.

Once we have finished cooking the broth for 36 hours or more we can let it cool a little before straining it through a colander. Discard the solids and let your bone broth cool for an hour in the bowl. Notice how dark and rich this is!

Freeze the Broth

Now our broth is ready for the freezer. Since most recipes call for measured amounts of broth we like to freeze it in 1 cup and 1/2 cup portions for later use. We use Souper Cubes for this and highly recommend them. We like that they are 1/2 cup or 1 cup portions. With our stock pot we get about 2 gallons of broth from this recipe. Your results will depend on the size of your pot.

Here are some of our favorite recipes that use bone broth:

• Red Curry Pork Tenderloin
• Molé Colorado

If you enjoyed this recipe subscribe to our Youtube Channel and share on social media. Leave us a message and let us know of any other recipes you’d like to see us work on.

Print