4 Working-Mama-Tips For Making Chicken Bone Broth

When I think about all the changes we have made to our diets in the last couple of years, a few stand out as more important than others. Switching from highly processed soybean oil to more stable, less processed fats like coconut oil, butter and lard is on the short list. Also making homemade stock or bone broth has been a game changer for me.

In the beginning I said that I would never make my own stock. I really did!! I was so anxious about the inconvenience of making stock that I clung to my bouillon like Thing 2 to his favorite train. I had made stock before and the result was a weak broth that needed so much salt to taste good that I figured it was easier to keep a couple of cubes on hands. That was until I was introduced to the technique of making bone broth.

To make bone broth one must take bones and simmer them for hours with aromatics like onions, celery, carrots and black peppercorns. Chicken bone broth must be simmered for a minimum for 4 hours. Beef bones must be cooked for closer to 10 or 12 hours. The resulting liquid is a dark colored, cloudy, meaty, gelatin filled elixir. Bone broth is a far cry from all those half assed recipes that call you to cook a whole raw chicken in a pot of water for an hour. Quick broths tend to be clear and even slightly bitter tasting in my opinion. The reward for all those hours spent tending to the pot is a broth so thick with nutrition and protein that it is an excellent support to otherwise meatless meals.

I have made chicken bone broth many times now. And I have done so with everything from a leftover roast bird to raw backs and necks. But my favorite chicken part to use is chicken feet. Chicken feet produce hands down the most flavorful and gelatin rich of all chicken broths. I have finally found a source for feet that is local, pastured and organic. Pastured chickens generally cost around $8 per pound. But the feet are sold off at a slightly lower cost. And fortunately the farm from which I buy my feet will sell a whole bag of feet, so I don’t have to buy a $45 bird just to get two feet for stock! My feet are approximately $6 for one and one half pounds. And that makes about a gallon and a half of stock.

Properly made bone broth should gel when cooled overnight in the refrigerator. If you have followed all the directions here and your broth does not gel then it just has a little too much water in it. Chances are when you use it to make something, like soup, it will gel up nicely after you have cooked with it. When cooking with feet, I have been told that clipping off the nails is super important. However, I generally dump the feet in frozen with no additional prep. I figure they will boil for 6 or so hours and whatever buggies the nails would have would stand no chance. Also, be sure to commit the full time and boil the feet until they are really beginning to break up and fall apart on their own. If your feet still look like they did when you dropped them in, you are throwing away a lot of goodness. If the skin looks ragged and the joints are beginning to come apart, then you have reached the zone. Keep going, it takes at least 4 hours of stovetop simmering to get there and you can easily boil them longer than that. There is no sense in throwing away nourishment!

Bone broth is super easy. But that isn’t why you aren’t currently making it right? You don’t make broth because it takes too long or you aren’t home for long enough periods of time, right? That is certainly what I struggle with. So how does a busy mama work something as simple as bone broth into her already maxed out schedule? I have a couple of tricks to share that make it easier for me to keep this important foodstuff around the house.

1) Save your vegetable scraps in a plastic bag in the freezer. Bone broth requires aromatic vegetables be boiled with the bones. But who wants to take great fresh {expensive} veggies, just boil them and finally throw them away? Now I freeze my scraps. When I chop a carrot, the nibs and ends go into my freezer bag instead of the garbage. Same with celery and onion ends. You can even throw onion papers in there. You will end up straining it out so there is nothing wrong with the papers! My freezer bag is where I throw all of the uneaten carrot sticks that come home from Thing 1’s lunch box! I generally save celery, carrots, onions or celery root. More good things to save would be ginger, garlic or garli scapes, leek trimmings, scallions or lemons that you have squeezed. They will of course flavor the broth.

2) Break up your time. Often I am busy or away from the house during the day, even on weekends. So I will start a pot of stock at 6pm and let it boil until 9pm. Before I go to bed I will stick the whole pot in the fridge. The next night I will repeat until the stock has boiled enough. When it comes to stock I am not concerned about the heating and cooling rules that apply to uncooked meats or leftovers. Stock is a food that is boiled at a high temperature for a long period of time. In the cooking phase I don’t worry much about it, and it helps my schedule to where I can make stock on a weeknight!

3) Freeze stock in smaller portions. At the end of the process I will freeze the stock into smaller 2 and 4 cup containers for longer storage. That way I don’t end up thawing and refreezing great blocks of stock. And then I can bring out exactly how much I need, a 2 cup portion for making gravy or rice or a 4 cup portion for making soup. Soup only takes 20-30 minutes with previously prepared broths, yet they taste like they have been cooking for hours! I will use 1 ½ to 2 gallons of water to boil 1 ½ pounds of chicken feet. That yields enough stock for my family for 3 to 4 weeks.

4) Put your crock pot to good use! I do think the stovetop is best. The heat is higher and so the stock bubbles. The bubbles agitate the bones and veggies making them break up and enrich the broth. BUT…I have made great bone broths in the crock pot when I don’t have enough time for a stove top job. I have even started a batch of broth at 9pm and had it cook until 5 or 6am. Then it is waiting for you when you wake up!! I don’t get as gelatin-y of a broth with the crock pot, but finishing it on the stove top might be an answer to that.

Using the above tricks I have managed to keep bone broths regularly on hand and the junk filled cubes out of the house! Considering the extreme cost of ethically raised meats, bone broth is a wonderfully nourishing addition to your diet. Plus the taste is so rich that I can always count on Thing 1 eating whatever veggies that I boil in them. When he takes a hot thermos full of veggie soup to school I always know that he is getting a healthy and nutritious lunch. I am truly thankful that he likes soup as much as he does.

If you are a stressed out lady {or fella} with too many obligations and not enough time to nourish yourself, consider making time to make bone broth. Using the tricks I mention will help to fit the task into your crazy schedule, and the nourishment will support your health!

Enjoy!

This post is shared with Traditional Tuesdays and Real Food Wednesdays and Simple Lives Thursdays and Fight Back Fridays

Chicken Day 2

So yesterday we talked a little about chicken and what kinds of chicken I am eating these days. Why don’t we spend some time talking today about commercial chicken.

I recently found a great article that details the process of raising chicken in a commercial chicken operation. It is not a site dedicated to vegetarianism or even “real food”. They are just a ‘how do they do it type of website’. Dear madehow.com, I am not plagiarising your work as much as I am spreading the word and heralding the thoroughness of your article!

The chicken most commonly eaten today is a descendant of Gallus gallus, a red jungle fowl originally native to India and Southeast Asia. As the bird was domesticated, the variety spread westward from India toward Greece. From Greece it was introduced into western Europe by Roman armies. During the Roman era the birds were commonplace. The first European settlers brought chickens with them when they settled in North America.

Today, the Commercial Chicken business is BIG business.

The Production Complex

The Hatchery
Most chicken bred for meat in the country are a mix of Comish males and White Rock females. While meat birds are raised in large houses, they are bred in a type of coop that you would consider more traditional. It consists of a large house with several small coops where hens can lay eggs. Once lain, the eggs are taken from the nests and placed in a incubation. Breeder hens live for less than a year, about 45 weeks, and then are slaughtered. The meat from these breeder hens is used in pet food or other processed food applications where a lower grade of food is needed.

Incubation
Eggs are placed into incubators for about 20 days, where they are kept warm and rotated by machines. Newly hatched chicks are not fed for their first three days of life as they are still living off their yolk sac for nutrition. Chicks are inoculated for diseases shortly after hatching, and shortly thereafter, they are shipped to nearby "grow-out" farms.

Growing Out
Chickens have been bred to reach a weight of about 4 pounds in a 6-7 week time period. The article I read mentioned bred chickens as opposed to genetically modified varieties. I am not under the impression that there is any GMO chicken out there on the market. Genetic Modifying has been more successful in plant foods such as corn and soybeans and canola plants. However if I am wrong--please comment on this post. I want to know for sure. Chickens, after hatching, are sent to "grow-out farms" where they will live and be fed in large houses with as many as 20,000 other birds. The birds are not caged but are provided with less than 1 square foot per bird, so some of the drawings at the Made How website are a little misleading because they show quite a bit more room in the chicken house than is actually allowed. Remember back to your school days. Much of the linoleum flooring found in those hallowed halls were comprised of 1 foot by 1 foot tiles. That would be one square foot. That's not that much space by the time those birds reach 4 pounds. At the growing out farms too, chickens are treated for diseases with antibiotics or other medication. The article did not mention whether all birds were treated, or whether just the sick birds were treated....The search for the truth goes on.

Collecting
Chickens are typically collected by hand by the farm workers. Although many mechanical chicken collectors have been created. Nothing works that much better than plain ole' human hands. The chickens are packed into boxes or crates which are then sent off to the processing plant.

Slaughtering
In the processing plant birds are suspended from their feet while still alive. They are passed through a vat of electrified water, the water only stuns the birds. Then the birds go through an automatic neck cutter which severs just their arteries, but leaves the head intact. The birds hang while their blood drains.

Defeathering and Evisceration
The carcasses then are passed through a hot water bath which makes the defeathering easier. Defeathering and evisceration are done by automated machine. Carcases are defeathered by moving rubber fingers, then washed again in the hot water bath, and defeathered a second time to remove any remaining feathers. The Defeathered carcasses are scrubbed. Then the head and feet are removed. Then the carcass is cut open, the innards are removed, and finally the bird is washed again inside and out.

Chilling and Cutting
The cleaned birds are sent next into a pool of cooled, chlorinated water for 40-50 minutes. The entire cleaning process takes about an hour. The birds once cooled are then passed along to be cut. The pieces are then diced up for whatever sale the processor is supplying. Some birds certainly are left whole or dressed for supermarket sale. Meat from neck and backs and wings may be removed and sold for use in hot dogs or coldcuts. Some birds may be cooked whole and processed so that their diced meat may be used in higher end processed foods.


The Made How article is very informative. I think the first step in making cleaner food choices is to know where conventional food comes from. I am not outlining anything in the above to highlight gross practices or dissuade you from eating conventional poultry. And I am much more concerned about how the birds are raised than I am how they are cleaned.

The article does mention waste. Chickens produce an awful lot of feces. And 20,000 chickens in one house create the biggest pile of s*** you can probably imagine. Interestingly enough the article does not mention the feces until the end of the article, completely separately from the farms themselves. But make no mistake. Our conventional chickens are definitely walking on poop all day. I just don't believe that their coops could possibly be cleaned well enough to leave their coops substantially poop-free. The article continues to say that chicken manure is attractive to flies, and enough manure can increase fly populations from surrounding areas. The ammonia gas has a very offensive odor. And the run off during a rain storm can wash harmful bacteria into local water supplies. Truly, large scale factory farms create some problems and imbalances in the environment that are not easily solved.

That's why I recommend smaller farms, local farms. Small local farms are more likely (though not always) to be in better balance with their environment, because their populations of animals are not so dense. You will pay more, but, isn't there another solution to that problem? You could just eat less meat overall. Many different sources state that we need 50-60 g of protein per day. One ounce of chicken breast meat contains about 6g. And if you eat nuts and yogurt, drink milk and eat other protein rich foods, 4-5 ounces of meat a day are probably all you need to get your daily requirements. I am of the opinion that meat is really necessary and very healthy. But I am no Dr. Atkins, I believe meat holds it's important place in a larger healthy diet of plant foods. But that is another post for another time...

Chicken Day 1

This week I wanted to talk a little bit about chicken. We used to eat a lot of chicken. Because when you are striving for a low fat diet, you tend to gravitate toward foods that are lean and, well, low in fat. But as you know with the salmonella issues, and the 20,000 chickens to a coop issues, and all the GMO corn feed, modern industrial chickens are not such a clean source of food. (Check out Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma, it has some very good chicken information.) So we started eating pastured chicken purchased through my CSA. But I still bought chicken breasts from them mostly, because that is what I was accustomed to. But we like beef; and grass fed beef I believe to be actually very HEALTHY for you, so we started eating less and less chicken. What I did do was start buying WHOLE chickens.

The whole chickens at my farmer’s market are $7 per pound! Yipes! Through my CSA whole chickens are $4.99 per pound. That is still almost $25 for a standard 4-5 lb chicken. The grocery store chickens are less than $12 total. What’s up with that? The farmer's market chickens are also only available in the fall, not year round like at your grocery store.

Also an issue to consider, I used to use breasts or thighs because they are convenient. But as you know from any bird that you have roasted whole, there is a lot of waste if you only use the breast. In a commercial chicken operation, where does the waste go? My farmer’s market doesn’t even offer just breasts. Buy a chicken whole or don’t buy it at all. It is a lot of work to raise this already small animal only to sell off the breasts. Additionally when only purchasing parts, the consumer wants a cheaper price because they are only buying part of the chicken. In that scenario, it becomes more and more important to raise meat CHEAPLY. If the farmer can only sell off the breasts and the thighs then theoretically they need to make as much profit off those parts as they would if they sold the whole chicken. And if you the consumer are only willing to pay half the price of a whole chicken because you are not actually buying a whole chicken, then the farmers need to raise their chickens at half the cost that they previously did. Right? Do you see how big business screwed up chickens? Do you see why chicken was more of a local and seasonal or even home raised food rather than a big business food before 1950? Chickens are a lot of work and they have a pretty low profit margin unless you can raise them cheaply and quickly. And raising cheap chicken usually means a chicken that is bred (not genetically modified) to grow to a weight of 4 pounds in 6-7 weeks, is held in a “coop” with 20,000 other birds and who has to walk on it’s friends’ feces every day.

So, I started buying whole chickens. I am also buying them less often, maybe once a month. Because a large farmer’s market or CSA chicken costs about $35-40 (yielding 1-2 dinners and a soup). Whereas, a pound of grass fed ground beef costs $7-8 (yielding 1 dinner). And with a whole chicken, I get the added benefit of having all the bones to make homemade gelatin rich stock. Truly, nothing goes to waste.

Also recently I made a new Internet friend. Lisa from Caliban’s Kitchen is a blogger and fellow mom in my “upstate” Manhattan neighborhood. We were connected through a mutual friend. I love what Lisa is doing on her site and I have provided a link in my blog roll. She has recently been writing a lot about humanely raised chickens, and a particular brand Murray’s that is available to folks here in the New York City area among other places.

Murray’s Chicken claims that they use no antibiotics or hormones. But Lisa had some questions. Were they humanely raised? Were they pastured? Did they have access to outdoor space? What is the definition of Humanely Raised? Lisa contacted Murray’s directly and they were actually totally human and not some business style android in their response. Please check out her site in the following posts all about her experience with Murray’s chicken. If the links don't take you directly to the corresponding pages, but rather to her home page, you can click on the Archives section, you will find all of the following posts in the archives for October 2010.

Murray's to The Rescue? Well, Maybe

The Sunny Side of the Coop: My Chat With Murray's Chicken

Understanding the Life of the Chickens We Eat