Bone Broth Cont.

We buy a portion of a grass fed cow each year. 

We ask the butcher to give us the bones for making broth.

This year, we had a huge box of some of the gnarliest looking bones including marrow bones and knuckles. 

First, I took half the bones and roasted them on rimmed baking sheets at 425 for 35-40 minutes. 

Then I divided them between two crock pots with water, onion, carrot, celery, wine, garlic. 

I let the bones simmer for 12-18 hours on low. 

After everything cooled for a little while in the crock pot on the counter, I strained the broth from both crock pots through a wire mesh strainer into various pitchers, and threw out the leftover bones and meat scarps. 

Then I let these pitchers of broth sit on the counter until they were around room temp. 

Then I transferred them to the fridge to cool down all the way.  

Once the broth sat in the fridge overnight, I took them out and rendered the solid block of tallow off the top of the broth, scraping the bottom of the block of tallow to get the bits of gristle off. 

I saved the tallow is a large zip lock. I plan to use it for certain recipes and maybe candle-making. 

You can see here how rich and gelatinous the finished broth was in this picture. 

Most of the broth was frozen in pint freezer containers for use in soups and recipes later this winter. 

I won't have to buy broth for a while, and it's rewarding to know for a fact that we are getting all the best nutrients possible from this homemade broth vs. the weakened store-bought varieties. 

I find that just one pint of homemade broth is so rich that it can be mixed with water and used a base for most large pots of soup or other recipes. 

Next, I made a second batch of broth in the same way, roasting the other half of the bones in the box, splitting them between the two crock pots, etc. 

But in that case, I added onion, carrots, celery, bay leaves, and apple cider vinegar in with the bones and water (instead of the garlic and red wine I used in the first batch.) 

Other than these few differences in ingredients, the second batch of broth was processed in the same way as the first. 

I set aside four cups of the batch of broth made with wine for a special dinner.  

In the end, I made approx. 20 pints of broth from the two batches of bones/ four crock pots of broth, and now I also have huge batch of homemade tallow to use. 

When all was said and done, I used the four cups of broth I saved to make French onion soup, my favorite soup, for the first time! 

It was a fitting reward for all the labor of processing an entire box of assorted bovine bones into four crock pots full of rich beef broth and beef tallow.