How To Make Homemade Chicken Broth

Once you’re done eating your chicken wings, or baked chicken, or whatever that has bones, follow these steps:

1. If you’re lazy, put the bones in a ziplock bag and freeze them until you’re not lazy. I have many a bag of frozen bones in my freezer.

2. Once you’re not lazy:

3. Preheat oven to 300 degrees on bake.

4. Put all your chicken bones on an oven safe pan (this doesn’t just have to be chicken wing bones, it can be a chicken carcass or two, too). I find you need about 3 servings of chicken wings to have enough bones to boil, or a chicken carcass. or mix and match them! Don’t skip the roasting and go straight to the boiling, it won’t taste nearly as good. The more bones you have, the faster the broth will be ready. I try to fill a large freezer ziplock bag (a gallon worth), and use about 3/4 of those in my slow cooker. You can use more and it works faster too!

5. Stick them in the oven and roast for at least 2 hours – the bones get dark and brittle and much tastier, sometimes 3-4 hours is cool too. You don’t have to wait until the oven is preheated to stick them in.

6. Using a slow cooker: If you have a slow cooker, use it. If you don’t have one, buy one, even used, they’re not very much and if you’re going to try eating like this you’ll need one. Makes your life way easier and the broth turns out way better. Put the bones in the slow cooker and fill it up as much as you can with (filtered) water. I’ll go into the water issue later. Add a bay leaf if you want! My slow cooker is a 4 quart slow cooker, and I fill the water almost to the top.

Using a pot: Take them out of the oven and put them in a big pot of filtered water. The bigger the pot, the longer you have to boil the bones. Also add the bay leaf.

7. Using a slow cooker: Turn on high for approx. 8 hours, or until the broth looks opaque.

Using a pot:  Bring the pot of water and bones to a boil. Turn down and simmer forever (like 24 hours) because a pot takes forever so don’t use a pot. If there’s a lot of meat and goodness on your bones, the broth can turn almost white in about 8 hours. If you’re using chicken wing bones, I find this takes almost 30 hours. Just let it simmer until the broth starts looking opaque. The longer you let it cook, the better. Or use a slow cooker for about 8 hours.

9. Store in the freezer! – pour into ice-cube trays so you can stock up on ice-cube broth for other recipes and gravy, and store in containers for soup. You should be trying to drink about a cup of this stuff a day. It’s full of gut healing ingredients. (It’ll need a LOT of salt, but it’s surprisingly good with just salt. Obviously pepper is good too). You know how chicken broth is supposed to be good for you when you’re sick? Well that store bought chicken broth/bouillon on isn’t good for you. at all. This is the real stuff, and it’s really good!

10. Otherwise store in fridge and eat within 4 days.

Eat with salt. Tons of salt. And pepper if you want, etc.