My oldest child recently went off to college – nearly 1000 miles away from home. Obviously, given this distance, he wasn’t going to be coming home for dinner or visit regularly on weekends! One of my biggest challenges with this life change was to help him figure out how to stay healthy. Eating in the college cafeteria and living in the first-year dorms without an easily accessible kitchen presents a unique set of obstacles.
Since bone broth is a crucial component of traditional diet and staying well in general, the possibility of buying bone broth as a substitute for homemade is the first task I tackled.
Buying Bone Broth vs Making It Yourself
When I first embarked on the adventure of Traditional Diet in 2002, my biggest challenge was making everything myself. There were no commercial substitutes for pretty much anything.
I had to make my own kombucha, beet kvass, and other fermented drinks, make my own sourdough bread, sprout and soak beans, nuts and seeds, and the list goes on and on.
It was exhausting!
Needless to say, I was over the moon when artisanal producers started coming out with traditional foods that I could buy. While this option was more expensive, I readjusted the food budget to accommodate some of these items. I knew I was going to go crazy trying to do everything myself 24/7/365 for two decades until my children were all grown.
Remember, traditional societies not only ate ancestral foods but enjoyed the support of an entire community. A mother was not making everything herself all the time. Large numbers of extended family surrounded her as a critical support structure.
With literally no family nearby to help, I considered these small producers to be my modern-day support structure. I needed their quality products to combine with my efforts in the kitchen to round out the meals that I served my family.
Commercial Bone Broth
Fake broths and soups including bouillon cubes at the store typically consist of nothing but water, MSG, additives and a lot of sodium. This includes organic brands. These options clearly aren’t a good substitute for homemade bone broth. But what about the many small companies that are now making truly authentic stocks and broths? Are they good enough to use at home or for making nondairy homemade baby formula?
I examined all the brands of bone broth I could get my hands on, and here’s what I found.
Little to No Gelatin
Probably my biggest disappointment is that commercially made bone broth contains little to no gelatin. Putting the containers in the refrigerator did nothing to firm up the broth into the familiar jiggly blob you get when making it at home. Every brand I tested stayed liquid, indicating one of two things:
- The bone broth was made with mostly bones and not enough meat to generate sufficient beneficial gelatin  -OR-
- The bone broth was watered down before packaging
I should add that the organic deli at my locally owned health food store offers commercially made bone broth that properly firms up to a semi-solid state in the refrigerator. Talking with the store manager, the broth is made with whole chickens, which explains why the broth has so much gelatin. Enough meat is used along with the bones in the proper ratio to generate large amounts of gelatin. Obviously, I buy a lot of this bone broth to supplement my homemade stock. We use 1-2 gallons each week for our family.
Unfortunately, this type of deli isn’t available where my son is going to college. So, I continued my search for a quality commercial bone broth to buy.
Dicey Packaging
My second concern with commercial bone broth is the packaging. Most are packaged in some sort of plastic or cartons lined with plastic.
Commercial packaging using plastic containers or liners typically involves hot food coming into contact with the plastic. This has the very real potential to leech toxins into the food. Organic UHT milk is one such product. The milk is boiling hot when it is poured into the carton and then vacuum sealed to make it shelf-stable without refrigeration. Bone broth involves a similar process from what I’ve gathered talking with packaging experts.
The exceptions to this include bone broth that is properly cooled to room temperature before packaging in plastic. This would require that the broth be frozen before shipping. Such exposure to plastic in this scenario would present little to no leaching risk. But, frozen bone broth lacks the convenience of shelf stability. It also requires shipping in coolers with much wasteful packaging, which isn’t an environmentally-friendly choice.
Another acceptable packaging option is, of course, glass. Unfortunately, glass presents the danger of breakage.
What to do now?
Buying Bone Broth: What We Ended Up Doing
In the end, if you simply don’t have time to make your own or are in a location without kitchen access, it is definitely worth it to buy bone broth. This traditional food is simply too important to do without!
After trying numerous brands and carefully vetting the packaging processes used, I settled on Epic Bone Broth for my son’s dorm room which comes in shelf-stable glass jars.
The jars are shelf-stable for about 6 months but need to be refrigerated once opened. I purchased 2 cases (6 jars per case) to get him started when he moved into the dorm.
He has a cordless electric kettle in his dorm room for heating (faster and safer than a microwave!). However, he discovered that he prefers just opening a jar and drinking it at room temperature. This saves the hassle of cleaning the kettle each time. He stores leftovers in his compact refrigerator, which I made sure had an ample freezer for his healthy frozen soups from Bonafide Provisions.
It’s a convenient way to stay healthy at college!
So simply dehydrating the broth is harmful to the nutrients? I am assuming that is what these companies are doing. I know people can do it at home with their own dehydrator, but I don’t have one.
The best way to make the bone broth transportable in non-liquid form is to boil the broth down to a concentrated sauce or fumee or even to the point where you have little jello cubes of bone broth. If you do this, you still need to refrigerate or freeze. I suspect that these commercially prepared powder broths are loaded with glutamates as it would take excessive processing to get them to be shelf stable and such a smooth powder. You don’t even need hot water to rehydrate bone broth powder with water, so the gelatin aspect is clearly destroyed (it won’t gel in the fridge), which means no digestibility benefits like with real bone broth. Real bone broth is the only cooked food that acts like a raw food in that it attracts digestive juices to itself. The nutrition from foods that attract digestive juices are much more easily digested and assimilated by the body. This rehydrated bone broth powder is not going to offer any of this type of benefit!
I was a little surprised to hear that meat needs to be part of the bone broth recipe to get good gelatin. I find that good type of beef or chicken bones means cartilage which results in gelatinous broth but didnt think that muscle meat was needed. Easy to understand it improves flavor though especially if bones are browned first.
You definitely need a combination of boney bones and meaty bones to get gelatinous broth. Here are the guidelines and various options for getting a good gel when making chicken and beef broth:
1 whole, free range layer hen with neck and wings cut up
3-4 lbs of boney chicken parts which includes a combo of necks, backs, and wings
OR the picked carcass of 2 meat chickens.
For beef stock, use about 7 lbs bones total (4 lbs of boney bones and 3 lbs of meaty bones).
Go for it, I don’t see how there could be an issue. I dehydrate my own gelatin-rich broths, and I can reconstitute them into a semi-solid broth afterward. It’s great for adding concentrated broth flavour and gelatin to foods that you don’t want to be soupy. The temperature in my dehydrator is nowhere near what broth gets to in the pot (near-boiling, no matter how low the simmer looks like).
I get real real bone broth from a little local meat market in Scottsdale..gels great. Only lasts 10 days then molds. It’s the real deal. My firstborn also just went to college. I am in your same boat. She likes soup with stuff in it and leaves the broth. She’s not a broth fan:( Thank you!!!
Have you looked into the bone broth protein powders that many of the holistic leaders have come out with? I recently purchased Dr Axe’s bone broth protein powder (pure flavor, so just bone broth) and it’s been very convenient for adding to all of my son’s meals. He has eczema and I was finding it difficult keeping up with making all of the meat stock required in the GAPS diet. I have not experimented to see if Dr Axe’s bone broth protein powder will gel, and I have not inquired about their process, but I will definitely do that now! Anyway, I’d appreciate your thoughts on the powder. Thank you.
Honestly, I am not a fan of these products. There just isn’t any shortcut when it comes to good quality bone broth. It’s an example of overindustrializing a traditional food (such as fake sourdough bread and “sprouted bread” with added vital wheat gluten) and losing most of the benefits in the process.
What about the dehydrated broth. I am looking into using these to make a warm drink in the evening while hiking the Appalachian Trail. The powder version is more manageable for keeping a pack light,
It’s fine if you enjoy it and would certainly be convenient when hiking, but it isn’t going to substitute for the real thing.
Sarah, thanks for sharing. I actually watched your youtube to make fish broth. I was looking for something to help with the goiters I have. This leads me to my question about the other broth types. So far Ive only been able to do fish including when Ive bought fish collagen commercially. The others – chicken, beef or bovine – Ive tried from well known ppl in the field – all broke out my shoulders. back, and chest with acne that I havent seen since high school, before I figured out the connection between my digestive system and my bad skin at the time. I assumed fat or protein were not working for me evrn though showed low percent . And when I quit drinking each, the blackheads or sore went away. I’ve had digestive issues since I was a kid including fatty acids and lactose intolerance. Even with all my healthy eating havent been able to cure the sensitivity. Do you have any thoughts on why fish broth works for me but the others don’t? Thanks.
Everyone is different and I personally feel that our genetic heritage plays a big role in which foods work for us better than others. Your ancestry could be such that fish was a big part of that traditional diet. So glad fish broth works for you … good for you for trying them all before just throwing in the towel because one didn’t agree with you digestively. Fish broth is the healthiest one anyway! https://www.thehealthyhomeeconomist.com/healthiest-and-best-bone-broth/
What I suspect is that fish broth works better because it is much quicker cooking than the others. 4 hours for fish broth versus 18 hours or even longer for chicken, beef etc. The longer a broth simmers, the more glutamates are formed. While this isn’t a problem, it can be for those with leaky gut or digestive imbalance. You might wish to try making meat stock instead of bone broth for chicken, beef etc which is the quick cooking way to make broth from these sources. More info here with recipe: https://www.thehealthyhomeeconomist.com/stock-vs-broth-are-you-confused/
Not sure if you have checked out Azure Standard’s frozen bone broth? Here’s a link for the chicken:
azurestandard.com/shop/product/food/soups-broths/aseptically-packaged/chicken/frozen/bone-broth-chicken-organic-frozen/20420
They also have beef and they also have: azurestandard.com/shop/product/food/soups-broths/condensed/aseptically-packaged/chicken/bone-broth-soup-chicken-coconut-ginger-mint-lemon-organic-frozen/20424
They probably have a drop near his school.
Just a suggestion?
Great idea! I will look into it. Does this broth gel in the fridge?
Thanks Sarah for the information on bone broth!! You so rock — I love reading your newsletters!
Does it not concern you that Epic’s products are not organic/non-gmo? Only their beef is 100% pasture raised/finished but not organic/non-gmo. This concerns me.
??? The chicken and turkey bone broth are from organic chickens/turkeys, the bison is pasture raised and the beef is grassfed. Good enough for me!