What does your freezer look like? This time of year, mine is loaded up with homemade bone broth.
The picture above is the top shelf of my kitchen freezer. The container third from the left is actually a full gallon container (you can’t see how wide it is from the picture), so the total is over 3 gallons of stock right now in my freezer. The middle containers are duck stock, the quart container on the far right is fish stock and the container on the far left is turkey stock.
All those containers of stock you see in the picture will last my family of 5 about one month to six weeks.
I use stock liberally – I even cook rice in it instead of water. The kids don’t even know they are eating stock sometimes!
Stock is my secret weapon to keep my family free of tummy bugs that are running rampant through school and the community at large during the winter months.
Homemade stock contains ample amounts of gelatin, which is a colloidal substance that attracts digestive juices to it and prevents gastrointestinal bugs from attaching themselves to the gut wall. Natural gelatin both assists digestion and keeps you well!
Store bought soups and broth/stocks – even if organic – are nutritionless, loaded with MSG (using deceptive and misleading pseudonyms of course) and do not contain any beneficial gelatin.
Making plenty of homemade soups with homemade broth and you have rediscovered one of the most important and delicious ways Traditional Societies stayed well!
Best of all, stock is FREE. All you have to do is use the bones of whatever meat you have roasted, add water and a bit of vinegar, and simmer for 24-48 hours.
Eating well does not have to break the bank!
Don’t have time to make soup?
Try this 5 minute healthy soup recipe that you can make with a quart of frozen bone broth right out of the freezer.
Another super fast soup is this recipe for panata, frugally referred to as bread soup.
This is probably a dumb question but I’m not a cook, I hate to cook but i have to start. lol I make chicken stock and it is really quite good (to my suprise!!) I froze it once in mason jars and they all broke. Not sure what i did wrong. and I keep hearing about how terrible it is for food to be in plastic. so my qustion is if I’m going to try to freeze it in plastic and it has to be cool before putting it in the plastic containers…how and where do you let it cool at? Putting it in a big container in the fridge?…how long does it take to cool that way?
Thanks for any help I can get!!!
My daughter is getting over a stomach bug right now. I have plenty of homemade stock in my freezer, but she isn’t wild about drinking it or eating soup. Would she get the benefits of the stock if I cooked some rice in the stock? I’m just wondering because she loves rice.
I have a question about making your own stock. I normally make mine in the crock pot with a whole chicken, take the meat off and get rid of the bones. If I make the first stock with the whole chicken do you think I could use the bones again for another round of stock? If the soup stock the second round doesn’t have that gelatin texture to it, is it still good to use?
I know that you live in the tampa area, if you wouldn’t mind me asking, where do you get your duck and beef?
Thanks
Mariah 🙂
Love this info!
Hi Sarah,
can you tell me why the stock has to simmer for so long? In my other cookbooks it says to simmer for about 2-4 hours. This is how I make it and it tastes good, but if there is a nutritional value of having it simmer as long as you say I want to know! I consume stock to keep healthy so I want the maximum benefit 🙂
Thank you,
Jessica
Hi Jessica, the longer you simmer, the more minerals come out of the bones into the broth. Fish stock only needs to simmer for about 4 hours because the bones are so thin. I sometimes let my beef stock go for 72 hours as the bones are so thick and hard.
Hi Sarah,
Another informative post! Thank you!
My mother roastes her meat in a Granitewear roaster. I was trying to find a resource that described whether they are safe to use (as opposed to stainless steel, corningwear etc.) . Would you happen to have any information or know anything about cooking with this material/metal?
Much appreciated!
Hi Bettina, I am not familiar with that particular cooking material.
Thanks!
C,
It also depends on how fresh your meat is when you buy it and if it has been previously frozen thawed and frozen again. If you meat is fresh, you should be fine. Just make sure you thaw it in the fridge. My rancher told me this when my freezer died and my beef thawed to refrigerator temperatures. We did not have any problems and I have discovered others with similar experiences.
~Leah
I posted this question to Sarah earlier, but didn’t get a reply. Perhaps it got lost among the other comments. Can anyone tell me if I can refreeze previously frozen meat and poultry bones to be used for stock-making later? I know we’re told never to refreeze previously frozen meat, poultry, seafood etc unless they are first cooked. Just wondering if it applies to raw bones.
Thanks!
Hi C, missed your question before. Sorry! I do not make a practice of refreezing previously frozen bones. Not saying it can’t be done, I just don’t do it myself just to be on the safe side.
I too love to make my own stock.
As Kim I too freeze my stock in Ziploc bags. That way I can freeze it flat. I will also freeze some in muffin tins because I can measure a cup in, then when it freezes i pop them out of the muffin tins and put them in a container. When I need a cup of stock in something I just pop one of those little rounds in a pot and voila, a cup of stock….or two…. (Alton Brown showed this tip on his show.)