Backyard Chickens

Chicken Bone Broth

Hello friends! Welcome back to the blog! Today I am making bone broth, and I wanted to share my process. I am going to put my process first, and the story after.

WHAT YOU NEED

  • Large stock pot

  • Chicken Carcass(es)

  • Onion

  • Garlic if desired

  • Bay leaf (or 2 or 3, depending on # of chickens)

  • Salt

  • Water

  • Apple Cider Vinegar

HOW TO PREPARE

  • 24 hours before cooking chicken(s), salt them generously. Bag and return to refrigerator. The salt will diffuse through the muscle (salt always moves from high concentration to low concentration; thank you 10th grade science class) and where salt goes, water follows. Once the salt is inside the muscle, you lose a lot less water during cooking, so the meat stays more tender and juicy.

  • Roast the chicken(s). I do 350 degrees Fahrenheit for 1 hour 15 minutes or so - I always use a meat thermometer to make sure the chicken is fully cooked (165 degrees Fahrenheit in the thickest part of the meat).

  • Let the meat cool, then pick the meat off the bones. Save the skin. If you’re starting with whole chickens, save the feet and necks too. All that goes in the broth. All the fat too. It adds incredible flavor, and you skim it off later.

  • Store or eat the meat. I’m making chicken soup once the broth is finished, so the meat is in the fridge until the broth is done.

  • Put the chicken bones, skin, and odds and ends in the stock pot. Mine holds about 4 chickens. Peel and coarsely chop the onion, toss in a bay leaf (I use 2-3), and peel a few cloves of garlic. Smash the garlic with the broad side of a knife. Cover with water, bring to a simmer. Add a splash of vinegar (helps leach the minerals out of the bones). Add salt. After a few hours, taste the broth, and probably add more salt. Keep tasting every so often and adjusting the salt. I used about 4x as much as I expected to, but you will know when you have it right.

  • Simmer, covered, 24-48 hours. Strain with a fine strainer or layered coffee filters or cheesecloth (I lined my colander with paper towels and used that). Refrigerate for 6+ hours until fat has risen to top and solidified. Remove fat. I’m reserving the fat to cook with - it adds an intense chicken-y flavor almost like adding a bullion cube to things like rice or couscous. Your broth is ready to use! I will add the chicken soup recipe another time.

STORY TIME

This broth is incredible. It is loaded with minerals like Calcium. It’s delicious and intensely flavorful. I think my favorite part of the homesteading journey so far is getting to learn to make incredible, healthful food from scratch. The chickens I used for this broth were not hatched on the homestead, but we had them shipped here as day-old chicks. They ranged in age from 18 months to 4 years old. We needed to make some space in the chicken coop before winter, so we butchered 11 birds and they will nourish us all winter long.

I look forward to reading your thoughts! Please comment below, or send me an email: info@honeybunnyhomestead.com. Thanks for reading!

Chicken Success!

Hello Friends!

Welcome back to the blog. At the last update about the chickens, we had settled on getting 2 dual-purpose heritage breeds with the hopes that one or both would go broody.

We did have 2 Jersey Giant hens go broody. They each sat on 9 eggs, we hatched a total of 6. We did lose 2 in the first 36 hours (all errors were ours; I had miscounted the days to hatch and had an inappropriate water dish in the enclosure. 2 babies fell in, got wet, got out, but were chilled and did not recover). I have been very pleased with the mother hens’ abilities. The 2 hens and 4 babies escaped their enclosure during a terrible rainstorm while Mr. L and I were both at work, and I fully expected to lose the remaining 4 babies because of the rain. When I finally tracked them down, THEY WERE BONE DRY! Both mama hens were sopping wet, sad feathers all hanging down, but somehow the babies were still fluffy. I have no idea how they managed it, but it beat the heck out of a brooder in the basement!

Unfortunately, our Jersey Giant rooster was badly bullied and ended up passing due to heat stroke. This coming spring we will add a few more JG hens and a rooster, as well as a few more colored egg layers. We will be sending the rest of our brown egg layers to Camp Kenmore so that going forward all our brown eggs will hatch purebred JGs.

We have noticed significantly fewer losses to predators with the heritage breeds, even with all the free-ranging. The only bird we lost this summer was our JG rooster, and that was not a predator problem.

All in all, I have to recommend heritage breed chickens. They take longer to grow to butcher weight than Cornish X, but the flavor is remarkable. My experience has been that the meat is not tough - it isn’t mushy, it is a bit more firm than I think of chicken being, but it is miles away from tough. They lay well, they sit well on their eggs, they make good mothers, and they don’t simply wander away to get eaten.

Thanks for checking back in with us!

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