Slow cooking beef bones all day (better yet, 24-72 hours) over a low heat creates an amazing probiotic beef bone broth that will give you one of the most important, healing, and nutrient packed foods that you could ever make for yourself.  It is a simple, inexpensive beneficial probiotic food that can be used for everything from an elixer when you are sick, your daily warm drink, or as the base for all of your soups, stews and sauces.  You won’t need to keep swallowing a handful of supplements each day to boost your immune system and give you strength and good health, you will just need to add this to your daily diet in one form or another.  Making a large batch of it allows you to reap the benefits from it for quite some time after, as it freezes nicely for future use as well.

Beef bone broth is a probiotic rich food that helps to re-balance your gut, build up your digestion, strengthen your immune system and nourish all the parts of your body including skin, joints, tendons, hair, bone.

    Why bone broth?

Probiotic beef bone broth is rich in minerals that help to strengthen your immune system and aid your body in healthy digestion.  Bone broth also is full of collagen which is perfect for strengthening tendons, joints, ligaments, bone, and skin.  Collagen is known to heal your gut lining and helps with digestive inflammation within your intestines, as well as alleviating heartburn and ulcers, and your overall digestive functions.  It also helps with healthy skin and hair.  Bone broth will also help detoxify the body of harmful chemicals and toxins, which in turn can improve your sleep and memory, and give you more energy.

      What kind of bones should I use?

Variety is the spice of life, right?  Variety of bones is what you want for the most beneficial probiotic beef bone broth.  Bones vary in the marrow that they contain.  Marrow comes with either yellow marrow or red marrow, depending on the type of bone.   Yellow marrow provides the healthy fat.  Yellow marrow is available in the center part of all of the long bones.   Red blood cells that are found in the red marrow build your body’s strength and boost your immune system.  Red marrow is found in all of the flat bones, like the hip, sternum, ribs, vertebrae and at the end of the long bones. The joints and knuckles are the best place to find the all important collagen as well. (Be sure to use organic, grass fed or free range animal bones – free of antibiotics and hormones for the maximum benefit….what they ate matters for what you are eating.)

Storing bones used from prior meals in the freezer is a really easy way to collect enough for when you are ready to make a good, strong broth/stock.  The main thing is to make sure that your larger bones are cut into small pieces.  By using smaller pieces of the different bones, you will reduce your cooking time and provide more of the essential marrow material to become the strength of your broth.

If you are purchasing your bones specifically for your broth, gather up several different bones as described above, so you have all of the benefits that the different parts and marrows have to offer.  With beef or lamb bones freshly purchased, browning the meat first or roasting the bones prior to placing them in the broth water helps to bring out a richer flavor to your probiotic stock.

Probiotic Beef Bone Broth:

 

Ingredients:

The most important ingredients of a good, probiotic bone broth are, bones, fat, meat, vegetables and water.  The special secret ingredient is to add apple cider vinegar (the best one in my recommendation is Braggs Apple Cider Vinegar with ‘the mother’ – it is un-filtered and unprocessed, having the most beneficial properties left in the blend).   Apple cider vinegar is not only full of great health benefits in it’s own right, but it also is the perfect acid to allow for the minerals and other nutrients that our bodies need to function well and be optimized to be pulled out of the pieces of bone during the cook time.

• Various Roasted Beef Bones (with both red and yellow marrow)
• Apple Cider Vinegar
• Sea Salt
• Assorted Chopped Vegetables:  Onion, Carrot, Celery, Garlic, etc. (optional, but great for flavor and added nutritional benefits)

 

Cooking Suggestions/Instructions:

1.   Place bones into a large stock pot or crock pot and cover with filtered water.

2.   Add two tablespoon of apple cider vinegar to water prior to cooking (wine can be used if you don’t have    vinegar).

3.   If on the stove, heat slowly until brought to a boil.  Reduce heat to simmer for at least 6 hours. Remove scum as it arises.

4.   You want to cook it long and slow, so a crock pot will yield the most benefit if you have the time to wait!  Beef bones can cook for 12-72 hours. A long and slow cook time is necessary in order to fully extract the nutrients in and around bone.  The longer, the better as far as nutrition goes.

When you broth is complete, you can strain it.  After cooking, the broth will cool and a layer of fat will harden on top. This layer protects the broth beneath. Many discard this layer prior to eating, but in actuality, it can be stirred back into the broth for the benefit of the healthy fats and nutrients like sulfer that have risen to the top.  Boiled down it concentrates and becomes a jellylike fumée or demi-glaze that can be reconstituted into a sauce by adding water.  (I use the jellylike concentrate and freeze them in ice cube trays to be pulled out the next time I need to make a beef broth for another recipe, like my gluten free soy sauce.)

Start making your first batch of bone broth today, and reap the healthful benefits for years to come!

 

 

If you wish to share this recipe, please provide the link back to this recipe here on my website wherever you may share it. If you make changes to the recipe, I ask that you rewrite the recipe in your own words as well as provide a link back to this recipe giving credit as the original recipe that you adapted from. Thank you for your integrity and support! (Plus, I would love to know what changes you make in your own creativity and flavor palates so that we can all benefit from each other!)