Chicken Bone Broth… aka Jewish Penicillin! It’s a magic elixir. It’s the fountain of youth and the key to optimal health. And then you see the price tag.
You’ll need a second job to buy the good stuff and making it at home can be just as EXPENSIVE and time consuming!
I’ve compiled my Top 5 Hacks to Making Affordable Bone Broth because once you realize how good bone broth is for you, you’re going to need it to be affordable in any quantity beyond 2 cups.
Imagine being able to afford to drink multiple cups of bone broth everyday without winning the lottery. You need this in your life. It will change your health.
Once you’ve read my hacks, try my recipe for Affordable Homemade Chicken Bone Broth: 64 cents a cup. You won’t regret it. You’ll be drinking bone broth with wild abandon! Your hair and skin will transform. Your gut will be healthy and you’ll never be thirsty…ok, the last one is a bit of a stretch.
Top 5 Hacks to Making Affordable Bone Broth
1. Make as much bone broth at a time as you can
2. Use affordable cuts of meats and bones
3. Take the meat off the bones
4. Reuse the bones for an additional batch
5. Chicken feet are optional
1. Make as much bone broth at a time as you can
I use a Cuisinart 20-Quart Stockpot and have an additional Belgique 16-Quart Stockpot to hold the first batch while the bones cook again for a second batch. The 8 Quart InstaPot (Instant Pot) is cool but ultimately, it’s just too small.
I want to make bone broth once a month, not once a week. I make 80+ cups of liquid gold with my Affordable Chicken Bone Broth for .64 cents per cup recipe.
You’ll need extra freezer space
As soon as you make the broth, you’ll realize very quickly that you’ll need extra freezer space to store it.
I purchased my latest chest freezer 7 years ago and it’s still going strong. I can store so many jars of bone broth in there it’s ridiculous. Having a chest freezer also enables me to buy ingredients in bulk when items go on sale and freeze my already cooked meals.
Unless you want to be trapped in your kitchen cooking all the time, you need to invest in tools and find methods that enable you to cook smarter not harder. A chest freezer is one of those tools.
2. Use affordable cuts of meat and bones
I have a limit as to how much I’ll spend per pound to make my broth. I won’t pay over $2.99/lb. That means, by default, I can’t make beef bone broth. It’s simply too expensive unless you can save up beef bones from your meals and find cheap but quality marrow bones.
These days, beef bones typically cost around $6.00/lb. Butchers used to give them away but word has gotten out that we want soup bones and they are cashing in.
Shop the sales and buy deep
I use cheap chicken and turkey parts for my bone broths because they are affordable. Wings, backs, necks, drumsticks, legs, thighs and whole birds.
I like buying the holiday leftover whole turkeys from Natural Grocers in May or June when they mark them way down. My best score was 9 organic 20+ lb. turkeys at $10 per turkey. That was some insanely delicious and affordable turkey bone broth!
3. Take the meat off the bones
This is simple, easy, and so obvious. Whatever part of the bird you use that has good meat on it, take it out after an hour of cooking at a low simmer. Remove the meat and put the bones and skin back into the stock pot to continue cooking. Season and freeze that meat for later use.
If you kept the meat on the bones for the entire time you’d have meat that has been cooked for 12-24 hrs. Not terribly tasty. By using this hack you’ll get the taste benefits of having a “meat broth,” the ease of having pre-cooked protein for later use and most importantly, this makes bone broth insanely affordable.
Bone broth AND cooked meat = win/win!
4. Reuse the bones for an additional batch
Cook your bone broth for 12 hours per batch (cook beef bone broth for 24 hours per batch.) Strain, set the broth aside to refrigerate once cool. Put all the used ingredients from that batch (bones and veggies) back into the stock pot, refill with water, add more apple cider vinegar and cook for another 12 hours.
Combining gives you a greater yield and it will have all the minerals, collagen and gelatin incorporated into one batch.
Histamine reaction and intolerance
*If you’re worried about histamine reaction because of leaky gut or colitis or if you’re on a SCD or GAPS diet, you should consider using Dr Kellyann’s “Bone Broth Diet” for your bone broth recipes. Her broths are meat based and are cooked for a minimum amount of time as to not create a histamine reaction. They are considered low histamine. My favorite resource for anything gut related is Breaking the Vicious Cycle by Elaine Gottschall.
5. Chicken feet are optional
Seriously. You don’t have to kill yourself looking for chicken feet.
When I can find them in Whole Foods, they are $1.99/lb. However, most stores haven’t figured out that their customers will buy them if they stock them (keep pestering your meat departments and store managers.)
I can buy chicken feet at the local Boulder County Farmers Market, but they are significantly more costly, upwards of $5/lb. I will say that I do get a lot more gelatinous collagen out of those feet so I can use less.
A pig’s foot or two are an acceptable substitute if that’s all you can find.
My broth didn’t gel!
Maybe you didn’t use chicken feet or didn’t use enough chicken feet. Maybe you used too much water (gelatinous collagen makes it gel.) Whatever happened, you’re freaking out because that was a lot of time and money and your bone broth isn’t jiggling!
It’s OK, you can breathe. It’s still beneficial and magical.
You can always add powdered gelatin and/or collagen to your broth after the fact. If you don’t have either, drink your bone broth with confidence knowing that all the magic is still in there even if you don’t have that “bone broth jiggle.”
Gelatin vs Collagen
Gelatin will make your broth gel (I like Great Lakes Gelatin) but it needs heat to dissolve. Collagen will not make it gel (I like Great Lakes Collagen) and it does not need heat to dissolve. They both add protein and have the same basic benefits.
But you don’t need to add either to your broth. Your broth is bone broth if you’ve cooked the bones for an extended period of time, 24 hrs. for chicken, 48 hrs. for beef.
There you have it! Top 5 Hacks to Making Affordable Bone Broth.
I hope you enjoy making my Affordable Homemade Chicken Bone Broth: .64 cents per cup as much as I do.
Let me know how yours turns out!
You are full of the good ideas!! Thanks for sharing.