I’ve created my best-yet beef bone broth recipe. The most crucial ingredient, naturally, is organic marrow bones from grass-finished cows. There’s only one “surprise” ingredient that I’ve not found in any other recipe. The result is at least 10 times better than any commercial broth I’ve ever consumed. (Gee – do you think I might be biased?)
A Slight Sidenote About My Kitchen Experiments
Since retiring I no longer have a research lab. So my efforts at “chemistry” are confined mostly to the kitchen. My view is that cooking is just another way to explore natural products chemistry. The bonus is getting to taste the results (i.e., if the recipes are good!).
Here are some previous examples, just for more fun reading for you.
- Simple Tartare Recipe for Steak or Tuna
- Mackerel Head Smoothies â An Epicurean Delight
- When Food Looks Back at You â Fish Head Soup
My Beef Bone Broth Recipe: The Surprise Ingredient
Let’s cut out the suspense and name it right now: it’s kombu (aka, kelp).
Now that you know what it is, you can relax and see what the other ingredients are and how I concocted this new beef bone broth recipe.
Start with Superior Bones
The key to ‘superior’ bones is getting them sourced from grass-finished cows. Meaning, raised on grass and only grass, all the way to the end.
Bones from grain-fed cows will not do! Unless, of course, you really want a boatload of abnormal fats derived from a diet of corn and/or soybean feeds. One nice bonus from grass-finished cows is natural fats, headed by the CLAs (conjugated linoleic acids).
By consuming ‘clean’ foods, you can also avoid a dose of the worst agricultural toxin ever used in human history: glyphosate. If you don’t know what that is, this earlier post explains enough to keep you up at night: Glyphosate Toxicity â Government Approved Lies That Keep On Giving.)
I started with 3 lbs of marrow bones from a local Whole Foods. It’s the largest Whole Foods store in our area and the only one offering marrow bones.
As per most recipes I found, I first roasted them at 400o F for 30 minutes. Then I placed them in the bottom of a slow cooker as shown here.
The marrow really loosened up after roasting, so much so that I had to scoop out a little bite. This is appropriately called God’s butter for good reason!
Veggies
In an effort to keep it simple, I cut up just a few additional veggies. They included 4 celery stalks (with leaves), a whole parsley bunch, one-half of a large red bell pepper, and 5 small carrots (with their tops). They all went into the pot on top of the marrow bones. (The carrots are under the other veggies in this photo.)
Kombu
Kombu is a type of ocean kelp (seaweed), technically classified as brown algae (Class Phaeophyceae).
I chose this type of seaweed because it provides an abundance of minerals from the sea, especially iodine. It’s also salty, so I didn’t have to add more salt to the broth.
Kombu is easy to find in Asian stores, and sometimes in the ethnic section of supermarkets.
It typically comes in 4-oz packets of dried strips, so it has to be rehydrated before use.
For this recipe, I soaked ca. 3 oz. in a bowl of filtered water for about 30 minutes. (Later I used the remaining ounce for making a kelp smoothie – that’s a story for another day.)
Then I dumped the whole bowlful, water and all, on top of the veggies, as shown in the photo above.
Note the big green asterisk on that glob of white stuff in this photo. It marks ca. 4 tbsp. of coconut oil.
I’m a huge fan of coconut oil, for many health reasons. See my earlier post about it here: Coconut Oil â A Health Marvel And Much More.
I cook with it every chance I get, and I put a tsp. of it in each cup of my morning coffee (along with an equal amount of unsalted butter – absolutely delicious!).
Now for the Easy Part
Once I assembled it all, I put the slow cooker in the garage (so as to not smell up the house), set to low heat.
Then I let it cook for the next 24 hours or so, with occasional stirring. (Many bone broth recipes call for cooking up to 48 hours, which I find unnecessary.)
Multiple Epicurean Delights
I then ladled out as much of the liquid as possible, then strained the remainder through a colander into a separate pan.
I’m not sure how much liquid I started with. However, the harvestable broth comes to ca. 4 qts. (or, 3.7541 liters for you science-y folks out there.)
The Mason jar goes into the fridge. I like to warm up a cup of it in a stovetop pan, since this stuff is too good to damage by microwaving.
The shaker cups go into the freezer for future use.
Besides the broth itself, I also harvest two ‘extras’ for future side dishes.
The first is the marrow itself.
This photo shows the recovered marrow bones, along with some of the marrow that I was able to scoop out (labeled with the green asterisk).
I love to take a nice big bite of the marrow, then put the remainder into the fridge for inclusion in other dishes later (e.g., in scrambled eggs or melted and poured over a baked potato).
The second side dish is the veggies themselves.
I love cooked carrots, celery, and bell peppers. And the salty/sweet-ish kombu is a great addition to this nice veggie side dish. The parsley gives the dish a nice little zing, too.
All in all the veggies are a tasty addition to have with other meals. It’s wonderful either cold or warmed up.
Cost Analysis
One of my favorite commercial beef bone broths is made by Kettle & Fire. As you might expect, it’s also pretty pricey.
As of this writing, a 16.9 oz carton goes for $6.79 (or $12.86 per quart), so that’s a starting point for comparing the costs of making my own beef bone broth recipe.
The total cost of my ingredients was around $10 for the veggies, ca. $5 worth of kombu, and just under $25 for the marrow bones.
That’s approximately $40 for 4 quarts of broth. In other words, $10 per quart.
This is only a bit less than the top commercial broth from Kettle & Fire, so the cost difference isn’t a big factor for me making my own broth.
However, I get a lot more than broth. The section above on Multiple Epicurean Delights explains that I also get a nice heap of bone marrow, plus several meals worth of veggies on the side. Priceless!
What I also get out of it, in addition to yummy broth, is the therapy of creating something wonderful in the kitchen. Also priceless!
In my opinion, my beef bone broth recipe is much tastier than any commercial bone broth. And making it gives me complete control of what goes into it. You won’t find any broth recipes that include seaweed, as far as I know.
Health Benefits of Bone Broth
Making a delicious dish is just the first step. Bone broths of all kinds are also well-established as health foods.
Remember the old adage that chicken noodle soup is a super healing food, especially when you have a cold or the flu? Well, that’s because of the marrow from the chicken bones. (Yup, neither the chicken meat nor the noodles have much to do with the health benefits. It’s all about the bone marrow.)
Consuming good marrow is the basis of the health benefits of a good bone broth.
I won’t add all the health benefits of bone broth here right now. However, one of my favorite functional medicine doctors has an extensive article on his blog on the topic. I recommend you at least peruse it to get a better feel for what bone broth can do for you. Here’s the link to it: Bone Broth Benefits for Joints, Skin and Gut Health.
Even before that post was published, the Weston A. Price Foundation put out a little review of the importance of bone broth for your health, here: Why Broth is Beautiful: Essential Roles for Proline, Glycine and Gelatin.
Dearth of Bone Broth Research
One interesting aspect of bone broth studies is that there aren’t many. This stuff is more like a folk medicine dish than anything modern scientists are interested in. I suppose such studies are hard to get funded, since the topic seems so mundane and obvious.
Even those articles I linked above, by Dr. Axe and by the Weston A. Price Foundation, which are normally replete with scientific citations, have little to offer in this regard.
Upon searching PubMed for what’s been studied scientifically, I did find a handful of studies. They give you an inkling of the published research. See the References section below.
Instead I’ll just rely on calling knowledge about this topic the wisdom of the ages.
Comments or Questions?
Iâd love to hear from you. This and every other post here provides a comment section at the end of the post, exactly for that purpose.
So, by all means, leave me your thoughts.
I would be especially grateful if you point out any flaws in my logic, factual errors, or ordinary typos. (I’ll give you a little ‘huzzah’ in my heart.)
Then Iâll respond as soon as I can.
References
Seki Y, Ohkuma RC, Miyakawa Y, Karakida T, Yamamoto R, Yamakoshi Y. Hyaluronan and chondroitin sulfate in chicken-vegetable bone broth delay osteoporosis progression. J Food Sci. 2024 Mar;89(3):1791-1803. doi: 10.1111/1750-3841.16962. Epub 2024 Feb 5. PMID: 38317402. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/38317402/
Mar-SolĂs LM, Soto-DomĂnguez A, RodrĂguez-Tovar LE, RodrĂguez-Rocha H, GarcĂa-GarcĂa A, Aguirre-Arzola VE, Zamora-Ăvila DE, Garza-Arredondo AJ, Castillo-VelĂĄzquez U. Analysis of the Anti-Inflammatory Capacity of Bone Broth in a Murine Model of Ulcerative Colitis. Medicina (Kaunas). 2021 Oct 20;57(11):1138. doi: 10.3390/medicina57111138. PMID: 34833355; PMCID: PMC8618064. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8618064/
Peterson OJ, Cornelison LE, Durham PL. Neuroprotective Effect of Enriched Chicken Bone Broth as a Dietary Supplement in a Model of Migraine Mediated by Early Life Stress. J Med Food. 2020 Dec;23(12):1259-1265. doi: 10.1089/jmf.2019.0312. Epub 2020 Apr 23. PMID: 32326809; PMCID: PMC7864107. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7864107/
Alcock RD, Shaw GC, Tee N, Burke LM. Plasma Amino Acid Concentrations After the Ingestion of Dairy and Collagen Proteins, in Healthy Active Males. Front Nutr. 2019 Oct 15;6:163. doi: 10.3389/fnut.2019.00163. PMID: 31681789; PMCID: PMC6803522. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6803522/
Hsu DJ, Lee CW, Tsai WC, Chien YC. Essential and toxic metals in animal bone broths. Food Nutr Res. 2017 Jul 18;61(1):1347478. doi: 10.1080/16546628.2017.1347478. PMID: 28804437; PMCID: PMC5533136. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5533136/
Monro JA, Leon R, Puri BK. The risk of lead contamination in bone broth diets. Med Hypotheses. 2013 Apr;80(4):389-90. doi: 10.1016/j.mehy.2012.12.026. Epub 2013 Jan 31. PMID: 23375414. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/23375414/
All the best in natural health,
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