Fall and winter eating in season is a lot of soup, stews, roasts with gravy, and braised meat. The oven can be on full blast all day and help to heat the house while your dinner cooks away. The base for a hearty, comforting, nutritious soup, stew, or braise is a real bone broth, not that shitty salt water they sell you in the store.
Our technique makes a broth so rich, it congeals at room temperature. That's how we like it, but there's some notes below on variations.
Ingredients
Lamb, beef, pork, or venison bones
1 onion, halved
1 piece of celery (or lovage if you have it), halved
1 carrot, halved
1-2 cloves of garlic, crushed
Water
2 bay leaves
8 whole cloves
Method
Turn oven on to 400 degrees
Put the bones on a baking tray covered with parchment paper (they're fine to roast from frozen)
Roast bones for about 1 hour, turning once to avoid burning
Prep your veggies
When the bones are nearly roasted, put on a big stockpot of water to boil
Add roasted bones to the stockpot
Pour off the fat from the baking tray and discard, then scrape the brown bits into the stockpot
Add veggies, bay leaves, and cloves to the pot
Bring to a hard boil, then cover the pot and reduce heat - but keep it at a hard boil with the lid on
Skim off any foam (early on) and fat (later on), and wipe up any grey/brown scum from the sides of the pot frequently - this will keep your broth from going cloudy
Keep at a hard boil for 24-36 hours
When done, let it cool, then strain into containers
The end result is a super-rich soup stock to use as a base for whatever winter cooking you've got on tap.
Notes
We do basically the same thing for poultry bones, but we don't roast them first - just straight into the pot
If you save your bones from steaks and chops that have already been cooked, skip the roasting step too
The longer and harder you boil the bones, the more you break down the connective tissues, marrow, etc - and the richer and more nutrient dense the broth will be. If you want a less intense broth, either boil it for a shorter time, or simmer it for just 12 hours
The discarded meats and connective tissues make great chicken treats, and the spent bones can be charred in the campfire to make a kind of biochar
Try freezing some broth in ice cube trays - broth cubes are super useful when you just need a little bit when cooking dumplings or winter greens