How To Source Affordable Bones For Your Homemade Broth

There is a difference between stock and broth, as stock is made with bones while broth is typically made with meat. Bone broth, however, is like stock on steroids. Bone broth is simmered for much, much longer than stock and therefore has more nutritional and health benefits due to the collagen released from bone marrow. Whether used in soups and stews or heated and sipped on its own, bone broth touts benefits like boosting the appearance of skin, decreasing joint pain, and even promoting gut health. But bone broth can be expensive to buy pre-made from the store or your local farmers market due to the ingredients it uses as well as the number of hours it requires to produce a true bone broth. 

While you could easily pay a handsome fee for the best bones for the richest broth, we have a couple of tricks to help bring down the cost of making a rich and healthy bone broth at home. It's always a good idea to develop friendly relationships with your food purveyors, like your local butcher or vendors at the farmers market. If you're lucky or ask nicely enough, you may be able to score scraps and bones from the butcher for free. And if they don't give them away for free, the people behind the meat counter at the grocery store are usually able to sell bones they don't otherwise use for a lower price, like chicken backs and feet. 

While a discount is nice, the least expensive way to acquire bones for your homemade bone broth is to buy bone-in meat cuts and save the bones for later use. You can easily do this by clearly labeling a gallon-sized freezer bag and filling it with leftover bones, be they beef, pork, chicken, or almost any kind of animal. Keep this bag in the freezer and continually add to it over weeks and months as you're left with bone scraps from dinner. However, bones should be stored in the freezer for no longer than six months as they can begin to lose their nutrients. In addition to leftover bones, you should also save vegetable scraps like onions, carrots, and other aromatics in the freezer to add to your bone broth for more flavor.

If you are using raw beef or pork bones, remember to blanch them first, as skipping this step can be a huge mistake. There are many impurities that can be released from raw bones, which negatively affect your broth. Blanching and rinsing the bones before beginning your bone broth improves flavor and texture. This is not a process to be rushed; it takes a long time to cook bone broth for truly mouthwatering results, as you need to draw out all the nutrients from the bones. For a hands-off shortcut, you can cook bone broth in an Instant Pot instead of dozens of hours on the stove, and this trick applies to regular stocks and broths as well.