This is not the first time we’ve talked about stock, but about two weeks ago, I received the same question three times: what’s the difference between stock, and broth, and bone broth? And that’s a good question. It is confusing. Our last discussion about stocks and broths was focused wholly on building flavor, and while that’s important, we need to back up (no pun intended) to the backbone of the thing: we have to know how to make them at all, before we know how to make them taste good - and we really need to know what, if anything, is worth buying from a store.
We’re tackling that today, and because it’s long - it’ll make for a nice Saturday-morning deep-dive, if you want to save it - you won’t find anything else in this issue (though there is still a recipe somewhere down there; feel free to scroll if you want to skip the text, which should take you 12-15 minutes to read). I know it’s lengthy, but I hope you’ll stick around: this one is full of important culinary and consumer info, and not only do I hope it will shed some light on one of the most confusing aisles of the supermarket, I also think I can convince you to start making your own stocks at home. Which is a pretty good ROI, if you ask me: 15 minutes now, to change the rest of your life.
Lastly, a quick note before we get started: for the sake of space and clarity, this issue is going to largely disregard seafood- and plant-based broths and stocks. The science and the language are just too different. So, since today’s content is unbendingly carnivorous: if that’s not your jam, feel free to peace out. I’ll see you next week for Tofu. xo.
Stocks & Broths
In so many instances, the differentiators that set the constituents of a category of food apart from one another are really clear and defined. Prepared chocolate and dairy milk are both great examples: while there are many types of each out there, we are conditioned to trust the (USDA- and FDA-regulated!) marketing information that’s provided on the label; from brand to brand, while there may be other ingredients present in proprietary formulations and while production methods may vary, 67% cacao is still 67% cacao, and 2% milk fat is still 2% milk fat. Those descriptors are unfailingly reliable, and the use of percentages on the label makes finding the right product a near-brainless task. As long as you see the right words and numbers, you know what you’re getting.
Nothing like this exists for stocks and broths.
Neither the USDA nor the FDA regulate the definition or use of the words “stock,” “broth,” or “bone broth” on most packaging (the one exception is actually on baby food), meaning that brands can apply any descriptor that they want to their product - bad news for a discerning consumer who’s seeking out quality. So: if the government doesn’t recognize any official difference between stock, broth, and bone broth, is there a difference at all? Let’s find out. Here’s everything that you need to know, why it matters, how to understand what you’re looking at when you’re perusing grocery shelves, and - ultimately - why you should really be making your own.
Stock, Broth, and Bone Broth: Which is which?
Because this has to get quite murky before we begin to make sense of it all, let’s go all-in on the confusion now: there is no consensus definition of any of these words. A reach into Google will make your head spin; there are plenty of people speaking authoritatively and definitively about it, and they’re all at odds with one another (and with food, who gets to say who’s right, anyway?). While most can agree upon the fact that stocks, broths, and bone broths are all the result of marrying animal carcasses with water and heat, there is a lot of room for variation, and no one agrees on those specs. What kind of animal carcasses? What parts? How much water? How much heat? For how long? What else goes in the pot? With every tweak and tinker, the formula produces mildly-to-wildly different results.
If there is ever a hint of agreement, it usually falls back on the definition espoused by classically-trained chefs of French cuisine, which, when aggressively paraphrased, is this: “stock” is made from bones and “broth” is made from meat (This doesn’t address “bone broth,” and actually only serves to confuse that term even more, but we’ll get to that one in a second.) French cuisine, however, is only a few hundred years old; meanwhile, humans invented pots over fifteen thousand years go, and we’ve been using them to embrace the wastelessness of boiling the scraps of our kill ever since. It’s hard to feel motivated to accept the definitions offered up by the Recently Dead French Guys about such an ancient and intimate part of our cuisine. Whatever we call it, these pots of hot meat water are older than civilization itself.
Which brings us to “bone broth.” It’s maybe ironic that the most primal-sounding term for our ancient-roots hot meat water is actually the youngest, but it is: “bone broth” is largely a marketing term, one that was born of the burst of popularity that the paleo diet has seen in the past two decades or so.
I gave the French guys a lot of grief about history, but it’s actually this most modern term that I like the best: “bone broth” incorporates both major components - bones and meat, if we accept the classical definition of broth - and it’s the combination of these two that produce the best final product.
» The term “broth” implies two things: a high ratio of meat to water, and a relatively short cook-time. Meat provides broths and stocks with flavor: it is full of amino acids, and the human palate loves those. It doesn’t take a lot of time to make a flavorful broth: after about two hours of simmering, the proteins in the muscle tissue have been denatured enough that most of the flavorful compounds have leached into the water. Bones can be present when making a broth, but do not have to, and traditionally they don’t make up the bulk of the contents of the pot - and what’s more, it wouldn’t matter if they did, because bones require a much longer simmer to give up the goods.
» “Stock,” too, implies two things: a high ratio of bones to water, and a long cook-time. Bones, in and of themselves, don’t have much flavor - but (unless they’ve really been picked clean) they generally have a lot of connective tissues clinging to them. These connective tissues - cartilaginous joints and tendons - contain lots of collagen, and collagen is what we’re after: it’s a nutritional powerhouse, and it’s what gives the stock a silky, satisfying mouthfeel. Ever had a really unctuous sauce in a restaurant called a demi-glace, or noticed that your hands get deliciously sticky when you’re tearing into a well-roasted chicken? That’s collagen. And while the amino acids in muscle tissue (meat) flavor the pot in just a couple of hours, it can take 2-4 times as long for the collagen in all of the connective tissues to melt.
It’s easy to see, then, how “bone broth” feels like the best of both worlds, right? Separately, broth and stock do have their places: the lighter flavor of a stock made from bones is great for applications where you’re reducing large amounts of liquid. That demi-glace is a good example, but a risotto is one you’re probably more familiar with: when you repeatedly add and reduce a liquid, it concentrates the flavors, and it’s easy to wind up with a risotto that’s dominated by intensely meaty flavors and is sometimes even overly salty if you use too-flavorful of a liquid to start. And a traditional broth is great, in a pinch: you could make the base of a really flavorful soup with just an hour or two of largely hands-off cooking. But for most of the home cook’s applications - soups and stews, quick pan-sauces, rice and pasta and vegetable dishes, casseroles - why wouldn’t we want the best of both worlds? In fact, the modern popularity of “bone broth” didn’t even start with culinary applications: bone broth is both so flavorful and so nutritious that it’s intended to be enjoyed by the steamy mugful, as a beverage. A lot of modern American chefs (even home chefs!) balk at the term “bone broth” - “That’s just another word for stock, and we’ve been making it for years!” - but the truth is that what they’re making is bone broth: they’re using up all of their scraps - not just meat, or just bones - and giving them a nice long hot bath to produce something that’s both crazy delicious and loaded with collagen.
Shop Talk
Now that you know all of this, it’s so much easier to pop into the soup aisle and grab what you need, right? Read those labels! Stock, broth, and bone broth: now you know! I’m so, so sorry, but: still, a hard no. That aisle is a minefield, and the even worse news is that almost everything you’ll find in there super sucks.
Remember that while these culinary definitions exist, they are not recognized or enforced by any agency: manufacturers can put almost anything they want on stock & broth labels. Most of us remember a time when just about every product available was called “broth” - you might have had a favorite brand, but you knew that everything was more or less the same. As food and cooking have become more trend than task over the past few decades, the market began to push products labeled “stock,” and in just the past three or four years we’re finally seeing packages with “bone broth” available for purchase. But because no one is regulating the use of these terms or putting forth an enforceable industry-wide definition, there’s rarely a distinction amongst those products. And almost none of them are what they claim to be. It’s just clever marketing and trend-chasing.
However it’s made, a good broth/stock requires whole-food ingredients: bones, meat, connective tissues, maybe some plant matter in the way of aromatics and herbs and spices. None of those things are cheap - but water is. While some of the better brands do start with whole foods and real ingredients, manufacturers stretch these costly inclusions by adding so much water as to render the stuff nearly tasteless - and then they hide that dilution of flavor behind loads of additives (stuff like extracts and modified sugars and fats, even MSG) to attempt to mimic the taste and texture of authentic stocks. I don’t vilify or hate all food additives - I don’t even hate MSG! - but while they do occasionally serve a purpose, they can never bring wan, cheaply-diluted stock back to its original glory. And as of this writing, there is not a single shelf-stable* broth, stock, or bone broth that comes even close to a true iteration of what you can make at home. It’s all - regardless of the label - flavored water. Even the “all-natural” ones, even the “organic” ones, even the ones that list meats and bones in their ingredient lists: they’re all industrial imitations, surviving on convenience alone.
*A full-disclosure moment: there ARE real, delicious bone broth options in some grocery stores now. They’re just not in the aisle with the rest, and they aren’t shelf-stable: they’re usually located in the freezer. Brands like Epic, Bonafide Provisions, Brodo, Primal, Bones & Co. - they make legit bone broths that range from good to excellent. I’m even sipping a mug of Brodo right now. It is phenomenal. Do you want to know how much it cost? (Everyone wave to my husband, who is about to start screaming; I only did this for market research, babe, I swear.) It was $4.50 for a one-cup serving. One cup. That’s more expensive than a boutique coffee. Bonafide Provisions, then, probably seems like a steal at $10 per quart, but you’re still looking at $20 to make a SMALL pot of soup - and that’s before you’ve added literally anything else to it. (Really drives home the point about all of that shelf-stable boxed stuff being total trash, huh?, when they’re selling for a third or even a quarter of the price.)
I’m not saying that these products are over-priced: they are of very high quality, they are nutritionally and palatably better than the garbage sold in aseptic boxes, and I understand the high costs of ingredients, packaging, and manufacturing. Those companies are probably selling their fancy frozen bone broths at razor-thin margins. But even if they’re running a legitimate business model and selling a quality product -that doesn’t mean you have to pay for it. You can just make it yourself. And if I had to name one practice that would elevate the quality of every [omnivorous] home-cook’s soups and stews and rices and sauces and pastas and freezer-stashes in general: this would probably be it.
I’m not here to shame you out of using boxed broths. I just love you and I think you deserve better.
Recipe: Bone Broth.
But first - some rules.
I will admit that despite everything I’ve said today, I generally refer to what I make at home as “stock,” and that’s only because I have a lot of anxiety that if I say “bone broth” people are going to think I’m a pretentious a-hole. Anyway. Whatever you call it, it’s really more about adhering to a loose set of rules than it is about a strict recipe. I’m including one anyway, as a launching point, but in general, if you follow these rules, you’ll be rewarded with quarts and quarts of liquid gold, forever and ever, amen.
» Follow the “bone broth” rule: use bones AND meat. Do not exclusively use either, but you don’t have to stress too much about the ratio. Bones should have bits of meat and connective tissue attached: a clean white bone brings nothing to the table save for maybe an inconsequential amount of mineral nutrition.
» A not-so-fun fact: a lot of grocery stores and meat markets sell marrow bones as “soup bones,” and those make absolutely terrible stock. They impart no flavor without any meat attached, and while beef marrow is almost pure healthy fat that’s loaded with minerals, it is not water-soluble: it floats to the surface and gets skimmed off. Skip ‘em.
» Great bones to use: poultry wings, thighs, legs, backs, necks; chicken feet (not as hard to find as you’d think; check Asian groceries!); oxtail (which is a cow’s tail); knuckles; rib trimmings; beef and pork shanks.
» Great meat cuts to use: all of them! Anything especially fatty - pork belly, for example - is probably worth skipping, but it won’t really harm your stock; the fat will just mostly wind up discarded, that’s all.
» Use an approximate 1:1 ratio of meat/bones by weight to water by volume - in other words, a pound of carcass per quart of water. If it’s a little off, you’re fine, so don’t stress.
» Roast the hell out of your bones and meat first. Roasting initiates Maillard reaction browning, a process by which amino acids + heat create dozens of new flavor compounds. Browned food tastes good. Rub all of your parts with a little oil and salt, scatter them on a sheet pan, and roast them at 450F until they’re browned and crispy. Don’t sweat it if you “overcook” the meat. You were gonna do that, anyway.
» Don’t leave the crispy bits of fond on your sheet pan! Scrape those up - use a little hot water if you need to - and get those into your stock-pot, too.
» Cook-time. This is going to vary greatly depending upon how much you’re making, your stove and pot, and the bones you chose to use, BUT, here’s a handy trick. Because we’re trying to extract as much collagen as possible from the meat and connective tissues, we can just visually check on it. Gently stir your simmering stock pot every 45 minutes or so, and when the bony pieces just begin to fall apart - joints are separating from the chicken legs, wing or neck pieces are separating into individual bones, etc. - your collagen has dissolved by about 75%. This will start to happen at the 3- to 4-hour mark. If you cook it for two to three hours beyond this point, you’ll have managed to dissolve just about all of the available collagen. Some stock recipes will have you cook for only 3 hours, and that’s just not enough - but yet others will say 18-24 hours, and the science isn’t there; it’s overkill. You really can’t OVER-cook a stock in a home kitchen, so you won’t hurt it, but there’s no discernible difference between most that are cooked for 6-7 hours and those cooked for an entire day.
» Very similarly, you can check on flavor development, too: after the first few hours, use tongs or a slotted spoon to lift out a small chunk of meat, then let it cool and eat it. Is it incredibly delicious and super tender and silky? Great: you just had a tasty snack, but, your stock’s not done. All of that flavor and all of the melted collagen that’s giving the meat that velvety texture is - obviously - still in the meat. Keep simmering and stirring occasionally until the meat tastes flavorless and feels dry on your palate. This usually happens after the bones begin to separate, for me - around the 4- or 5-hour mark.
» What about all of the extras: what else goes into our stock pot? Whatever you want, really, but here are some things that are Good To Know.
Onions, scallions/onion tops, garlic, chives, all of our flavorful alliums can all go into the pot, peels and roots and all (cleaned, of course). Ditto that for celery, too - you can throw it in, leaves and all, once you’ve washed the silt off. The amount is up to you; I like to do two medium onions (the size of a baseball) and about half a bunch of celery per 8-quart batch, plus anything in my scrap bag (we’ll get to that in a minute).
This is an unpopular opinion, but I feel very strongly about it and I have acclaimed chefs Marco Canora (the owner of Brodo and my fantastic $5 cup of meat water) and Andy Baraghani on my side to validate me: no carrots. If you have one or two that are looking sad and you can’t bear to waste them, throw them in, but no more: carrots are delicious, but even a small amount can make your broth intensely sweet over time.
To that end, you can roast any vegetables you want to include in your stock along with your meat and bones, but know that while you are developing color and flavor, you’re also caramelizing their sugars and ultimately increasing the sweetness of your finished product. Your call. I prefer deeply savory, less-sweet stocks, so I don’t.
Herbs & spices: if you’re making a basic stock - something to stock your fridge and freezer, something that you hope is all-purpose - go easy on the herbs and spices, or skip them entirely; you can always add them later to customize each dish. Rosemary, ginger, all-spice, cinnamon, dill: these things all make for delicious stocks, but they’re assertive, so only add them if you want your next 6 quarts of stock and all of the dishes you’ll make with it to pulse with those flavors. Also, while woody/hardy herbs like thyme and rosemary are great for stocks, soft tender ones like cilantro and basil can give your stock a bruised taste after a long cook; better to add those at the end, or, again, just add them to whatever dish you make with your stock later.
The scrap bag. Cookbooks and food magazines have been begging that we keep a freezer stash of scraps for years. Leftover bones, meat trimmings, and herb and vegetable scraps will keep nearly-indefinitely in the freezer, meaning that you can not only limit your food waste but also significantly reduce the cost of your batches of homemade stock: just supplement with a little bit of fresh meat, and the rest is covered, from stuff you would otherwise have thrown away. Great idea - but don’t, as some publications will encourage you to do, get carried away with it. Not everything that’s compostable should otherwise be saved for the scrap bag. Herb stems and leaves, scraps from alliums (onions, garlic, scallions), celery trimmings and leaves, mushroom stems: those will all impart nice, savory notes to your stock. Stuff to avoid? Almost everything else: some recipes and writers will tell you to save your Bell pepper cores, spicy-pepper stems and seeds, potato peels, corn cobs, apple cores, carrot peelings, broccoli and cabbage stems, you name it. Unfortunately, while those things will impart some flavor, they’ll also impart a lot of things we don’t want: bitterness, too much sweetness, silt and dirt, a gritty texture, a sulfurous stinky smell. In a lot of these instances, we get rid of them for a reason: we don’t want to eat them. As the meat/protein scraps go, you don’t have to be quite so discerning: just about anything is fine to save. Just know that more intensely and uniquely flavored bones and meat scraps - lamb, bones or scraps of smoked meats, shrimp and lobster shells, fish heads - will be detectable in your stock; better to keep those in a separate scrap bag and use them to make specialty stocks and broths when you need them, rather than including them in your all-purpose.
Acid. Even the tiniest bit of acid will bring a lot of balance to the flavor of your stock, so I always add some: usually just a tablespoon or so of apple cider vinegar, the juice of a lemon, or one or two whole Roma or similarly-sized tomatoes (any more than that will make the broth tomato-ey - not bad, just not very “all-purpose” either, and worth knowing if that’s something you’d like to avoid). Some people claim that the acid also helps to denature the collagen and to leach additional minerals from the bones, and there is some science to that, but I am suspicious that such a small amount is enough to swing the pendulum, here, any more so than the meats and vegetables (which are both more acidic than the water they’re in) already are.
» If you are in a huge rush, but are still committed to making from scratch instead of buying College Inn cans: I applaud you. It’s broth time. Adhere to the same ratio of animal weight to water volume, but use few bones; you won’t be cooking it long enough for most of the collagen to dissolve, so to use a lot is largely pointless. Follow the same instructions as for the stock/bone broth, but instead of reducing it to a faint simmer, just lower the boil: you still want some bubbles to make the surface dance. Cook it for at least an hour, and then after that for as long as you can.
Exhale. That was so long, but if you’re still here, it’s probably because you’re willing to give this a shot. And if that’s you, then I can’t overstate this: making a good, rich stock or bone broth takes a long time, it’s kind of a pain in the ass, it can be a little messy until you get the hang of it, it does require one or two pieces of special equipment, and you will never ever regret doing it. It’s so satisfying to know that once your freezer is stocked, you can make a legit, nourishing soup or gravy or whatever you want, with none of that sugar- and salt- and extract-laden business, in 20 minutes.
That’s it. We’re done. Great job; you made it.
The Recipe - for real, this time.
Basic Bone Broth/All-Purpose Stock
Makes 5-6 quarts. If you absolutely have to halve this recipe, go for it.
Ingredients
7-8 combined pounds of meat & bones (any combination is fine, although for an all-purpose stock you should skip high-fat cuts like belly, gamey proteins like lamb, and anything salted or smoked like sausages or ham)
2 medium onions (baseballs; skins are fine), roots washed of dirt, quartered
approximately half a bunch/head celery, washed and roughly chopped
two small tomatoes, halved OR juice of one lemon OR 1-2T of ACV
1T of whole black peppercorns
one head of garlic, halved crosswise (skins are fine)
Something Green: approx. two cups (not packed) of parsley, carrot tops, or lacinato/black kale
5-6 stems of fresh thyme
any additional flavorful goodies from your plant scrap bag
2 small carrots, peeled and cut in half (optional; if you must)
Equipment
one rimmed sheet-pan
one large - 12-qt plus - stock pot (if you don’t have one, they’re very affordable)
one large mixing bowl
another large pot - at least 8-qts
a spider (if you don’t have one, you can use a slotted spoon but it’ll take longer)
Method
Lightly oil and salt all of your meat and bones (don’t forget your scrap bag, and it’s totally OK to do this step from frozen) and arrange them on the sheet tray.
Roast at 450F until browned and crispy, turning them once to maximize browning - this should take 30-45 minutes at least, and if you think it needs more time, give it more time. No one makes stock because it’s speedy.
Allow the meat and bones to cool slightly before carefully transferring them to your 12qt stock pot. Scrape up any remaining brown bits from the pan (use water if necessary) and add those to the pot as well.
Add the remaining ingredients. Do not add additional salt. You’ll salt your stock when you cook with it.
Add 8 quarts of water and give everything a stir and a nudge to ensure it’s all submerged. If it’s not, you can add another quart of water if you want, but don’t worry; as things begin to soften, it’ll all settle significantly.
Place the pot over high heat and allow to come to a rolling boil, then reduce the heat to barely a simmer and cook, stirring occasionally, for 5-7 hours. See the rules and notes above for doneness cues. I like to cover my pot with an off-kilter lid to allow some, but not all, of the steam to escape; a little reduction is ok but you don’t want to let it all simmer away. Add more water if you have to.
Once the stock is done, turn off the heat and allow it to rest for an hour. Once you’ve done this a lot, you can skip this step, but until you get the choreography of straining down, do yourself the favor of waiting until it’s not piping hot.
Place the pot of stock on a countertop or table (it’ll still be warm, so use a trivet if needed) beside your largest mixing bowl. Place the other clean large pot in your sink, and place your fine mesh strainer over that.
Using the spider strainer or a slotted spoon, carefully lift all of the solids out of your stock and place them in the mixing bowl.
Once all of the large (and even small) chunks have been removed, carry the pot of stock over to the sink and carefully pour it through the mesh strainer and into the clean pot. If you’ve left too much Stuff in the stock, your mesh strainer will get overwhelmed, so take care to do a thorough job of the previous step!
You’re done! Kinda. Your stock is now done cooking and thoroughly strained, but you need to (1) remove the fat, and (2) portion it for storage. These parts are up to you, and will be determined by the tools and space you have, but here are some options:
To remove the fat, you can: skim it off with a spoon (tedious, but it works); use a fat separator (you’ll have to do this in batches, so: less tedious, but still tedious); refrigerate it all in one or a few small portions and just scrape the fat off once it has completely chilled.
Fat can be saved to use as a flavorful (read: not neutral) cooking oil or discarded.
Once the fat has been removed, you can portion the stock. I freeze it in quart or half-quart deli containers, but you could also:
Freeze some of it in ice cube trays, and then pack the cubes into a gallon bag after they’re set. From there, it’s really easy to pull out just a few to cook with as you go - you can add that collagen- and flavor-rich stock to anything.
Freeze it in 2- or 3-cup portions in quart-sized freezer bags (don’t put a full quart in there; it expands as it freezes). lay them flat to freeze solid, and once they’re hard, you can stand them up like books - they take up very little space this way.
Stock will keep in the fridge for about a week, and in the freezer indefinitely.
If your yield is somewhat less than expected, it’s ok; it just reduced more than planned. You can either add a little water now, or just package it for storage as-is and add more water to your dishes at cook-time.
As for the solids that you removed from the stock pot: those can be discarded as well, although if you view it as waste (and let me just say for the record that what you made is a crazy-nutritious whole food, perhaps even with scraps, and this is hardly a wasteful process) you do have a few options: you can very carefully pick some of the meat out (ensuring that there are no bones) and use it to make rillettes or croquettes, or - if you’re really all-in on this - you can put the whole batch of stuff back into your stock pot, add just 2 quarts of water this time, and boil it for an hour before repeating the straining process. This second-run liquid is not as flavorful as a stock/bone broth and shouldn’t be used as such, but, labeled and saved for next time, it gives you a head-start on developing flavor in your next batch of stock; just use it to replace some of the water. It’s a way of really wringing every last bit and drop of flavor and collagen and minerals from your ingredients, and it’s lovingly called a remy.