How To Can Bone Broth

This recipe will make homemade chicken broth, homemade beef broth, homemade turkey broth, homemade pork broth, or homemade bone broth! This is the best broth recipe because it is interchangeable with whatever carcass and bones you decide to use. You can follow along with my How To Can Bone Broth Step by Step Guide video here.

Making homemade broth is EASY! Not only is broth from scratch easy to make, it is healthy and delicious. No more relying on store bought broths that have “chicken flavoring” instead of the real thing—chicken, or beef, or vegetables! Once you make broth in your kitchen, there is no going back.

What is broth?

Broth is a liquid that has been created from water which meat, vegetables (or both) have simmered in for a period of time. It can be used in stews, soups, rice, and to make gravies. I use it all the time in a wide variety of my recipes!

I use to always keep boxed Walmart broth in my pantry. Recently, I found the last box of it stowed in the back of my pantry and decided I would use it up for a recipe. I had already began canning my own homemade broth from scratch by then, but I wanted to use what I had. It was an organic chicken broth, but I looked at the ingredients and to my surprise, there was no chicken! It was chicken flavoring. I ended up not using it, and decided to make a massive batch of canned bone broth from scratch the next day to stock up the pantry.

What is bone broth?

Bone broth is a broth that has had bones simmered in it to extract the nutrients from within the marrow of the bones. I will simmer my bone broth for 24 hours or until the bones will squish together and fall apart at the ends.

What are the health benefits of bone broth?

From the bones themselves, you will extract calcium and phosphorous from the inner marrow. The nutrient content will depend on the quality of the bones—you will want pasture raised, organic bones. If you have general, run of the mill bones, you will most likely be slurping down some pesticides and other junk that seeped into the bones over the course of the animals life.

How do you make bone broth?

The best way to make homemade bone broth is to save the scraps of vegetables over time. This will include: peelings of garlic, peelings of onions, carrot chunks, ends of green onions, okra, and pretty much any vegetable you create scraps from. I save my vegetable scraps in a Ziploc bag in the freezer. When the bag fills up, I know it is time to make some broth or bone broth!

The easiest way to collect bones for bone broth is to save bones from the meat you consume. For example, I buy whole chickens. I cook these whole chickens in my Instant Pot, then I carve out the chicken meat. The carcass goes into another Ziploc bag in the freezer to save to make bone broth. After Thanksgiving, do not throw that turkey carcass! Save it to make bone broth.

When you have enough vegetables and bones, you simply toss the bones and vegetables into a crockpot or a roaster for twenty four hours with a splash of apple cider vinegar and you will have broth at the end! I have found that my 22 qt. roaster will fill 13 qt. canning jars.

If you don’t want to can up the broth and just want to store it in your fridge for short term use, I would suggest making broth in a smaller crockpot than in a roaster because you will have less broth. Using a roaster will overwhelm you with broth on-hand if you are not canning it.

How do you can bone broth?

I can all of my bone broth, so I can always have homemade broth on hand for any recipes that calls for a broth! You will need to have a pressure canner—this is the one I use. Because this is a low acid food with the vegetables and the meat, it needs to be pressure canned. You cannot use a water bath canner for this recipe!

After the broth is finished cooking, you will ladle it into a liquid fat separator covered with a cheese cloth to get out any of the fragments then pour the broth into the jar and leave a 1in. headspace. You don’t want to be canning fat, so try to keep out as much fat as possible, hence the liquid fat separator. Wipe the rims of the canning jar with vinegar and put on the lid, finger tight.

Place the jars in the prepared canner and follow the instructions for your canner to process the bone broth correctly. Quarts will be canned for 25 minutes and pints will be canned for 20 minutes with your appropriate weight.

What does bone broth taste like?

To me, it tastes like stronger and tastier broth than you get at the store. It is packed full of fresh flavors from scraps from your own kitchen and not bio-engineered in some remote lab. Canned, bone broth will last for years on your pantry shelf!

Let’s get canning!