Fiona's Chicken Bone Broth

The recipe below is an edited extract from From Scratch by Fiona Weir Walmsley, published by Hardie Grant Books, rrp $48.

You can see Fiona on Sunday, November 19 at 2023's True Story festival at Coledale Community Hall. The full program for this feast of non-fiction will be revealed on the evening of Saturday, October 7, when festival director Caroline Baum will be in conversation with Tracey Spicer about her new book, Man-Made: How the Bias of the Past is Being Built into the Future. Book tickets here.

Broths and Soups for Life

I have a deep respect for broth. It feels like an old food to me. As if somehow all the research on its capacity for anti-inflammation and mineral richness and fabulous amino acids is unnecessary if we just listened to our bodies on broth. Humans have been reaching for bone broths for millennia, since we figured out how to boil bones in vessels. Broth is cheap and nutritious, and if made with properly raised bones, it’s gelatine-rich and filling and great for people with digestive issues and nourishing enough to build up bodies recovering from disease or injury. It doesn’t take much making, and these recipes should be guides only. Make it your way. Add veggies if you want to, or seaweed, or herbs.

Please just make it! Don’t throw away those bones!

If you’ve had a whole roast chicken dinner with wine and it’s late, don’t compost the bones. Chuck them in a bag in your freezer until you have enough bones for a huge potful. Broth shouldn’t be underestimated; it’s a fundamental food for life and I’m here to help encourage you to make (and drink) lots of it. Our farm crew have always known there is a two-litre jar of broth in the door of the farmhouse fridge, almost permanently, and are encouraged to see HOW GOOD IT IS at 3 pm when you’re feeling pulled towards needing something uplifting. It’s satisfying and full of minerals that will give you vigour and energy in a surprising dose.

So, make the broth. Warm it up and drink it by the cupful. Use it as the base for soups, stews, casseroles, gravy and even porridge. Freeze it in ice-cube trays and drop one into your green smoothie for a collagen kick. Pass a mug to anyone who is sniffling. Take a jar to someone who is sad or grieving or so unwell that they just can’t face food. Have it in your fridge and your freezer and see what happens if you replace one caffeinated beverage a day with a mug of bone broth. You might find yourself all evangelical about it too.

A note about bones: the reason you want to use pasture-raised or grass-fed is because the difference in the animal’s life makes a big difference to its bones. Pasture-raised animals that live with more robust nutrition throughout their lives tend to have mightily more calcium in their bones.

A good example of this is if you pick up a cooked bone of a conventionally grown chicken from the supermarket. You can usually snap it. This is not the case with a pasture-raised meat chicken. You actually cannot usually even break the bones with two hands.

This nutrition, of course, is extended to the broth made from these bones. It’s more expensive to grow chickens in small batches on pasture than it is to grow them by the thousands in large, temperature-controlled sheds. It’s less economic to give cows heaps of space and manage them in rotated paddocks than to grow them in yards feeding them grain for quicker growth.

Please pay the extra money and buy pastureraised and grass-fed, for sustainable farming, for a better quality of life for the animals being farmed, and for your own very good health.

Chicken bone broth

MAKES APPROX. 2.5 LITRES (85 FL OZ/ 10 CUPS)

• 1 chicken carcass (ideally pasture-raised)
• 1 onion, skin on and roughly chopped
• 3 garlic cloves, unpeeled
• 2 bay leaves
• 2 teaspoons sea salt
• 1 tablespoon whole black peppercorns
• 2 tablespoons apple-cider vinegar

METHOD

Take one free-range chicken carcass and put it in a stockpot. You can use the bones raw or cooked, though roasted bones tend to lend the broth some extra colour and flavour. Use all the pan scrapings, including the chicken skin, in your broth.

Add the onion (use the skin too for added colour), garlic and bay leaves. Add the salt and the black peppercorns.

Cover the bones with water and add approximately 1 tablespoon of apple-cider vinegar per litre (34 fl oz/4 cups) of water (this helps draw the gelatine and other goodness out of the bones) and bring slowly just up to the boil, then reduce the heat to a simmer. Put the lid on, slightly ajar (we usually prop the lid open with a wooden spoon on its side).

Simmer slowly for 6–8 hours for a lovely, mineral-rich broth. You need to simmer it on a low enough heat that it does not evaporate. For a lovely jelly-like finish you don’t want to be adding too much extra water as it cooks.

Strain out the vegetables and bones and store the finished broth in the fridge for up to 2 weeks. It also freezes really well for 6 months.

Discover the True Story of AI with Tracey Spicer at festival program launch

In this curtain raiser for November’s True Story Festival of non-fiction writing, award-winning journalist Tracey Spicer talks to Caroline Baum about the scary and unexpected ethical and everyday implications of AI in our lives. How have age-old prejudices around gender and race been built into robots?  What can we do to make algorithms more representative of who we are? An unmissable conversation for anyone who cares about the human race.

Join us as Tracey Spicer speaks about her new book, Man-Made: How the Bias of the Past is Being Built into the Future, and the True Story festival program is revealed. True Story is a partnership between South Coast Writers Centre, The Illawarra Flame, and Life Sentences podcast.

Save the date: Saturday, 7 October, 6-7.30pm at Coledale Community Hall.

Tickets via southcoastwriters.org/upcomingevents