Without a healthy gut, your body will not be able to properly digest and absorb vital vitamins and minerals. Even if you are eating wholesome and nourishing foods, you may not be reaping all the benefits. A good chicken broth is an excellent foundation to help heal, soothe and protect your gut.
By incorporating broth making into your routine, you'll not only waste less food and get better value from your ingredients, by using up every last morsel, but you'll also create a store cupboard of delicious bases to create healthy, quick meals.
A good broth is rich in gelatine and collagen, while you can find some of this in the chicken carcass, there is oodles contained within chicken feet, necks and wings. We would always recommend including a variety of bones within your broth for the best results.
It goes without saying, to produce the healthiest, tastiest broth you must use ingredients from healthy animals. Only properly free-ranging birds will build up real collagen, marrow and gelatine by forming a strong carcass from all their running around. Free-ranging birds will also eat a high proportion of forage, picking up vitamins and minerals from a varied diet, and access to long periods of sunlight create superior levels of CLA. UV light also suppresses bad bacteria, allowing the birds to develop natural immunity which is stored within the memory bank of their marrow.
How To Make a Simple Chicken Broth
Depending on what you plan to do with your broth will give you an idea of the cooking time. If you are looking to make a simple base for another meal such as a soup a 2 hour cooking time will suffice. If your intent is to make a nutritious sipping broth you'll need to aim for at least 4 hours of simmering. For a super intense gelatine, reminiscent of a jellied stock cube you'll need to cook your broth for 8-12 hours.
Broths can be pepped up with other added ingredients such as; vegetables, cider vinegar, spices like Turmeric, or garden herbs, however, we prefer to keep ours clean and simple and layer flavours as a secondary step, depending on our desired finished dish.
