Waste Not Freezer Space: Bone Broth Bouillon Cubes

When you buy a quarter of beef, you end up with several packages of soup bones. (And if you ask, the butcher will probably inundate you with a ton more beef bones than you've ever dreamed of, because if nobody takes them he has to pay the renderer to discard them for him.) Now, if you just consider them to be part of the package of beef, they can sit in your freezer alongside the stew cubes, patiently awaiting the day when you'll need to make beef soup. This is a very legitimate way to keep them. Unless...

Unless you've had your beef in the freezer for about three months and you're about to have to add half a pig to the freezer as well. Or unless your brother-in-law is butchering 50 chickens next weekend and promised to give you 5 if you come and help with the dirty work. Or unless you just got back from the garden, panicking with the realization that the sweet corn must be harvested now and the new gasket for the pressure canner hasn't arrived in the mail yet, which means it has to go (you guessed it) in the freezer. Sigh.


If any of these things sound like plausible scenarios to you, there is hope. Dig out all the beef bones and put them in the fridge to thaw (if it's strictly preferable given the state of your kitchen/need to cut a lot of corn off the cob; if you don't want to thaw them you really needn't.) When you're ready, do the following things and you will be rewarded with shelf stable bone broth bouillon, ready to drop into literally any hot liquid for instant nourishing goodness!

My story differs from the above scenario in that I intentionally went to the butcher and obtained 5 grocery bags' worth of beef bones. But your story will look much the same, however you source the bones.

First, I roasted the bones.

This will give the final product a meatier flavor. The goal isn't to "cook" the bones, just to brown up their exterior, so I just kind of piled them any which way. (They will sweat so deeper pans are better if you don't want meat juices all over your oven!)

I put five grocery bag's worth of bones in a five gallon pot. As you can see, it's full. I poured three gallons of water over them. As you can see, they're almost covered. (As they boil they'll get less integrity and the top ones will be able to be pushed down below the surface.) I used high heat to bring the pot to a boil, then reduced it to the lowest temperature that would keep the pan simmering and cooked, stirring occasionally, for about 24 hours. The bones sank in the pot, but the water also slowly began to evaporate, so the level of bones in the water stayed about the same. 

 I skimmed fat a couple of times and got about this much (that's a 3 cup jar); the bulk of the fat I removed when the boiling process was done: I removed most of the bones with tongs to a large bowl, allowed the broth to cool until it congealed (it's already cooked down by about 1/6th, since the volume has gone from 3 gallons to 2.5), and cracked and picked at the hardened fat on the surface. I put it all in jars as it was; if I had wanted to keep it long term I would have put it in a sauce pan and carefully completed the rendering process, but I knew I could use up a quart and a half of tallow in a matter of a few weeks.  

The fatless broth I then heated to boiling, then poured it through a nice clean pillowcase into a smaller pan to continue cooking down. (You'll wish the broth was boiling when you started pouring because as it cools it gets thicker, and it takes a surprisingly long time to get it all through the pillowcase! I lined a colander with the pillowcase for most of the process, placed the colander over the intended pan, and kept adding hot broth until it had all been strained.)

The broth is getting close to the end of cooking down! I've had strained broth boiling for about 4 hours at this point. The surface looks wrinkly, but there's still a lot of steam--a sign that there's still water coming out. At this point you want to watch it, though, because it will scorch pretty easily.

After a couple more hours, we have this! Approximately 1 quart of broth, enough to make a very manageable layer in the bottom of my silicone baking pan. There's still some steam, but that's ok, it's so thick it really wants to congeal. 

Waste not, people! Do you see the skin of congealed broth on the inside of that pan? Do. Not. Wash. That. Pan. That's enough to make about a quart of broth! Would you dump a quart of broth down the drain? Of course not, you're reading the Waste-Not Blog! No. Either add a quart of water, heat and stir until the pan is clean, and put it in a quart jar in the fridge for next time you need a quart of broth; or do like me and dump in a couple cups of soaked beans and a quart of water and just use the pan to make some meaty beany goodness. 

It's cooled and congealed into a disc of heavily concentrated bone broth goodness. Now for my favorite picture of all time.

Would you look at that!? You could see your face in it. It's bone broth bouillon and I laid it on the counter and it's reflecting my rosemary in its solid surface. Can you even? I can't. I'm sorry. Somebody else is going to have to because I just can't.

Sorry. Where were we?

Here's my knife cutting strips of the bouillon disc.

And here's my knife again, cutting the strips into cubes (give or take, try not to get picky here.) 

You'll get little bouillon flakes like these as you're cutting. I just added them to the beans I was cooking in the broth pot; each of those flakes is enough to make about an ounce of broth, so again, don't throw them away! Would you cry if you spilled an ounce of real, nutritious bone broth? I would. (I cry a lot.) Anyway, don't throw out the little flakes of bouillon is all I'm saying. 

I put them on a plate. This part is debatable, but here's my reasoning: most people advise that you put them in the dehydrator at this point, but with the heat turned off so it's just air drying because it's so easy to scorch. And my brain got to thinking, I have no dehydrator, and what is a dehydrator without the heat? Why, it's a box with a fan in it. I have a fan, and I run it all night in my bedroom every night to keep the air circulating and make white noise to help the baby sleep. So I put the plate of bouillon cubes in front of the box fan overnight. (The cat was locked up and the mice can't reach the seat of the chair I used.) It took a few nights, removing cubes to a quart jar as they hardened, until they were all hard (barely gummy at all when squeezed) and ready to keep indefinitely in a quart jar on the counter, like so: 

You guys, that's 3 gallons of broth. (OK, it's 2 1/2 because I impatiently used a few cubes already.)  But still, it all fits in that quart jar. And it doesn't grow mold or any nasties because they all require moisture to live and it's got close to 0 moisture. It's like gummy bears except with no sugar and even less water and it tastes like beefy cheese. (What? I had to find out for science.)

Finally, you don't need beef bones to do this; you could do it with the broth from your turkey carcass from thanksgiving, or with a big old bag of chicken backs and/or feet, or the bones from your husband's deer, or virtually anything you generally use to make large volumes of broth. So forget about pressure canning bone broth; forget about gallon freezer bags leaking all the broth into your sink as they thaw, or broken glass jars of broth in your freezer leaving little deadly shards everywhere. Go ahead and make delicious bone broth bouillon and find out how easy it can be to sneak broth into your daily diet!