How to Make Beef Stock

We use a lot of chicken stock around here but that doesn’t mean it’s superior to other kinds of stock. We’ve recently been working on adding soup recipes that are especially delicious with beef stock.

Whatever meat you use, remember it should be 80% meat and 20% bone with a joint. Depending on your cut, you might need to add additional meat to fulfill these ratios.

Meat stock is a pillar in healing a leaky gut but this rich food is beneficial to anyone. It provides large amounts of the immune system’s favorite foods, is very easy to digest, and is a great base to modify for other healing and nutritious recipes.  

Meat stock is meant to be a meal in itself. It’s short cooking time allows the meat to remain edible while still enriching stock with easy to absorb nutrients. This is the perfect thing to eat anytime you are feeling ill or stressed or “can’t get filled up” hungry. These are some of the reasons meat stock is such an important part of the healing process of the GAPS Diet. Any time you are consuming meat stock on a regular basis, your body will be receiving the healing benefit.

Meat stock can be made into a soup or simply drunk on its own as a hot beverage with a meal. You can also poach a couple eggs in your stock for a rich breakfast. Stock can also be used to cook rice or other soaked grains to increase their digestibility and nutritional content. In short, this should be considered a staple to have in your kitchen at all times, either in the fridge or the freezer.

There are a variety of ways you can skim the scum off the top of your stock. I usually use a slotted spoon but you can also use a mesh scum skimmer, a slotted spoon, a small strainer, or a large soup spoon.

Skimming the scum off the top is where you can tell the quality of your meat. If your meat is poor quality, had a lot of hormones or was poorly processed, you’ll get scum that’s heavy, grey and unappetizing. If you have a good quality meat, you will have a small amount of light almost white colored scum that appears as a lighter foam. This is also where you can tell if your meat has gone bad at this point.

You can store your stock in the fridge or the freezer, depending on how quickly you’ll consume the batch.

A NOTE ABOUT MEAT STOCK AND THE GAPS INTRO DIET:

When Dr. Natasha Campbell talks about meat in stage 1, she’s referring to eating primarily the gelatinous meats like skin, joints and connective tissue. When meat is added on Stage 2, she means the muscle eats, the only thing we Americans consider to be meat. Eating a lot of muscle meat can be constipating so if this is your issue, be sure to eat every last bit of the skin and joints.

Ingredients for Beef Stock:

• Beef. I am using 3 ½ lbs of beef short ribs. Whatever meat you use, remember it should be 80% meat and 20% bone with a joint. Depending on your cut, you might need to add additional meat to fulfill these ratios.

• Small handful of peppercorns

• 2 Bay Leaves

• Filtered Water

Directions for Beef Stock:

Cut your beef ribs apart so that each rib is separated.

Add to a pot and fill with filtered water.

Add peppercorns whole and bay leaves to the pot.

If you are using dry herbs and are on Intro GAPS, pre-stage 4, put your herbs in a reusable herb or tea infuser or muslin pouch for easy removal. This is not necessary if you are using fresh herbs.

Turn pot up to high to bring to a boil. Skim the scum off the top of your pot.

Turn heat down lower to a simmer. Simmer beef stock for 3-5 hours. 

Strain the beef stock using a large mesh strainer and a funnel or large measuring cup with a lip.

Place in jars or a large bowl and allow to cool completely before placing in the fridge or freezer.

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How to Calm the Flavor of Beef Liver

Especially in today’s toxic and stressful world, it’s important to be eating organ meats, including liver. I did not grow up eating organs. Just like most people, I was disgusted at the thought of eating liver. I didn’t make much effort to eat organ meat, especially livers. I did try to use a chicken liver in most pots of stock that I made. Over time, I have come to enjoy the taste of organ meats. Although, I still only like liver prepared certain ways.

It’s important to get grass-fed liver from healthy animals. You can tell the health of your liver by looking at it! It should be a dark red color. Unhealthy livers will be a pale, almost brown color. That shows a liver that’s aged or from an unhealthy animal and should not be used. It should be a robust red and not mushy.

A well prepared liver is the key to enjoying it. Some livers, like chicken livers, are mild enough to be cooked without any additional preparation. But beef liver, being from a larger animal, can be quite strong in flavor. There are ways however to diminish the strength of liver flavor by soaking it in whole milk (raw preferred!), apple cider vinegar, or lemon juice.

For many recipes, you may decide to thinly slice your liver before soaking it. You need probably 1/8 to 1/4 cup of acid. You want to soak the liver for 30 to 90 minutes. The acid begins to denature the proteins which improves the texture and taste. But if you leave your liver for too long in the acid, it will start to “overcook” the liver, creating an undesirable texture.

If you remove the filament from around your liver, the edges won’t curl when you cook it! If you go to a butcher, you can ask them to remove it, or you can remove it yourself.

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Now that you’ve chosen your liver, thaw it to room temperature. Slice if desired.

Place your liver in a bowl with filtered water. Add 4-8 tablespoons of apple cider vinegar, lemon juice, or whole milk (raw preferred.) Allow to soak for anywhere from 30 minutes to 2 hours. The time you soak is determined by the thickness of your slices and your texture preferences.

After soaking the liver for your desired time, you can remove it and cut it up to prepare it per your recipe. As you can see from the picture below, I did not soak this long enough for the acid to permeate the entire liver. This will lead to a slightly stronger liver taste. This liver was blended in a food processor and added to ground hamburger to make meatballs so the stronger taste was okay.

Do you have any tips or tricks about how you enjoy liver? Share what you know below!

What to do with Chicken on the GAPS Diet

Chicken is such a versatile and easy to meat to cook! It’s a mild meat so it can be easily adapted to many different recipes and flavors.

Purchase the highest quality meat you can afford! For me, this means buying chickens directly from farmers whenever possible. If I buy a chicken from a store, I buy organic and antibiotic free. And make sure you get the organs whenever possible! If you have the space, time and allowance from your city, consider raising your own chickens. I loved raising chickens, both for the fresh eggs and the delicious meat. I knew exactly where my food was coming from - and everything that had gone into it!

To help your budget, make sure you’re using as much of your chicken as possible. Chicken feet and gizzards can be added to stocks. The skin and joint cartilage can be blended in a stock. Liver can be made into pate. And the chicken heart is my favorite treat!

Below are some of my favorite recipes for chicken!

Chicken Stock

Meat stock can be made into a soup or simply drunk on its own as a hot beverage with a meal. You can also poach a couple eggs in your stock for a rich breakfast. Stock can also be used to cook rice or other soaked grains to increase their digestibility and nutritional content. In short, this should be considered a staple to have in your kitchen at all times, either in the fridge or the freezer.

Gluten Free, Dairy Free, Egg Free

Whole Roasted Chicken with Salt

This is a very simple recipe that makes a whole, juicy roasted chicken. It takes just two simple ingredients and is a very hands off recipe.

Gluten Free, Dairy Free, Egg Free

Honey Roasted Chicken

Roasting a chicken is a great and simple way to make a meal. This particular roasting recipe requires a little more attention than others, as you need to baste and adjust the temperature often, but it's definitely worth it!

Gluten Free, Dairy Free, Egg Free

Chicken Tortilla Soup

This is a good GAPS soup because of all of the sour cream. It wasn't too spicy, and it's different than plain meat stock that you typically eat on Stage 1. There are many different ways to make it, so it's also easy to switch up to match your tastes.

Gluten Free, Dairy Free, Egg Free

Creamy Garlic Chicken Soup

Because you immersion blend the vegetables into the stock, this is a great recipe to also blend in the the joint cartilage, skin and any of the other parts of the chicken that you may be tempted to throw away. I separate the chicken into three parts usually - bones, chicken meat, and everything else.

Gluten Free, Dairy Free, Egg Free

Creamy Chicken Pot Pie Soup

The key to this soup being reminiscent of a pot pie is to cut the vegetables into bite size pieces and make a consistency that’s more like a stew than a soup. Included in this recipe are a few tricks to thicken the soup so it more closely resembles the gravy that we associate with chicken pot pie.

Gluten Free, Dairy Free, Egg Free

10 Ways to Consume Meat Stock

Meat stock is one of the pillars of a healthy gut diet. While bone broth is getting a lot of press lately, I don’t recommend it for most people. (Learn more about why I recommend meat stock over bone broth here.) Meat stock really gets a gold medal as a great nutrient dense food that can boost your immunity, help with healing allergies, and is easy to digest, especially for those with a leaky gut. Even better, meat stock is meant to be a meal all on it’s own! You can make meat stock with any meat, though I think chicken meat stock is the easiest beginner stock.

Consuming meat stock is a habit I encourage my clients to do throughout the day because of it’s great health benefits. There are many ways to consume meat stock and some creative ways so that you don’t get bored with consuming meat stock frequently. Here’s a few of my favorites!

Vary Your Meat Stock Recipe

Try adding different spices and herbs to your meat stock recipe when you cook it. This will change the taste to keep it interesting. You can also vary the vegetables and aromatics that you add - or add no aromatics like onions and your dogs can consume your meat stock as well!

Have It Warm

Heated stock is a great warming beverage, especially on cool winter mornings. Keeping heated stock in a mug next to you will allow you to drink it alongside your morning meal.

If you’re on the go, keep your heated stock in a thermos so it stays warm throughout the day. Then you can sip on it just like a tea or coffee.

Eat It Cold

Drinking cold stock is very refreshing on a hot summer day!

If your stock gets a good gel at the top, you can simply pop the gel off the top of your stock and eat it cold like a meat jelly.

Use Meat Stock as a Base

Meat stock makes an excellent base for different soups and other recipes. I’ve been partial to this chicken tortilla soup recipe recently but you can make it into any variety of soup that sounds delicious.

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Add an Egg (or Two)

You can poach eggs in warm stock for a delicious breakfast. Use the stock as a replacement for the water that you would normally poach eggs in.

Or, break and stir a few egg yolks only into warm stock. This will create a cheesy tasting drink that is delicious.

Consume Meat Stock on the Go

Traveling can bring up a whole host of stressors and traveling on the GAPS Diet means paying closer attention to your food. Since meat stock is one of the pillars of the GAPS Diet, it’s important to factor it into your travel plans. There’s a few different ways to consume meat stock on the go, from dehydrating it to making it when you get there.

What are your favorite ways to consume meat stock? If you have other ideas, share them in the comments below!

Chicken Stock Recipe

Meat stock is a pillar in healing a leaky gut but this rich food is beneficial to anyone. It provides large amounts of the immune system’s favorite foods, is very easy to digest, and is a great base to modify for other healing and nutritious recipes.  

Meat stock is meant to be a meal in itself. It’s short cooking time allows the meat to remain edible while still enriching stock with easy to absorb nutrients. This is the perfect thing to eat anytime you are feeling ill or stressed or “can’t get filled up” hungry. These are some of the reasons meat stock is such an important part of the healing process of the GAPS Diet. Any time you are consuming meat stock on a regular basis, your body will be receiving the healing benefit.

Meat stock can be made into a soup or simply drunk on its own as a hot beverage with a meal. You can also poach a couple eggs in your stock for a rich breakfast. Stock can also be used to cook rice or other soaked grains to increase their digestibility and nutritional content. In short, this should be considered a staple to have in your kitchen at all times, either in the fridge or the freezer.

This recipe is stock without aromatics. I prefer stock this way currently because it’s a neutral base ingredient that can be changed in any way for any other recipe. Making stock this way, you can also feed your dog the extra chicken meat because the base doesn’t have onions. Make sure you debone the chicken before giving to your dog; they should not have chicken bones.

You’ll notice I set aside the breasts of the chicken. Good stock should be 80% meat and 20% bone with a joint. Using a whole chicken, this ratio is fulfilled without needed the breasts. You can use the breasts in other recipes or add to the soup later for more tender meat.

There are a variety of ways you can skim the scum off the top of your stock. I usually use a slotted spoon but you can also use a mesh scum skimmer, a slotted spoon, a small strainer, or a large soup spoon.

Skimming the scum off the top is where you can tell the quality of your meat. If your meat is poor quality, had a lot of hormones or was poorly processed, you’ll get scum that’s heavy, grey and unappetizing. If you have a good quality chicken, you will have a small amount of light almost white colored scum that appears as a lighter foam. This is also where you can tell if your meat has gone bad at this point. If your chicken is not good, you will smell an obvious sulfur smell.

You can store your stock in the fridge or the freezer, depending on how quickly you’ll consume the batch.

A note about Meat Stock and the GAPS Intro Diet:

When Dr. Natasha Campbell talks about meat in stage 1, she’s referring to eating primarily the gelatinous meats like skin, joints and connective tissue. When meat is added on Stage 2, she means the muscle meats, the only thing we Americans consider to be meat. Eating a lot of muscle meat can be constipating so if this is your issue, be sure to eat every last bit of the skin and joints.

Fill large stock pot with water.

Remove chicken from package and remove giblets from interior. Rinse chicken.

Cut chicken into 8 pieces, joints exposed. First, remove the wings at the base of the joint.

Slice the drumsticks, pop the joint out of the meat and finish slicing off the drumstick.

Slice down the center of the bird, exposing the back. Slice the back off.

With the chest cavity down, slice to the right of the breast bone, removing one breast and then the other.

Pull the tenders off the breast (the underside of the breast) and remove the skin from the breast. Set the breasts aside for a different recipe.

Optionally, seperate the drumstick from the thigh.

This is how your chicken should look once you've cut it into the pieces.

Place pieces of chicken into the water. First, the back, then breastbone, then wings, thighs, then the drumsticks. Add in all giblets and extra skin from breasts.

Meat should be covered with about two inches of water. Here I am measuring the water level with my finger.

Bring to a boil. It usually takes 10-15 minutes to bring to a boil.

Skim the scum off the top using a mesh scum skimmer, a slotted spoon or a large soup spoon. Try to leave as much fat as you can in the pot.

If you miss skimming the scum, your meat stock is fine. The scum is simply impurities. Removing them improves the overall taste of your meat stock but leaving them is not harmful.

Reduce your heat and leave the pot at a simmer for 1 - 1 ½ hours.

Longer simmering will make the meat tasteless. Longer than 8 hours causes the histamine amounts to be higher which can cause nerve irritation symptoms in people with a leaky gut.

Simmering means movement in the water and very little movement on the surface.

Remove the whole pieces of chicken onto a platter. I use a strainer to make it easier.

Allow the chicken pieces to cool.

Debone the chicken chunks.

When you find the heart - SCORE! Eat it! This is my reward to myself for deboning the chicken.

Make sure you remove only the bones! Everything else is delicious and healthy for you. This photo shows all that should be left after you have deboned the chicken.

Toss the bones or freeze them for bone broth at a later time. I don’t like bone broth so I toss them.

Once stock has cooled slightly, pour into jars or use immediately for soup, like this GAPS Legal Chicken Tortilla Soup.

If you’d like to freeze your stock, wait for it to cool to room temperature. This inhibits bacteria growth.

Then, to cool completely, store in the fridge.

Once your stock has completely cooled, add to a BPA free freezer bag. Lay inside a container to shape your bag. Freeze solid.

Do this one bag at a time!

After deboning the chicken, sift through the meat picking out all the skin and organ meat.

Add these back to your stock and blend them with an immersion blender or blender.

It will get frothy! Don’t be alarmed!

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Chicken Stock

Author: Amy Mihaly, Be Well Clinic

prep time: cook time: total time:

ingredients:

• Filtered Water
• 1 Whole Chicken

instructions:

How to cook Chicken Stock

1. Fill large stock pot with water.
2. Remove chicken from package and remove giblets from interior. Rinse chicken.
3. Cut chicken into 8 pieces, joints exposed. First, remove the wings at the base of the joint.
4. Slice the drumsticks, pop the joint out of the meat and finish slicing off the drumstick.
5. Slice down the center of the bird, exposing the back. Slice the back off.
6. With the chest cavity down, slice to the right of the breast bone, removing one breast and then the other.
7. Pull the tenders off the breast (the underside of the breast) and remove the skin from the breast. Set the breasts aside for a different recipe.
8. Optionally, separate the drumstick from the thigh.
9. This is how your chicken should look once you've cut it into the pieces.
10. Place pieces of chicken into the water. First, the back, then breastbone, then wings, thighs, then the drumsticks. Add in all giblets and extra skin from breasts.
11. Meat should be covered with about two inches of water. Here I am measuring the water level with my finger.
12. Bring to a boil. It usually takes 10-15 minutes to bring to a boil.
13. Skim the scum off the top using a mesh scum skimmer, a slotted spoon or a large soup spoon. Try to leave as much fat as you can in the pot.
14. If you miss skimming the scum, your meat stock is fine. The scum is simply impurities. Removing them improves the overall taste of your meat stock but leaving them is not harmful.
15. Reduce your heat and leave the pot at a simmer for 1 - 1 ½ hours.
16. Longer simmering will make the meat tasteless. Longer than 8 hours causes the histamine amounts to be higher which can cause nerve irritation symptoms in people with a leaky gut.
17. Simmering means movement in the water and very little movement on the surface.
18. Remove the whole pieces of chicken onto a platter. I use a strainer to make it easier.
19. Allow the chicken pieces to cool.
20. Debone the chicken chunks.
21. When you find the heart - SCORE! Eat it! This is my reward to myself for deboning the chicken.
22. Make sure you remove only the bones! Everything else is delicious and healthy for you. This photo shows all that should be left after you have deboned the chicken.
23. Toss the bones or freeze them for bone broth at a later time. I don’t like bone broth so I toss them.
24. Once stock has cooled slightly, pour into jars or use immediately for soup, like this GAPS Legal Chicken Tortilla Soup.
25. If you’d like to freeze your stock, wait for it to cool to room temperature. This inhibits bacteria growth.
26. Then, to cool completely, store in the fridge.
27. Once your stock has completely cooled, add to a BPA free freezer bag. Lay inside a container to shape your bag. Freeze solid.
28. Do this one bag at a time!
29. After deboning the chicken, sift through the meat picking out all the skin and organ meat.
30. Add these back to your stock and blend them with an immersion blender or blender.
31. It will get frothy! Don’t be alarmed!

Created using The Recipes Generator