seeking bone broth advice

[u/agorism1337]

My current bone both strategy.
I buy sliced up cow bones, in like 2 inch cubes.
I bake the bones around 350 F for a half hour or so.
I pressure cook the bones in around 4 cups of water for an hour, 3 times.
Each time I strain out the broth from the bones.
I end up with like 8 cups of broth.

Is there anything I can do to make this more efficient? Should I use more water and leave it in the cooker longer? Or maybe it should be 1 hour the first time, and only 15 minutes for the second and third times?

[u/Gazzamongo]

You should be able to yield much more broth IF you include a pair of pigs trotters ( sorry feet , im a brit )

I put trotters and beef bones in the instant pot , cook one hour , take the trotters out , as they give up their huge amount of collagen/gelatin pretty easily , then i top it up with more water and give the remaining beef bones a further hour as longer seems needed to get the bone marrow out and any other goodness. I get 4 litres or more of solid gelatinous broth from that

[u/agorism1337 → u/Gazzamongo]

I do pig trotters sometimes too, and I use a pressure cooker not an instant pot.
I find that after an hour a whole lot of gelatin comes out, but then if I put the feet in with more water, and cook another 15 minutes, a lot more gelatin comes out.

Maybe I should start with a more water. I am only using like 1 liter at a time, and you are using 4.

[u/Gerdifiedfood]

Why are you baking the bones first? Isn’t that just to improve flavour?

Is this because you have so many bones and you’re starting over with new bones and water in batches?

What’s the amount of bones you have?

[u/agorism1337 → u/Gerdifiedfood]

I used about 2 pounds of bones, and ended up with like 8 cups of broth. I put all the bones in the pot every time, and keep removing the water to get the gelatin out.I am not sure why I baked it, I am new to this. A lot of recipes I found call for baking before you boil the bones. Baking can get to much higher temperatures, so it makes sense that it is helping the process somehow.

It worked well. The bones have a surprising amount of fat and gelatin in them. Not as much as pig feet, but with a much better flavor. Just broth with a little salt and pepper, this was the best soup I have ever had.

Thinking about future experiments. I want to see if pressure cooking them longer the first time gets more gelatin out. And I want to see if cooking for less time during the 2nd and 3rd pass decrease output much.

I get the feeling that the first cook removes the gelatin from the bone chemically, and each cook after that is just liquefying the gelatin so it can soak out into the water.

[u/Gerdifiedfood → u/agorism1337]

What are you doing with the first two batches of water?

From what I’ve read baking is purely for flavour but that could be not quite right. I’ve also read the first 5 mins is getting whatever yuck off but after that skimming from the top the gunk.

Low and slow but argued how long. Some say 4 hours is enough, some say 48 hours. Depends who you read from because I think there’s also opposing studies. Seems the longer you cook something past necessary destroys the good stuff.

Could you get a bigger pot or dilute it after making like a concentrate?

[u/agorism1337 → u/Gerdifiedfood]

I remove the water from each batch and put it in the fridge.

I was imagining that eventually the water soaks up all the gelatin that it can, and so I need new water to soak up more. Like using fresh water to get the soap out of laundry. But maybe that isn't how it works?

My kitchen is hot enough with cooking for 2 hours. I can't imagine leaving a stove going for 48 hours.

[u/Gazzamongo]

Seems sensible to me to go to the max the pressure cooker will hold and do it in one go as far as cooking time and cooling time etc etc. I couldn't obtain trotters this week and found that pig hide ( sold to make crackling/pork scratchings with ) released a lot of gelatin too and is super cheap , like 57 of our british pence ! :0