HOW TO MAKE HOMEMADE BONE BROTH IN THE INSTANT POT | Gut Healing + Immune Boosting Animal Stock

Hi everyone, my name is Megan. Welcome back to my channel. Today I'm going to teach you how to make bone broth in your instant pot. We absolutely love bone broth in our home. It is an absolute staple in my kitchen. I use it all the time. I use it in cooking and soups. We just like to drink it. It's extremely healing for your gut. It boosts your immune system. It just has so many amazing benefits and so it's really important to me to always have some bone broth on hand especially now that my daughter is starting to eat solids. I have been giving her bone broth almost every day since she started eating solids. It's important to me that she has the best start possible and that her gut is just really healthy and so all of us eat bone broth almost every day and it's become so much easier, so much more easier, so much easier. I don't know. It's way easier to be able to eat this every day when you make it in the instant pot because it just goes so so much faster. For years I've made this on the stovetop and it takes anywhere from 24 hours to three days of boiling in a big stock pot that takes up at least two burners on my stove because the pot's so big and because I make all of our meals from scratch I need my stovetop. I need to be able to have access to it for making other meals and so this is just the perfect way to not be taking up my stovetop and it just goes so much faster anyway. You can buy bone broth in the store but it's just not the same. It doesn't have the health benefits. They don't make it the same way that you can at home. Bone broth from the store is essentially just salty water. The best way to tell whether or not bone broth is real good bone broth is when you put it in the refrigerator and it gels and that's from cooking it long enough with the right water to bone ratio that it's able to pull the gelatin out of the bones and that's the really good stuff that we want to have in our bone broth. Here's a batch that I made yesterday and you can see that it's like very thick and gelatin-like. See that is some real bone broth. This is what you're aiming for. This is super healthy and our family is gonna love eating this. So I actually just got a quarter of a steer and they gave me all the bones at once and they didn't freeze them so I have been making bone broth for the last two days like crazy. So far I have about three gallons of it I think and I have a long ways to go so I figured that I would go ahead and show you guys this whole process while I'm making one of the batches since I am like gonna be all about bone broth for the next few days. So the other reason that I love bone broth is that it utilizes a part of the animal that normally gets wasted. Most people have no idea what to do with animal bones. I try to use every single part of the animal that I possibly can and the bones are just so fabulous. They make such a healthy thing for you to eat and so it's just terrible that so many bones go to waste. So I'm really passionate about not wasting any part of the animal. We use all the fat and render it to make lard and we use all the meat and the organs and so this just makes me so happy that I'm able to use these bones and not let them go to waste. If you guys are interested in learning more about bone broth I will link a really good article down below that has more info on all the health benefits and more of the background on bone broth. So I'll link that below for you guys if you're interested but let's get right into this recipe. So I have a box of bones here. I actually have, I'm still in the first box. I have two more boxes that are bigger than that that still have bones in them that I need to make. So I'm, I have a lot of bone broth to make. So I'm just going to put some of those bones into the instant pot insert. This insert is actually still dirty from making bone broth for the last two days and I'm not going to wash in between. There's just really no reason to. One awesome thing that I love doing is if you have just like made soup or just cooked like a whole chicken and you leave all the bones in there and then you just make bone broth right away and the pot never has to get washed. So the two most common kinds of bones that you would use for this are beef bones and chicken bones. But I'm not, we're not really picky about our bone broth and I'll use like a combination of both of those. I also use pork bones. I'll use lamb bones and deer bones. Just pretty much any animal you can use the bones and these batches are going to be only beef bones but normally I'm just throwing a bunch of random bones in there like I put in like pork neck bones and just random bones that I've saved from making roasts and different things so you really don't have to be too picky about having it separated by animal unless you really care about that sort of thing. So I'm just going to fill this a little over halfway with these bones. I don't want it to reach the pressure cook max line and then I'm going to go fill this up with water until it's about an inch above where the bones are. If you start finding that you're having trouble with it gelling properly it could be that your water to bone ratio is off and you just need to adjust it a little bit but normally I put bones in there till it's just above half full bones and then I fill with water up to the max pressure cook line and that seems to be like a perfect ratio and my bone broth always gels. So all, that's actually all you absolutely need to make this is water and bones but the other secret ingredient that I always add every time is a couple tablespoons of apple cider vinegar and this really helps to draw all the gelatin out of the bones and all the amazing qualities that are in there and so I always add just a couple tablespoons of this. I generally just don't even measure I just put a splash in there but for this size of pot it's probably around two to three tablespoons. I make sure that I use raw apple cider vinegar and I've loved how it's been turning out since I started using that but the apple cider vinegar is optional if you don't have it or you just don't feel like adding it. The other ingredient that is also optional that I am not going to add this time are vegetable scraps and fresh herbs. Whenever I make bone broth during the summer or spring I always go out to my garden and pick a bunch of fresh herbs like oregano and sage and tarragon and I put some herbs in there. You can also save potato peelings from a dinner you're making just I like to save potato peelings and put them in a bag in the freezer. Same thing with carrot peelings or onion peelings the ends of the onions just pretty much any vegetable that you're using to make dinner. Whatever scraps you have it's a great idea to put that in a ziploc bag and just put it in the freezer until you're going to make this and then just add a little bit of those vegetables to this pot and it'll just pull all the benefits from the vegetables as well and just really increase the flavor of this. I am out of vegetable scraps because I've been making so much bone broth lately so I'm just going to do just simplified version which is bones and water and apple cider vinegar. So the next thing I'm going to do is I'm going to take it over to my instant pot and I'm going to put the insert in there. I'm going to close the lid make sure that the vent is set to sealing and then I'm going to press the soup broth button and I'm going to set it for 120 minutes or two hours. Some instant pots get set for minutes and so you would set it for 120 minutes. Mine sets for hours and minutes so I set it for two hours and then I'm going to run that cycle through three times and now the reason that I do it three times instead of just setting for the whole time is because that setting on the instant pot will only go up to four hours max and you want it to go for six hours. So I found it's just easier to set it for two hour increments and then just come back when when it's done with its cycle and just press the start button again. I have mine on the setting where after it finishes it keeps it warm so if I start this for the first cycle and then I go to bed it'll keep it warm over the whole night and so it won't go bad and then I'll just set it for the next cycle when I wake up in the morning. I used to not run it through for that much time but I found that I was having trouble with it not gelling consistently and it just needed a little bit more time. Six hours is still way way less than 24 hours of boiling on the stovetop so it's totally worth getting it to gel properly and pulling all those nutrients out of the bones. Once it's gone through three cycles it's completely done. Most of the time I'm not in a huge rush to get it out and so I'll just let it naturally release the pressure but if you're just kind of in a hurry and you want to get the next batch started or you want to use your pot for something else you can you can do a manual release either way is totally fine. When I do manual releases I put a towel over the top so it doesn't spray stuff all over my cabinets or shelves and then I just use a bowl and a strainer to strain the bone broth off the bones and then once it's all done I don't throw the bones in the trash can. I take them out to my chickens and they pick all the meat that's left on them and they get all the awesome stuff and then we get eggs from that so it's like even after you make bone broth the bones are still doing something and being productive. You can give them to your dog just I generally try to give them to our animals or do something other than just throw them in our trash can. Here's my last batch that I actually just pulled this out of the instant pot right before I filmed this video and you can see it's still liquid right now. It'll gel up once I put it in the refrigerator. I'm actually going to can all the bone broth that I'm making from this quarter of a cow just because we don't have a ton of freezer space right now and it's just super handy to have it canned because then you have to wait for it to thaw out. I absolutely love canning bone broth and having it ready to go like that. I will also be doing a tutorial on how to can bone broth so if I haven't done before this video I'll link it up in the cards and then and then in the description box below but you can totally store it in your freezer just make sure that if you're storing glass jars you leave a little bit of room at the top so that when it expands it doesn't explode because that would be very sad. If you're going to be using the bone broth right away for your soup or something you can keep it in your refrigerator for a week or two and it'll be totally fine. Another thing I wanted to mention is that if you want to add more flavor to your bone broth you can roast your bones before you put them in the instant pot to make the broth so just put them in your oven do a roast for a little while and then put them in and do the whole process and that is all you have to do. It's actually quite simple and it's so worth having it. I absolutely love it and I found that we actually eat way more bone broth now that I've been making in the instant pot because it's just so ridiculously easy and fast so I hope this video was helpful. If you enjoy content like this don't forget to subscribe to my channel and I also have an Instagram account where I post almost daily on just our life on the homestead and my life as a young mom and so I'll link that down below as well. Thank you for watching and I will see you in my next video. Bye!