Meat Stock vs. Bone Broth

Meat Stock is always made with raw pieces of meat with a joint (meaty bones), cooked for a short period of time.  When I refer to meaty bones, I am talking about mostly meat, with a little bone or join and some connective tissue around it (a lot of meat to little bone).   For beef, pork, lamb or game, you can use meaty soup bones,  joints, meaty neck bones, short ribs, tail, spine, feet, head, legs, shoulder, shank  or hocks.   For chicken or turkey, you can use legs, feet, tights, neck bones, giblets, head or a whole chicken or bird cut up.  You can use an animal carcass with bones, joints, fascia, cartilage, fat and good amount of muscle on it.  It is essential to use bones and joints, as they provide the healing substances, not so much the muscle meats.   To make fish stock you can use the whole fish with the skin, head,  skeleton, tails and fin.   Parts of the animals that are tough and chewy tissues work well go make Meat Stock, but not lean muscle like steak meat. 

The meat and bones used to prepare Meat Stock can be fresh or frozen. There is not need to defrost them before you cook them.  You only need to put the meat and bones in a large pot, a Dutch Oven or a slow cooker, and cook them with clean water or filtered tap water, good quality mineral salt and peppercorns.  Peppercorns should be removed after the Meat Stock is cooked.  I suggest to alternate between different meat stocks (use different animals) to provide a whole spectrums of nourishment.

Apple Cider Vinegar (ACV) is not used to make Meat Stock.  Some people add it when they cook their stock, because it helps leach minerals from the bones into the stock, but it is mostly used to cook bone broth.  However, Meat Stock is full of meat, and the bones are covered with meat, so the vinegar cannot act on them. 

When you cook Meat Stock, you practically make a meal with well cooked meat and a delicious stock good to either drink it or to use it for making soups.  From the Meat Stock, you can eat everything except the bones: the meat (plus the cartilage and tendons) and the vegetables (if you used them to cook your stock).   The bones can be saved and frozen to make Bone Broth at a later time. 

Cooking Time. Meat Stock should be cooked for a relatively short amount of time. When you make your stock in a Dutch oven or in a regular pot in the stove, you have to cook it from 1 to 3 hours, depending of the thickness of the bones, and to cover it so that it doesn’t evaporate, and you don’t lose a portion of it. When it comes to cooking time, a good rule of thumb is to cook fish bones for 1 hour, chicken bones for 2 hours and beef bones for 3 hours. If you cook the stock for longer periods of time, the amino acids that they contain (read more about this below), which have great properties to help heal and seal the gut lining, get cooked off.  The time to cook your Meat Stock will be longer if you use a slow cooker. 

Consistency. Meat Stock is more viscous because of the amount of collagen that comes from the bones. After your stock cools off, it should get a gelatinous consistency. This is because of the gelatinous tissues and joints dissolve into the stock. If your stock doesn’t get that consistency is most probably because you used.

If you have trouble getting this gelatinous consistency, it is most probably because you used too much water for the amount of meaty bones used. A good rule of thumb is to use one quart of water for every pound of meaty bones. Make sure the bones (and the vegetables you might include when you cook it) are covered for about ½ inch with water. When people use the slow cooker to make stock, one of the mistakes they make is to add too much water to it, so their stock ends up being too thin. Another problem of not getting the gelatinous consistency is to use too much meat or bones, instead of joints and connective tissue.

Healing properties. The Meat Stock is very medicinal, especially when you have leaky gut or intestinal permeability. It is used to heal the connective tissue of the gut wall because of all the very bio-available nutrients that it contains:  minerals, vitamins, proteoglycans, glycoproteins and  hyaluronic acid, among others.   It is also high in the amino acids proline and glycine, biotin, collagen, elastin, glucosamine and gelatin, that feed the enterocytes, which are the building blocks of the gut lining.   It contains Connective Tissue, (our body is made from Connective Tissue), and provides high amounts of Collagen, (the most abundant protein in our body),  so the Meat Stock provides great building materials for our body to heal.  This is a good reason to pick quality and healthy animals to prepare our Meat Stock. 

When you are sick and you are trying to get healthier, Meat Stock is what your body needs.

Home-made Meat Stock is the best alternative to support your health. It is used in the beginning stages of the GAPS Nutritional Protocol, whose primary focus is to heal and seal the damaged gut wall. The reason why Meat Stock is preferred over Bone Broth is that it is low in glutamic acid, which many people are sensitive to.

Meat Stock is one of the best healing remedies for the gut lining and the immune system, because of all the gelatinous soft tissue and bone marrow it provides.ql