Roast Chicken Bone Broth Recipe

A wholesome winter warmer and easy homemade stock

The perfect autumnal Sunday looks something like this:

Tea and breakfast in bed. A long walk. Light the fire, warm up slowly. Chicken in the oven. A proper roast dinner with crispy roast potatoes. A snooze by the fire. Leftover chicken in the fridge for sandwiches all week, a little set aside for the dogs too - special treat.

And then, going to bed knowing the bone broth is quietly doing its thing in the slow cooker overnight.

If you're going to roast a chicken, it makes sense to use every last bit of it. That's one of the things I love most about making bone broth; nothing is wasted, and the result is something genuinely nourishing. It’s packed with protein, collagen, and a whole host of other goodness that your body will thank you for.

For a slow-cooked, nourishing bone broth, you'll need...

Ingredients:

• Cooked chicken bones - ideally organic. I use the carcass from a Sunday roast. I love putting every part of the chicken to use

• A couple of carrots, an onion, a few cloves of garlic, some celery, a lemon (often the one roasted inside the chicken), rosemary, sage, ginger. There’s no hard and fast rule here, you can use any veg you’ve got kicking around, even if it’s past it’s best.

• A good glug of cider vinegar or fire cider. This is thought to help draw the collagen from the bones, and it enriches the flavour too

• Enough water to cover everything in the pot

Equipment:

• A slow cooker, or a large pan with a lid

• Cheese cloth and a sieve

The slow, simple method for making bone broth at home…

1 | Start with the bones

Remove any remaining meat from the carcass and add all of the bones to your slow cooker or pot.

2 | Chop

Roughly chop your vegetables, herbs and lemon into large chunks and add them into the pot.

3 | Add liquid

Pour in a generous glug or two of cider vinegar or fire cider, then cover everything with cold water.

4 | Cook

Slow cooker: set to low and leave overnight.

On the hob: the lowest heat you can manage, lid on, for 6–10 hours. The longer the better. You want the broth hot but never boiling, to slowly draw all of the goodness out of the bones.

5 | Strain

Pour through a sieve lined with a cheese cloth into a large container - I use Kilner jars.

Compost the vegetables, and a word from experience, dispose of the chicken bones in the outside bin, well out of reach of any dogs.

6 | Enjoy

Warmed in a mug on a cold afternoon as a restorative winter drink. Stirred into soups and gravies as a deeply flavoured stock. Or, and I promise this is worth trying, baked into bread. My bone broth bread recipe is here.

You can also freeze it if you’re not ready to use it

Making bone broth is one of those tasks that feels almost too simple. The left over bits of a roast chicken, any vegetables you’ve got kicking around, a slow cooker ticking away through the night.

And yet the result is something genuinely nourishing. A little warmth in a mug, a depth of flavour in everything you cook with it. Worth making every time a roast chicken comes out of the oven.

📍 Save to Pinterest for when you make your next roast…