Sorry DC, I don't think an experiment was really necessary to figure out that you need a little meat on bones if you want a decent stock. You will get a richer, full flavoured stock if you also brown meaty bones first, along with some veggies - celery, onions, carrots, etc... before adding them to the stock pot.

Use your bland stock to kick start your next pot of stock.

~Ann

I won't be much help because my stock making is nothing like you described. I use either chicken or beef bones to make stock, I just don't like pork stock, not even mixed with beef.

I don't use bones that have been scraped clean, I often use the very ends of the hocks, the rib trimmings, etc. Remember, I use the entire steer or pig or chicken or whatever. At the very least I leave some meat on the bones, I don't scrape them clean.

I always roast the bones before making stock, as IMO it adds flavor. I never use just salt, I use salt, pepper, bay leaf, carrot, onion, celery, garlic if it's beef broth. I save the carrot trimmings, celery leaves, onion peels, etc. right along with the bones for stock.

My stock is rich, flavorful, full of good stuff and is made mostly with "leftovers" or scraps that would be discarded otherwise.

However, it is absolutely nothing that even resembles your pot of water, scraped bones and salt.

So, I guess there's stock and then there's stock. Of course, you could just use that salt laden powdered stuff, which might be cheaper but I'm just not going to, it's nasty and tastes only of salt. I'll go to the extra time and effort to make good stock.

Annie

If you left some of the meat on the bones or thrown in a fresh pork hock and roasted them first, maybe you would have had a better result. I don't have a pressure cooker but simmer slowly for a couple of hours.

I just made a big pot of fish stock last week and used the bones and the heads (gills cut out). I added some onion, celery, parsley and a little strip of lemon peel. If I had just used bones only without any flesh, they wouldn't have been worth the time and electricity to do it.

Shrimp shells are the only fleshless preparation I can think of that makes a flavorful stock.

I suppose you have proved that bones have no flavor. I like the way you challenged this particular premise.

Well, for a change you're not going to make me experiment because you're confirming what I've always blindly assumed to be true: for the most part bones supply the collagen, meat supplies the flavor.

I recall the very first time I made my own chicken stock, I used a recipe from Mark Bittman's How to Cook Everything where he writes, "Don't use cooked, meatless bones by themselves or the stock will lack a meaty flavor. But a combination of bones and meat, or raw, meaty bones alone, is fine." Fast forward many years to when I made my first beef stock. I used Cook's Illustrated's recipe and it called for a lot of meat to be used. Specifically they recommended beef shanks. This made for a very expensive stock, but oh so good.

Off topic but while we're at it, since the first time I made chicken stock with chicken feet as part of the chicken ingredient, I've not omitted them since. Not much meat on them, but talk about "mouth feel!" (I miss you Shaun, come back and post once in a while, would ya?!) My typical combination is roughly 1/3 each of raw feet, meaty scraps (I buy backs and necks to supplement what I don't have in the freezer) and carcasses from roasted chicken.

Lastly, while I'm already off topic, a gratuitous plug for Swanson's Organic Chicken Broth which I recently bought kind of by chance. Not the same as homemade, but believe it or not it actually tastes like chicken and not just like a whole lot of salt, herbs and spices.

The link below gives a lot of history and science behind making broth. And a follow up article "Why Broth is Beautiful: Essential Roles for Proline, Glycine and Gelatin" by Kaayla T. Daniel, PhD, CCN has even more interesting information. http://www.westonaprice.org/food-features/why-broth-is-beautiful

-Grainlady

Here is a link that might be useful: Broth is Beautiful

I like that you have published your results for us to see. There is a publication bias towards positive results, and so, you're being unique.

:)

Interesting. Shoulder bones contain red marrow though, right? My dog goes crazy for bone marrow, which makes me think it tastes like something.

I make stock from a combination of meaty bones and meat trimmings. Like everyone else who has responded, I add vegetables - onions, carrots and celery are standard, leek tops when I have them. I also season it as it cooks down.

I don't think the bones add a lot of flavor by themselves, as you have proved. But they add gelatin as they break down. This gives a silky mouthfeel to the final stock which is why homemade stocks always taste richer and fuller than any commercial stock I've ever tried.

Cheryl

I have never had good results wither making stock from bones etc. Thank God for boxed stocks ready to go. Like you said for the amount of time and expense of all the veggies I prefer to buy stock myself. But that is just me.
Others swear by making your own..

June

That must be why putting a pig's foot in a pot of beans improves the broth so much: lots of meaty flavor from the meat and lots of collagen mouthfeel from all the connective tissue.

Slightly OT: I used to make my own chicken stock and canned it in a pressure canner. Haven't done that lately as life has just gotten too busy. I generally buy Costco's Kirkland chicken stock, and it's fine for my uses.

Anybody have any experience with Minor's soup bases? I'm thinking about getting some. I've used "Better than Bullion" and it was, well, better than bullion cubes but not spectacular. I thought their beef base was better than most canned beef broth, but I was looking for something better than that. Shirley Corriher of 'Cookwise' recommends a concoction called 'B V' to jack up the beefy flavor, but I've never seen it in a store.

The best way to make stock is to treat it as you would a starter for sourdough. Always save the original stock and use it each time as your base to make new. So if you remove 1 c for flavoring make sure and take what is left...say 3 c and use that as the base in which you cook the new meat and bones and vegetables. Never ever lose your starter. My son is a chef and he has had his same beef wonderfulness for approx 7 years now ! The best chefs would never part with this magical stuff. It gets so concentrated that one tsp is enough to flavor a whole dish. c

Bone broth has long been a staple in the kitchen's of traditional cooks....but it's not made in an hour in a pressure cooker with salted water....but cooked for days at a slow simmer.

Most people add some flavorings like garlic and perhaps throw away bits like celery leaves or the top of an onion, perhaps carrot peelings and tops...
But the secret of good bone broth is long slow cooking....and something acid in the pot.
The site linked below used vinegar....I use lemon. Depending on the amount, half a lemon or a whole one or more. Put the peels in too.
The site I have linked says to use 2 T. vinegar per gallon of water....if I don't have a lemon I just slop in some vinegar.
After 5 hours, that broth is so full of minerals and gelatin that it is like rubber when cooled....adds wonderful taste and texture to all sorts of things.
I have cooked chicken bones until there is almost nothing left....they pretty well dissolved.
Never had that happen with beef...I guess because they are larger....but i have made some very nice broth from a beef knuckle with no meat left on it at all.

And my favorite way to make chicken stock is with bones and skin. Because of the nature of chicken, it's very difficult to get all the meat off the bones, so there is some left, but not much! When making something with bone in chicken breast, I save the bones and the skin and add onion, celery, parsley and lemon and simmer it all day.....and that broth is wonderful!

For more information, read the article linked.

Here is a link that might be useful: bone broth

A little OT, but still about bones. Several years ago, decided to treat my 2 BIG goofy Rotts to bones. Stopped at a small, REAL butcher shop that has been around for YEARS. Knew they either GAVE the bones away or charged very little. I asked the "kid" behind the counter if they had any BIG BARE bones in the back. She kinda tilted her head to the side (like my dog did when interested or CONFUSED) and asked... BEAR BONES?? Once I (and several other people in shop) stopped giggling... I explained that I didn't need bones with a lot of meat on them.

Butcher came out with a FLINTSTONE bone... whole leg bone wth HUGE knuckles at each end. Asked him to cut it into 4 hunks... each easily 6" long or longer. Since the thought of giving my dogs raw bones just kinda skeeved me out for several reasons... I roasted the heck outta them with onions/celery/carrots till super brown. Then into a CALDRON with some water and ended up with a good amount of nice broth... pretty much for free.

My supermarket almost always has nice meaty pork bones for CHEAP!!! But I've never used pork bones for stock/broth. My dog loves them raw, and her teeth are soooooo clean.

Here's the question - did you even get much gelatin from the bones? Does the stock have any feel, will it set up in the fridge? Because if "no", then the reason to use bones in stock making becomes even more tenuous.

I usually throw cow tendons, pigs feet, etc in the stock pot to get the feel.

Bones yield gelatin....a proper bone broth will jell.
The long slow cooking and the addition of vinegar or lemon pulls the collagen and minerals out of the bones.
I have never done what the linked site shows....but I may.....when it gets cooler....a LOT cooler!!

Here is a link that might be useful: 12 days of bone broth

Roasting, browning, caramelization is long known to add flavor to meat. That works for broth/stock as well. No mystery there.

Eileen

Here is a link that might be useful: Maillard reaction.

Very good start dcarch. Ann_t said "I don't think an experiment was really necessary to figure out that you need a little meat on bones if you want a decent stock"

Actually, an experiment like yours is what is so valuable about scientific thinking and approach. First, I assume that you suspected that Ann is correct but you noted that many people had casually and perhaps without evidence, implied that the bones themselves added flavor. I admit that I am not as experienced as Ann and had inferred that the bone internals indeed added flavor.

In any case, the point of checking out 'obvious' (or not) things is that something is Always learned. If the obvious thing appears to be incorrect, then more checking is done and a new understanding is made. And if the obvious thing is supported then (other than getting to say 'duh') the casual view is upheld and strengthend. Everyone knows you will sail off the ocean edge; that heavy objects fall faster than lighter ones; oops, you won't?, they don't?; bah, who cares anyway; well, it can change the world sometines.

Well, dcarch, good thinking as usual. Now in this case we are having the seminar. Acid may extract more stuff? Burning heat may create charred flavor. Perhaps steam heat was not necessarily the best extraction method. Perhaps it was.

"Thank you Doctor, we believe your paper is worthy of publication when you have responded to the reviewer's questions
The Editor"

Actually the marrow in the bones would have provided flavor. Marrow is high in fat, and yellow marrow, of the type found in the long bones is particularly high in fat.
I sure know I have made some lovely broth with pretty much bare bones....but have not taken pains to scrape them clean....they just came that way. And of course I added aromatice like garlic, onion, celery, bay leaf, pepper to the pot.

Cook's Illustrated has a number of recipes where they've used the addition of a small amount of unflavored gelatin to simulate the smooth 'mouthfeel' of a reduced sauce.

A sauce reduction is usually called a demi-glace. Veal makes the best demi-glace.

There used to be a local French bistro where the chef used veal stock in addition to beef stock for her French Onion Soup. The first time I tasted it I could tell what she'd done; there's no comparison to using an all-beef stock.

I remember once reading a Victorian recipe for beef broth for invalid patients or elderly family. You used a couple of pounds of red meat, cooked it in water until all the flavor of the meat had gone into the broth. The now-tasteless meat was fed to the hogs.

Bones don't contribute much, if any flavor.

But they do contribute the lion's share of the gelatin that makes a good stock so wonderful.

Chas, Bravo! Cooking is subject to folklore, old wives tales, and wasted effort. I applaud all efforts to separate the fact from the fiction, and the resulting discussion about what intervening variables there may have been in the experiment.

"The closer to the bone, the sweeter the meat".
Is that just an old wives tale?
(my apoligies to any old wives that may
have stumbled upon this post).

I'm glad I took the time to read this. I found it pretty interesting. I am one of those people that can not get enough flavor in homemade stock so I usually wind up adding some bouillion anyway. So why go through the trouble? I have been using the Costco organic stock in a box.

Trailrunner, thanks for that tip. Keeping a starter going may be the type of fix I have been looking for. I hate adding those processed chemicals.

Well, we need someone to do the study. Cook a T Bone Steak (lots of bone) and while blind-folded have someone feed you small pieces from various area's appropriately identified by the feeder and see if you can relate 'sweetness' to the location. Research Research Research.

And the Bravo goes to the researcher. We are just the reviewers and editor so far. But thank you anyway jessica.

I somewhat agree. In general humans are where we are because we have the ability to pass on our knowledge to our children and therefore intellectually evolve. However, for some reason we are sentimental to the way our grandmothers cooked, surely influenced by their grandmothers before them. And so breaking kitchen myths might be somewhat of an emotional subject.

In my case, I've never seen instructions to make stock from just bones; meat was always required. But then, my mother, good cook that she is, probably never made a homemade stock in her life so this notion didn't offend me. Therefore to me this experiment was more of a "No sht, Sherlock" moment for me, but now I see why it might not have been, for others.

What got me thinking about this is the situation when I see beef bones at $1.25 a lb, and beef for stewing is $1.85 a lb, which deal is best for making beef stock?

Obviously, I have not seen bones with absolutely no meat for sale.

There are good reasons why "The closer to the bones, the sweeter the meat".

1. Bones are relatively poor thermal conductors, the meat nearest to the bone are less overcooked and therefore more juicy.

2. Frozen ice crystals form inside the bones. They expand and force the heme out of the marrow through the soft, porous bones. This gives the meat around the bones more flavor.

dcarch

joan it is the only thing that makes a truly great stock. Starting from scratch each time is so counterproductive. Also start with short ribs. There isn't a better cut of beef for beef stock. When you have frozen/thawed and repeated this step 4 times you will wonder how you ever made do with the inferior stock achieved any other way !!

Chicken is the same...reuse the old...thaw it and add the new bones/skin/and a few vegs. You should never season a stock with salt until you are ready to use it. That is ...never with this kind of stock as it gets more and more concentrated. As I said before you will ultimately be able to use one tsp to season a whole dish. Good Luck !

Trailrunner....I need to show more restraint....I tend to get piggy and use all the stock without thoughts to the next batch.
I have used stock to poach chicken breasts....and then added the bones and skin and further cooked it.....but never saved a portion of that for the next go around.

haha...piggy..you can do the same with pork :) Yes you have to be stingy. My DH used the last of the beef wonderfulness that my DS1 had given us...whew...did I fuss...we had to get another portion and I forbid him to use it all. Our biggest problem is that we rarely eat beef now...but he uses it to flavor his stir fry so I am facing a battle . c