healing chicken bone broth [instant pot] + a bonus: pastina soup!
When life is in need of a hard reset, bone broth is the first thing I make. It’s often billed as magic wellness elixir among people with a certain flavor of health ambition—it heals the gut! It boosts immunity! It puts collagen back into your joints! It’s basically skincare!—but even if it wasn’t any of those things, I would still drink it just because there is nothing more comforting and restorative than a mug of hot liquid gold on a gloomy day. I swear you can feel it flow through your body like an energy current as you sip it. Maybe it’s a mineral infusion? I don’t know how biology works.
This is the formula for the bone broth I now make nearly every week in the winter, perfected after many experiments. Supposedly the 1 tbsp. of apple cider vinegar helps pull out additional minerals, which is why it’s part of my base recipe no matter how I’m planning to flavor the finished broth. Whether the finished product “gels” in the fridge, an indicator of collagen richness, is THE status symbol for bone broth enthusiasts; in order to achieve that, you want to use chicken parts that are bone-dominant, which is where the collagen hides out. However, having a little meat on those bones really enhances the chicken-y flavor, which is why I like to use drumsticks. This recipe gels reliably every time for me.
While you can do it on the stove, having an Instant Pot allows you to create bone broth start to finish in about 1/3 of the time it would take in a conventional stock pot. Even with a pressure cooker, it’s still never going to be a spur of the moment project: you need to start it early, allowing lots of time for the broth to pressurize, heat, and cool. However, it demands almost nothing of you until the end when you strain it. It’s most satisfying as a hands-off side project to put together in the afternoon on a day you’re planning to do nothing but chores.
You can sip it from a mug, use it for cooking, or as pictured here (my favorite way), as a base for pastina. Just reheat the cooled bone broth in a pan, add ancini di pepe pasta or Israeli couscous, and top with whatever fresh herbs are in the fridge.
If you want to get REALLY advanced, it’s not just bone broth that freezes well. You can also freeze bags of the ingredients—random chicken bones or carcasses from roasts, nubby carrot ends, old wilty celery pieces, leftover ginger from other recipes—and just dump them straight from the freezer into the pot when you decide to make broth. It takes longer doing it from frozen because the Instant Pot has to work harder to bring it up to temperature, but it will still work.
RECIPE
Restorative all-purpose chicken bone broth for winter and always, doable in hours rather than days thanks to the Instant Pot.
Effortful time: 15 minutes, almost entirely at the end
Total time: 5 hours
Makes 3 quarts / 96 oz.
You need
Basic template
2 1/2-3 lbs. chicken parts—I usually use drumsticks
1 tbsp. apple cider vinegar
Salt, to taste
1 tbsp. whole peppercorns
Enough filtered water to cover everything
1 large yellow onion, halved, papery skins left on
6 cloves of garlic, skins on and smashed with a knife
Enough filtered water to cover everything
Classic add-ins (pictured here)
1 carrot, unpeeled
2 ribs celery
2 bay leaves
Lemongrass ginger add-ins
3” knob ginger, washed and unpeeled, cut in thick slices
1 stalk lemongrass
MAKE IT
Assemble. Dump all ingredients into the Instant Pot and add filtered water until you hit the “max fill” line.
Pressure cook for 3 hours on high. It will take a longer time to pressurize than other recipes using the IP.
Allow for a full natural release, or you risk spraying your kitchen with hot bone liquid. This can take about an hour.
Strain and store. Using a fine mesh colander over another large container, carefully strain the broth. Discard everything else. Ladle into separate containers and allow to cool, either using ice cubes or by filling your sink with a few inches of cold water and plugging the drain. Keeps for four days in the fridge or indefinitely in the freezer!
Note for those without an instant pot: you can do this broth too! It just takes 5ever. Start in the morning. Throw everything in your biggest stock pot, and fill it up with water. Bring it to a boil for a few minutes, then drop to the lowest possible simmer and partially cover. Let this go for, no joke, 12 hours—this is to extract collagen from the bones, which makes it “bone broth.” If you don’t care about this, and just want a nice chicken stock to sip or make into the soup you saw here, you can simmer it for 3-4 hours; it won’t be the same gelatinous jiggly end product full of alleged magic properties, but it will still taste healing enough all the same.
BONUS RECipe: PASTINA SOUP!
Pastina is one of my favorite things to eat when I am low, tired, sick, or just really over it. My favorite character in Lisa Taddeo’s incredible book Animal inspired me, as it is the only thing she ever wants to cook, and I’m glad to see so many other people enjoying it too!
To make it, I heat 2 cups of this broth on the stove in a medium saucepan. Add 1/2 cup of tiny noodles: I used Israeli couscous, a similar shape to Italian ancini di pepe. Simmer this according to the package directions; obviously don’t drain. Remove from heat. Add a few tsp. of any chopped tender herbs you have, like parsley, basil, or chives, which I used here; top it off with a few twirls of black pepper. While this is absolutely best with homemade broth, can you do it without that? You absolutely can; frozen bone broth is a great (but expensive) substitute, and I have also used my old standby Better Than Bouillon in emergencies more than once. Just promise me you’ll homemake the broth just once so you can taste what I taste.