Rural Revolution: Three-day beef ambrosia

We’ll be getting our bull/steer Romeo back from the butcher in a few days’ time, so we’ve been reorganizing the freezer to make room for him. During this process, we came across several cuts of meat from a previous butchering that have just been … sitting there. For years.

This cut is a chuck roast. I’ve put chuck roasts in a slow cooker in the past with excellent results, but it still remains, for whatever reason, my least-favorite part of the animal. It’s generally the last thing I reach for when it comes to making something for dinner.

But this time, needing to make room, I fished out three chuck roasts as well as two packages of soup bones, another item I seldom use. My plan was to can up the meat in a bone broth.

I threw these all into a large stock pot, added powdered garlic, dried onion, pepper, and a splash of vinegar (to help draw the nutrients out of the bones), topped everything with water, and let it simmer overnight.

The next day, I scooped out all the meat and bones. I carefully went through each piece of meat and de-fatted it as best I could. I think this is one of the reasons I’m not so fond of chuck roast – it’s just too fatty. (I put the fatty bits aside to feed to Mr. Darcy in small increments.)

Then I put the meat in the refrigerator overnight. More importantly, I put the pot of beef broth in the fridge too, so the fat could cool, rise to the surface, and harden.

The next day, I scooped the fat off the surface of the broth.

The bone broth is incredible – rich, meaty, full of nutrients. I filled canning jars with meat and topped them with the broth.

Then, not wanting to waste anything, I filled the rest of the jars with leftover broth.

After canning, the result is six pints of beef ambrosia – tender and delicious – and eight pints of beef bone broth for the pantry.

Not a bad haul for some cuts of meat otherwise taking up space in the freezer.