One of our photos may look like Belgian Waffle, but there’s no waffle in this no-nonense series about cooking for Scotties. The New Year is now firmly anchored in port, and any residual Christmas sparkle has slowly swept itself up or dissolved into a dispirited puddle in the corner. The imbibed festive energy that previously charged a buoyant mood has now run dry and I thereby find myself suddenly in the position of going ‘cold turkey’ from lack of merry things to do as we slide ever further into the realms of January.

Therefore, what better way to un-focus on the winter blues, by literally embracing the cold turkey, or rather its bare bones, by creating my own nutritious bone broth for our Scottie, Jimmy.

The Christmas turkey was finished late this year, as it was our second of the season – we do love our turkey – so we didn’t in fact pick through the bare (ish) bones until the first few days of January; and the great thing about turkey is that there are a lot of bones! Therefore, instead of binning the bones – inclusive of back and wings – which I have to say happens most years due to post-turkey lethargy, I galvanised myself mentally to attack the remnants of the turkey, both for the purposes of writing this article and most importantly to provide our Scottie with this most elixir of foods.

Bone broth in essence is made by boiling up bones – and any remnants of meat and connective tissue still hanging on – until the bones start to crumble under inspection.  The bones require a lot of cooking to get to disintegration point; bones in fact turn white in the process as they release their normally locked in goodness – minerals (e.g. calcium, phosphorus, silicon), and marrow (replete with vitamins A, B2, B12, and E) to name just a few –  to the surrounding liquid, thus repackaging themselves into an easily absorbable form that can be literally lapped up by your Scottie to provide a complementary boost to their diet.

As a Scottie’s liver has a known sensitivity to environmental toxins, a bone broth is most notable to our breed as a liver detoxifier; Dogs Naturally Magazine highlighted the fact that the detoxification process carried out by the liver is actually limited by the amount of glycine available to it, hence by topping up on this amino acid, which happens to be in abundance in bone broth,  you are actually allowing the liver more opportunity to do its work. However, if you need yet more incentive, a bone broth is also great for bone health, as it contains both glucosamine and chondroitin which are key ingredients in most joint care supplements, including the ever popular and veterinary approved YuMOVE.

Therefore, my super-easy guide to bone broth is as follows:

  • Be a bone collector!

I used a whole turkey carcass, but you can use any bones, either cooked or raw. If you need to build up a bone collection the easiest way to do this is to just pop any leftover bones on your dinner plate into a bag in the freezer over the period of a few weeks; once amassed, you will then be ready to whip out your cauldron in the guise of your slow cooker or pressure cooker to work the magic.

  • Create your potion

At its simplest, this is putting your bones into a pot, covering with water and cooking for a nice long time; this can be 24 hours or more in a slow cooker, as you will want all the nutritional content in the bones to fully drain into your broth. The time can be reduced if your pot has a ‘pressure cook’ function; I did mine on a high pressure cook setting for 5 hours in our Ninja Foodi, although obviously the cook time will be dependent on the quantity of your batch and the type of bones.

  • Enhancing tips

Add 1-2 tablespoons of Apple Cider Vinegar to help leach minerals from the bones into the broth.

Toss in green leafy or colourful vegetables for an extra nutritional boost; any vegetable you have knocking about your fridge really, just avoid leaks and onions. I popped in some leftover sprouts, carrots and finished with a sprinkling of oregano.

Bone broth ingredients ready to cook

 

  • Prepare for storage

Once the bones crumble under slight pressure, this is indicative that all the goodness that held them together is in your broth. Let your concoction cool a bit, then strain through a cheese cloth or fine meshed strainer into a glass bowl to ensure your product is free of bone and any fragments.  Then if so inclined, you can additionally whizz your sedimental slops – i.e. any crumbled bone and still assembled vegetable material – through a blender, straining yet again, to ensure every last morsel of goodness is captured.

Cooked turkey broth

 

Strained product

As your product cools skim and discard any layer of congealed fat on the surface. The underlying broth should have a jelly-like consistency on cooling, however if it is more liquid in formation this doesn’t matter; it is just indicative of a higher proportion of liquid to leached bone content in your concoction.

  • Storage

Once cooled spoon into ice cube trays and freeze.

Bone broth ice cubes

  • Serving portion size

If your Scottie is around 10 kilos you can look at feeding 2 cubes a day, defrosted or warmed in their meal; or as a frozen treat on a hot day.

The only caveat to feeding this bone broth recipe is if your Scottie has been prescribed a low-histamine diet; as this bone broth contains a lot of naturally occurring histamine.

Guidance: The author is a Scottie owner and dog diet enthusiast, but not a qualified vet or dietician. Please consult your vet for more information. Scottie Club UK and the author accept no liability for how the contents of this article are relied upon by the reader. It is published for information purposes only and does not constitute any promotion.

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