My guests today are Sally Fallon Morell and Kaayla T. Daniel, PhD, co-authors of the new book Nourishing Broth: An Old-Fashioned Remedy for the Modern World. You’ve probably heard a grandmother say that chicken soup will cure whatever ails you. Sally and Kaayla show just how true this is. This excellent book gives all the scientific background about how broth made from bones is necessary for good health, then gives recipes for bone broths of all kinds plus how to use them in cooking. Your kitchen will never be the same. www.nourishingbroth.com
Sally Fallon Morell is author of the bestselling cookbook Nourishing Traditions and The Nourishing Traditions Book of Baby and Child Care. She is the founding president of the Weston A. Price Foundation. Sally is a journalist, chef, nutrition researcher, homemaker, and community activist. Her lifelong interest in the subject of nutrition began in the early 1970s when she read Nutrition and Physical Degeneration by Weston A. Price. Called the “Isaac Newton of Nutrition,” Price traveled the world over studying healthy primitive populations and their diets. The unforgettable photographs contained in his book document the 
beautiful facial structure and superb physiques of isolated groups consuming only whole, natural foods. Price noted that all of these diets contained a source of good quality animal fat, which provided numerous factors necessary for the full expression of our genetic potential and optimum health. Ms. Morell applied the principles of the Price research to the feeding of her own children, and proved for herself that a diet rich in animal fats, and containing the protective factors in old fashioned foodstuffs like cod liver oil, liver and eggs, make for sturdy cheerful children with a high immunity to illness. And since she has been educating the world on how to enjoy this diet deliciously. www.westonaprice.org
Kaayla T. Daniel, PhD is the Vice President of the Weston A. Price Foundation, on the Board of Directors of the Farm-to-Consumer Legal Defense Fund, 
and received the Weston A. Price Foundation’s Integrity in Science Award in 2005. Kaayla has been a guest on The Dr.Oz Show, PBS Healing Quest, NPR’s People’s Pharmacy, and many other shows. She is the author of The Whole Soy Story: The Dark Side of America’s Favorite Health Food – endorsed by leading health experts, including Drs Joseph Mercola, Larry Dossey, Kilmer S. McCully, Russell Blaylock and Doris J. Rapp. Kaayla is known as The Naughty Nutritionist™ because of her ability to outrageously and humorously debunk nutritional myths. www.drkaayladaniel.com.
TOXIC FREE TALK RADIO
Nourishing Broth: An Old-Fashioned Remedy for the Modern World
Host: Debra Lynn Dadd
Guest: Sally Fallon Morell and Kaayla T. Daniel, PhD
Date of Broadcast: November 25, 2014 (September 20, 2013)
DEBRA: Hi, I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. This is Toxic Free Talk Radio where we talk about how to thrive in a toxic world and live toxic-free. It’s Tuesday, September 30th 2013. Here in Clearwater, Florida, we’re having a beautiful, early autumn day. I mean, here, I know some of you in the northern parts of the world are already having nice, crisp autumn days. But here, we’re just very happy that it’s not 90° and it can be 80 during the day. That’s an autumn day to me.
I’m already feeling like I want to eat soup. I don’t make soup all the time, but when it starts getting to be autumn, I go back into making my own chicken broth mode. I made chicken broth for the first time this year this past week. And that’s what we’re going to be talking about today, soup – but not just soup out of the can. We’re going to be talking about the old tradition of making broth from bones and the amazing health benefits that can come from that.
The occasion for discussing this is a new book called Nourishing Broth by Sally Fallon Morell and Kaayla Daniel. Both of them have been on the show before. They have each written wonderful books themselves and have now joined to talk about broth.
Many of you I’m sure know Sally because she’s the author of Nourishing Traditions, which has changed the way we eat. I think it’s one of those books that just has had such a widespread influence whether people know it or not. There’s been such a change in getting back to real foods and that really started with Sally writing this book as far as I can tell.
She’s also the founder of the Weston A Price Foundation. She’s a journalist, chef, nutrition researcher, homemaker, community activist. And she has just done so much, I can’t even tell you.
Kaayla Daniel PhD, she’s the vice president of the Weston Price Foundation. She’s on the board of directors of Farm to Consumer Legal Defense Fund and received the Weston A Price Foundation ‘Integrity in Science’ award in 2005. She’s the author of The Whole Soy Story, which I have been recommending over and over and over again ever since it first came out because she really tells you why soy is not a health food.
And so if you’re eating all kinds of soy protein bars, soy burgers and soy this and soy that, I suggest you take a look at this book, The Whole Soy Story. I know for myself it made a big difference for me to stop eating soy. It was completely messing up the hormones in my body.
I was doing things like taking thyroid supplement and then my doctor would say, “I’m giving you this supplement. Why is it…? Are you not taking it?” It was because I was at the time taking my thyroid supplements followed by a soy protein bar for breakfast. So soy is a sneaky thing and it’s something that you need to know about.
But now, we’re going to talk about soup. Hi, Sally and Kaayla.
SALLY FALLON MORELL: How are you?
DEBRA: Good, how are you?
SALLY FALLON MORELL: Fine, fine.
DEBRA: Okay! Kaayla, are you there?
KAAYLA DANIEL: I am here.
DEBRA: Okay, good. So good, we’ve got both of you. Well, I can’t say enough good things about Nourishing Broth because not only is it a cookbook, but it’s also a book about the subject of nutrition and how broth when it’s made in the proper way and eaten on a regular basis be the foundation of a whole new level of health.
So the first question I want to ask you – and I’ll ask you, Sally. I made brought because I know the way that I make broth, it’s just the way I make broth. And I know that you have recipes. You’ve talked about this in Nourishing Tradition. But I was wondering if there is a specific way to make broth, a specific technique that I should be rethinking what I do to make the broth that I make to be more nourishing?
SALLY FALLON MORELL: Well, thank you, Debra. Well, of course, the more gelatinous, the thicker that broth gets when you chill it down, the better it is for you, the more of this wonderful cartilage components it will have in it. So yes, you want to know the techniques to make a gelatinous broth.
I think there’s two basic ones. One is making sure you have enough bones in that pot. I like to make sure the water comes up to the top of the bones. In other words, that’s the ratio. So for example, if you fill up a slow cooker to the top with bones, chicken bones usually, then you would add your water and it comes just up to the top of the bone. So that’s one thing, having a high bone to water ratio.
And I think the other thing is the right kind of bones. You want bones with cartilage in them. Chicken bones have a lot of cartilage. We like to recommend that you use the head and feet if you can. Another great source of cartilage to make your broth thick is the pig’s foot or split pig’s foot. Most people can buy these at the supermarket. So if you can’t get heads and feet of chicken, I recommend putting one of those in your chicken broth.
And then if you’re making broth with beef, beef bones, you want those knuckles or the tailbones or you see that white cartilage. So you don’t just want bones, you want the cartilage as well. That will melt into the water as you make your broth and give you that gelatin, which is what you’re aiming for.
DEBRA: Well, I can say that my chicken broth is quite gelatinous. What I do is that I use a lot of bones, chicken bones (organic chicken bones), I put in my carrots and onions and celery and garlic. And then I cook it for a very long time and I strain it out and put it in the refrigerator, so that I can skim the fat…
SALLY FALLON MORELL: Off the top, yes.
DEBRA: …off the top. And it’s like a bowl of jello. It’s really gelatinous.
SALLY FALLON MORELL: Right, yes. Congratulations.
DEBRA: Thank you, thank you. Well, I did read Nourishing Traditions. I did read every word of Nourishing Traditions.
SALLY FALLON MORELL: But if it doesn’t get as thick as a bowl of jello, as gelatin-like as a bowl of jello, I still tell people, “Don’t worry about it” because it still has got some good stuff in there and it’s still very good for you even if you don’t have the perfect gel when you finish.
DEBRA: Yeah, yeah. I will also say that I live in Florida and I have banana trees in my backyard. They came with the house. And so we just got into the habit of taking the bones and the leftover vegetables after we’ve strained off the broth and just dumping them at the roots of the banana trees and our banana trees are so well-fed. They love it! They love it! So I think chicken soup is…
SALLY FALLON MORELL: [inaudible 00:08:19]
DEBRA: Yeah. I think every living thing loves chicken broth. So this cookbook is being talked about the sequel to Nourishing Traditions. Why did you focus on broth?
SALLY FALLON MORELL: That’s me or Kaayla?
DEBRA: Either one of you.
SALLY FALLON MORELL: Yeah, I think Kaayla would be a good one to answer this.
DEBRA: Okay.
KAAYLA DANIEL: Well, I think we see broth as the foundation of a good diet. If you’re going to be eating meat, which we certainly recommend, a lot of soups and stews are a very nourishing way to do that. It’s also an economical way because one of the biggest concerns a lot of people have is how do you afford high-quality pastured meats, et cetera. So eating more soup and stews with a low-cost cut can be very helpful.
And I think there was just a public cry for more information about broth and we had to just respond to that.
DEBRA: I think that soup is universally loved. I have a friend and if you ask him what does he want to eat, he would rather eat soup than chocolate cake or anything that you would think that somebody would want to eat as their favorite food.
And I think I know for myself that when I really eat a nourishing soup like making my own broth – and I’ll tell you that once I started doing it, I just will never go back to anything out of a can or a box because it tastes so much better and it also feels so much better in my body. It’s just having that comforting feeling, but also a nourishing feeling. I think it’s perfect that you’re focusing on broth because it has so, so, so many benefits.
So we need to go to break. But when we come back, Sally, let’s talk about what beginners need to know. I know I’m a seasoned broth maker, but I’m sure many in our audience are opening cans and boxes that might even say ‘organic’. Let’s talk about what they need to know and maybe why you want to make it yourself.
You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. Today, my guests are Sally Fallon Morell and Kaayla Daniel. We’re talking about making your own chicken soup and other kinds of broth and how that is healthy for you. We’ll be right back.
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest today are Sally Fallon Morell and Kaayla Daniel, PhD. We’re talking about their new book, Nourishing Broth.
So Sally, why should people make their own broth and not just buy it in a can or a box.
SALLY FALLON MORELL: Right! In the book, we talked about all the components of broth – the special amino acids, all the components of cartilage that your body uses to build cartilage in the body. All these are there in broth that you make yourself with bones.
When you buy soup or bouillon cubes or powdered soup or canned soup or whatever, there’s no broth in there. They are using flavorings to give you the taste of broth, but there’s none of the health benefits there. In fact, there could be some health detriments if you are sensitive to MSG and a lot of these flavorings.
I wanted to say that when you eat soup, you probably don’t want that chocolate cake. Broth is so satisfying. And one of the things broth can do is raise dopamine, make you feel good. That’s what chocolate does also, but broth is a much more nutritious way of doing that.
DEBRA: So what does a beginner need to know about making broth, somebody who just has never made it before?
SALLY FALLON MORELL: Again, I would say to just start saving up bones or buy some backs or necks in the market and put them in a stock pot or a slow cooker. You put a little bit of vinegar in there to bring out the minerals into the broth and you fill it with some good water. You can add as many vegetables as you want. The fundamental one would be a chopped up onion. But a lot of people add carrots, celery, parsley, garlic and so forth. but just put in there what you have and what you want to put in.
And then you bring it to a slow simmer. You bring it slowly to a simmer, I should say. Let it slowly simmer anywhere from four to 24 hours.
DEBRA: Mm-hmmm… I usually simmer it about six or eight hours.
SALLY FALLON MORELL: And that’s just fine for chicken broth, yes.
DEBRA: Yeah. Yeah, yeah. So Kaayla, in the book, there’s a number of different kinds of broths. You have chicken broth and beef broth, fish broth and a number of different things. Which one has the most healing power?
KAAYLA DANIEL: I like to say whatever broth you actually make and eat because they’re all good. I recommend a variety because each of them has different percentages of all these healing components.
For example, if you’re making a chicken broth from a carcass of a chicken, you’re going to have the skin, you’re going to have the cartilage, you’re going to have the bones. But a chicken broth is not going to have as much marrow because chicken bone is like any bird bone, they’re light and not much marrow.
But you’re going to get a whole lot of marrow, for example, if you’re using lamb or beef [inaudible 00:16:55] bone – rich probes of marrow in there. So it’s really going to depend on which bones you’re using. You’re more likely to get, say, iodine and thyroid benefits from little dried fish. So they’re all good.
We get a lot of questions about what exact bones we should use for perfect broth and I tell people to relax, just use enough of them and do a variety and it’s all good.
DEBRA: Good! Well, I occasionally will make beef bones. I think it’s more difficult – I don’t know why – to make beef soft than it is for chicken bones. I eat a lot of chicken. I know a lot of people buy just chicken breast, just the meat of the chicken without buying the bones. But I always buy the whole chicken and I always makes roast chicken. It’s very unusual. I have to be really busy or some reason why I can’t make a whole chicken in order for me to quickly buy chicken breast and just make that, just be able to have some fast chicken.
And then I always have this steady stream of chicken bones. I always save them. Sometimes, if I don’t make the chicken broth soon enough, my freezer gets full of all these chicken bones.
SALLY FALLON MORELL: I know. It looks kind of scary in there, I have to admit.
DEBRA: They do, they do. But I never make one chicken. I always wait until I have the bones of two chickens. The other day, I made three chickens. It’s just so easy. I just want to make sure that people understand that this is not a big, drawn out process. You just save the bones, you throw them in a pot. You put the water in, you put whatever else you want to put in there (vegetables, whole grain). And then it just sits on the back of a stove while you’re doing other things. I fortunately work at home, so I can do that kind of thing or you can put it on a slow cooker and you go off to work.
SALLY FALLON MORELL: Yes, slow cookers are great, yeah.
DEBRA: Yeah, it really is. The prep time is only the time it takes you to chop the vegetables and put the bones in a pot and then it just sits there and it does this thing. You open the pot and you have this super, super nourishing – it’s not a big deal to do it yourself. And once you do it, it just is amazing. It’s amazing.
KAAYLA DANIEL: I think people get too worried about making the perfect gourmet soup and a lot of people are intimidated (especially the younger generation growing up on everything processed and packaged and fast). But broth really is the original fast food. And once we have a huge [inaudible 00:19:48], it goes very, very quickly and you can always have nourishing food ready for yourself.
DEBRA: You can! And another thing that I do, I make it and often, I’ll make more than I can eat. At one point, I had a problem with making it and not being able to eat it as fast before it would then go bad. And so then, I started just putting serving size containers in the freezers. And so you can just take it out like a can of soup (except instead of having a can and all those additives and the BPA from the can and all of that stuff). You’ve got your own chicken stock and then you can make it into any kind of soup that you want.
So give us a tip. We’re coming up on break. So Sally, give us a tip of a quick soup that you can make if you just got your chicken broth on hand.
SALLY FALLON MORELL: Well, the quickest thing you can do is pick off all the meat from the bones, chop it up and put it in your broth, a little bit of rice and cook that some more [inaudible 00:20:53]. And then maybe a can of tomatoes and salt and pepper. That’s a real easy recipe to do.
DEBRA: That sounds really good to me. You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guests today are Sally Fallon Morell and Kaayla Daniel, authors of Nourishing Broth, a brand new book. You can go to their website for the book. It’s NourishingBroth.com. You can order it there and read all the great comments from everybody telling what a wonderful book it is. And we’ll be right back.
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guests today are Sally Fallon Morell and Kaayla Daniel, authors of the new book, Nourishing Broth.
So I want to give another tip about making soup. If you’ve got the chicken stock or the beef stock or whatever kind of stock you have broth on hand, I always try to make a little bit more of any dinner that I’m making so that I have leftovers. A really easy thing to do is just chop up those leftovers and throw them in the chicken broth and you instantly have soup. That’s my tip for this segment.
So you said earlier, Sally about picking the meat off the bones. I just wanted to ask you do you cook the whole chicken with the meat on it because what I do is I roast the chicken, I pull out the meat out of it and eat it and then I take the bones that have bits of meat on it. In my case, I only like to eat white meat, not dark meat. That’s just been my preference since I was a child. So the white meat, I just eat as roast chicken. And then the legs and the thighs go into the soup pot. So do you actually cook the whole bird or do you just use the bones?
SALLY FALLON MORELL: Well, I’ve done it both ways. In fact, when I was cooking for a large family. Usually, on Thursday, I put two chickens in a pot and cook to those. And then all of that chicken meat went to make tacos or chicken salad or burritos or chicken a la king or something for the weekends. So we had plenty of food for the weekend.
And then as a bonus, I had all these broth. The leftover bones from picking the meat off the chickens could go back in and make more broth.
Today, I’m only cooking for myself and my husband. And so I usually do a roast chicken that we eat over several days. Then I save the bones. As I say, they look kind of scary in those ziplock bags in the freezer. But when I have enough to fill up the slow cooker, then I make my broth. You can do it both ways.
And one thing about cooking the whole chicken is you are cooking the skin. We’ve heard so much about skinless chicken breast, we should only skin the chicken breast, but the skin is very nutritious. The amino acids in the skin balance the amino acids in broth to give you a real nice balance of what you need.
DEBRA: Oh, yeah.
SALLY FALLON MORELL: And there’s a lot of gelatin in the skin. There’s a lot of cartilage in the skin. So when you do cook the whole chicken, you’re cooking the skin and getting all of the components of skin in your broth.
DEBRA: Well, I have to admit that when I roast my chicken, the first thing that happens when I take it out of the oven is I rip that crispy skin right off and put it straight in my mouth.
SALLY FALLON MORELL: Right, right. Yes, same with us. So when you are doing chicken that way, you have the bones left over, but there’s never any skin left over, I can tell you.
DEBRA: No skin whatsoever. Also, you commented about putting in the feet and the head. I remember the first time I had a whole chicken. This is many years ago. I opened the package.i was used to chicken breast, boneless/skinless. And then also, earlier, before they had boneless/skinless, I used to have chicken breast on the bones.
But I decided one day that I was going to get a whole chicken. And where I was living, that was something that was possible. I opened the packaged. I mean, just to see the feet and the head, it was very scary. It was very scary because you don’t think it’s an animal. And then, you put it in the pot and the feet are sticking out and it’s got little fingernails on it, on the toes.
SALLY FALLON MORELL: Right. I used to hang those over the edge of the pot, so my kids could see it, yeah.
DEBRA: Yeah. But I have to tell you that once I got over that, putting chicken feet in your soup is absolutely the thing to do. And where I was living at the time, there was a place where I could buy chickens with the feet on them. And then I could also buy just feet by themselves because the chickens were delivered with feet to the store. And so the butcher in the store would cut off the feet for those who didn’t want them. And so I could buy all the – they were just given to me.
But then they stopped delivering them. The delivery actually came with the chicken without the feet and I couldn’t get chicken feet anymore.
And so do you have some suggestions on how people can get chicken feet or anything you want to say about chicken feet, Kaayla?
KAAYLA DANIEL: I get my chicken feet from an ethnic market here in Albuquerque. They usually come frozen. They also have the gizzards and some of the other things that I like to include in my soup. Basically, a whole lot of the things that some of us want, but the average consumer is not going to buy. I usually buy a whole lot of chicken feet and they are frozen. I heat them in a freezer.
My method of cooking is usually on a Sunday, I will roast a chicken. There will be a lot of gelatin underneath the chicken that we’ll eat right then and there. And of course, we’ve eaten off most of the skin as well. So I will then, the second day or third day, I’ll probably take off say the breast milk because we usually go for the drumstick the first day. So I’ll take off the breast meat and I’ll make something like a chicken curry and that will be enough. It’s sauced with say coconut milk and some broth and some other ingredients.
So I’ll have my carcass. And then that does go into the slow cooker. But because I’ve already got my gelatin because it came off the roast chicken, I’m just going to get a good gelatinous broth unless I add a few other things. And what I’m going to add is chicken feet.
DEBRA: Oh, good. Yeah, yeah. The chicken feet really make a difference in the gelatinousness of it and also the flavor. It really makes a difference. I can tell if chicken stock has been made with chicken feet. It’s a huge difference.
KAAYLA DANIEL: It makes a huge difference. And then I give my dog the very soft chicken feet. Her skin, her hair fur is just amazingly healthy.
DEBRA: Well, so we’ve all heard all the grandmothers say that you should eat chicken soup and that’s the best thing for you and it’ll cure anything. Sally, is it true that broth can heal or is that an old wive’s tale.
SALLY FALLON MORELL: It’s not an old wive’s tale. It’s one of these traditions about food that’s totally validated by the science. And that’s what I love about this book. It’s really Kaayla who has put all the science together for us and it is absolutely fascinating.
One of the things I learned that I didn’t know was that we have cartilage all over the body, not just in our bones. We have cartilage in our eyes. We have cartilage in our organs, in our skin and lining the intestinal tract of the gut. We have cartilage in all that needs to be nourished and kept good and healthy and robust. And that’s what broth does.
So we can expect to see beautiful, healthy skin in people who eat broth, strong, flexible bones, good, strong digestion. Maybe we could even say good eyesight or healthy eyes. So there’s no part of the body that broth does not nourish.
DEBRA: Amazing! So we need to go to break again. But when we come back, Kaayla, I would like you to tell us about the science that supports broth for healing, how far that goes back, how long we’ve known this. You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest today are Sally Fallon Morell and Kaayla Daniels, authors of Nourishing Broth. You can learn more about their book at NourishingBroth.com. We’ll be right back.
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guests today are Sally Fallon Morell and Kaayla Daniel, authors of the new book, Nourishing Broth. You can go to their website at NourishingBroth.com. You also probably want to go to the Weston A Price Foundation website, which is WestonAPrice.org, which has an amazing amount of information about all kinds of aspects of real food.
And if you become a member, you can become part of a local chapter and the people in that chapter will help you find the best quality food that exists in your local area. You can go straight to the farmer’s and get raw milk and pastured chickens and all kinds of wonderful things. So if you want the best information that exists about food, go to WestonAPrice.org and become a member.
So over the break, I was thinking about how economical it is to make broth because here, you have something that you’re going to – literally, we’re just throwing away the bones. They have no value. You put them in water and boil them and you’ve got all these nutrition. So people throw away the bones, throw away all that nutrition and then they go spend money on buying supplements.
SALLY FALLON MORELL: Yeah.
DEBRA: And in times past before we had an industrial society, what people would do is get their nutrition, far superior nutrition than we have today from actual food.
SALLY FALLON MORELL: Yes, with less meat because with broth, you don’t need as much protein. Broth is a protein sparer. I like to talk about how you can get four meals for a family of four from one chicken.
DEBRA: Oh, tell us.
SALLY FALLON MORELL: Well, first, you bake the chicken, have roast chicken. Then you pick up all the extra meat, then you make broth. Some of the extra meat goes for maybe a chicken salad or chicken curry. I do a gourmet salad with sautéed chicken meat. And then finally, you’ve got your broth for a soup. So there’s four meals there.
DEBRA: Yes, yes. And I know that my chicken stock lasts all week. And not only can you have soup, but you can also use it as the base for making sauces and other things (like making a curry sauce with the chicken stock). So delicious!
SALLY FALLON MORELL: That’s how you make sauce, with broth.
DEBRA: With broth, that’s right. It’s the foundation for all those sauces. And if you go to cooking school, the first thing that they do is they teach you how to make stock. That’s it.
SALLY FALLON MORELL: Right.
DEBRA: So Kaayla, do tell us about the question I asked before about science supporting broth for healing.
KAAYLA DANIEL: Well, of course, we don’t have a lot of studies on soup itself because nobody is going to sponsor and pay for a lot of expensive studies for a product that nobody can pill or powder or patent. So we don’t have studies on soup itself. Well, we just have a few.
But there’s a whole lot of studies, hundreds of studies on the individual components of broth. They would include cartilage, which itself is a whole food and collagen and also some of the amino acid, glutamine and proline (the top three amino acid that we find in broth) and a lot of studies on the proteoglycans which stands for the protein sugar. People know them most popularly as the supplement Glucosamine and the supplement Chondroitin Sulfate.
So there’s hundreds, thousands of studies of these separate components. Some studies are on bone marrow. And of course, besides all of those that are unique to broth, we’re also going to get the nutrition from the vegetables that go into our broth and from other ingredients.
DEBRA: Like garlic.
KAAYLA DANIEL: Like garlic, exactly. Broth is a vehicle for all sorts of other ingredients. I think people worry too much about making the absolute perfect thing all the time. We can experiment. We can adapt our old, favorite recipes. Back from when I was a vegetarian, I used the Moosewood Cookbook and I adapt a lot of those recipes to include broth now.
DEBRA: I’m just smiling because so many people are trying to take their favorite meat-oriented recipes and make them vegetarian. You’re taking your vegetarian recipes and adapting, adding the nutrition that comes from animals.
Let’s see. Sally, how much broth do you recommend that people consume every day to obtain the health benefits?
SALLY FALLON MORELL: I think it’s good to aim sort of a maintenance dose of a cup of broth a day. Now, you can do that as a broth in a mug, but I typically use broth to make soup or to make a sauce or a gravy. That’s a really lovely way to get your broth, a very nutritious way to eat the meat that you’ve put that sauce on as well.
However, if you’ve been sick, if you are healing from something, I would have a cup of broth at every meal. You will be amazed at how quickly you heal. We do talk about broth for injuries in the book and how you need extra nourishment for your cartilage when you are healing.
One thing I want to add because you’re into toxins and how to avoid toxins, one of the things that Kaayla has found is that the types of amino acids in broth supports the liver’s ability to detoxify your body. So again, broth is very protective as well as nourishing.
DEBRA: And it really has been a staple of every cuisine forever.
SALLY FALLON MORELL: Every cuisine in the world. I’m talking about African, Asian, American Indians. The American Indians made broth and considered it more nourishing, better for them than water.
DEBRA: Yeah, yeah. It’s just there in every culture except ours because we’ve moved away from making our own food out of real food ingredients. And instead, people are buying things in the supermarket. They think it’s more convenient, but it’s not nourishing. It’s not nourishing. It doesn’t have the same nourishment. It just doesn’t.
SALLY FALLON MORELL: Right. You’re cheating yourself.
DEBRA: You are, you are, you are, you are. Absolutely. I think it’s important that everybody consider cooking and food preparation to be part of their normal, daily routine of being healthy and happy and having the joy of eating good food. It’s just part of our health. If we don’t do that ourselves and just substitute it with packaged, processed foods, we’re just not getting it. And to do this whole thing of processed foods and laboratory made supplements is not the same as getting your nutrition from food.
SALLY FALLON MORELL: Well, one of the things, once you learn to make broth, you’re on the road to becoming a good cook. It’s the basis for becoming a good cook.
DEBRA: Yes, it absolutely is. Why are there no vegetarian recipes in the book? Why not vegetable broth, Sally?
SALLY FALLON MORELL: Oh, I’ll leave that for Kaayla.
DEBRA: Okay!
KAAYLA DANIEL: Well, of course, the topic was bone broth and I don’t know any vegetarian bones. Although they do call tofu ‘the meat without the bone’. So much of the nutrition does come from the bones and the cartilage and the skin. And of course, we also get added nutrition from whatever vegetables we’re adding to the broth, typically the classic mirepoix, the onions, the celery, the carrots, et cetera.
But the bone broth made from bones is just so rich. It makes your reputation as a cook. The recipes just tastes so much better. For example, all the bean recipes, it’s absolutely fail-proof that you make them with ham hock. You’ll have a reputation throughout your community as cook.
DEBRA: Yeah. Well, we only have a couple of minutes of the show. So I’d like to give each of you the opportunity to give us whatever closing words you’d like to. Sally, do you want to go first?
SALLY FALLON MORELL: I just want to say what a joy it was to write this book. My big thing in my career has been to show the scientific validation of traditional food ways and it’s just been wonderful to see what Kaayla put together.
I also think the biggest compliment we’ve gotten so far in the book is that it’s a page turner. Can you imagine that a book on broth, people can’t stop turning the pages to read it? So very readable, yes.
DEBRA: It’s a very fascinating subject, yes. The book is just excellent! It’s excellent. Kaayla?
KAAYLA DANIEL: I’d like to invite everyone to join our broth making community because Sally and I have so much to share. And so we’ve put up a new website, NourishingBroth.com. That’s where we’re going to be answering all the questions (and we get lots and lots of questions) and people are sharing their stories and new recipes.
We also have a gift for people, two gifts in fact. One is Extra Helpings of Nourishing Broth. That’s the piece from Sally. And the other is my tip on ‘How to be Souper’, pun totally intended.
DEBRA: Souper, I love that. Good! Well, thank you so much again for being with me today. And again, I want to give all the websites for you to get more information from both of these lovely women. As Kaayla just said, you can go to NourishingBroth.com. That’s about the book. And then you want to go to WestonAPrice.org to find out more about the Weston A Price Foundation and all the wonderful work that both Kaayla and Sally are doing to make us all aware of the real foods, how they can be prepared, the traditional ways people have nourished themselves.
And also, they do so much work to make access to these foods – things like raw milk and pastured eggs and all of these foods that you don’t normally find in a supermarket, but are the things that we should eat. You don’t even find them in natural food stores although we do have pastured eggs now at my natural food store.
Oh, we’ve got to go! This is Toxic Free Talk Radio.
SALLY FALLON MORELL: Thank you, Debra. Thank you so much.
DEBRA: You’re welcome.
KAAYLA DANIEL: Thank you.
DEBRA: Thank you, both of you. This is Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. Be well.
