Once you learn how to make roast turkey bone broth on the stove top, you will never throw out your roast turkey carcass again. Instead, you’ll turn it into some of the most flavorful and collagen-rich bone broth you have ever had!
You can use this recipe to make any poultry bone broth, and if you’re looking for a unique poultry recipe to surprise and delight your family and friends with this holiday season, I also share some memorable poultry recipes in this blog post.
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Table of Contents
- The Modern Pioneer Cookbook
- Benefits of a Roast Turkey Bone Broth
- How to Make Acidulated Water
- How to Choose Vegetables for Your Bone Broth
- More Turkey Bone Broth Recipes
- Memorable Poultry Recipes
- More Bone Broth Videos
- More Broth Recipes
- Looking for Bones or Chicken Feet to Make Broth?
- Download Your Free 36-Page Pantry List
- Kitchen Academy Videos
- How to Make Roast Turkey Bone Broth Recipe
- Shop for items used in this blog post or video
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The Modern Pioneer Cookbook
Seasonal ingredients, traditional techniques, and nourishing recipes. Over 85 traditional, from-scratch recipes! Discover for yourself how you can use simple ingredients and traditional techniques to cook the modern pioneer way.
Benefits of a Roast Turkey Bone Broth
After you’ve enjoyed a delicious turkey dinner this holiday season or any time of the year, don’t throw the carcass out! Instead, use the turkey bones and some of the vegetables from your crisper to make a delicious roast turkey bone broth.
With this recipe, your turkey bone broth will come out incredibly gelatinous, giving you lots of collagen to help your joints and soothe your digestive system. You can add a pinch of sea salt to enjoy sipping the bone broth on a cool day or use it as a base to make a tasty turkey noodle soup, as I did.
How to Make Acidulated Water
You’ll want to soak your bones in acidulated water which will help to leach out the collagen from the bones and cartilage. Oftentimes, I’ll add vermouth, a fortified wine, to water to make the acidulated water. Vermouth doesn’t leave an aftertaste, and the alcohol evaporates after the six-hour simmer time for making a poultry bone broth.
As an alternative to an alcohol, you can also use lemon or lime citrus juice or vinegar. However, don’t use a white vinegar, which will leave too strong a taste.
Instead, choose a lighter vinegar, such as apple cider or a citrus vinegar. They will leave a lighter taste, but that’s what I’m hoping for in today’s recipe, where I’m using an apple and cranberry vinegar. Any remaining flavors will complement my roast turkey bone broth, making it even more delightful!
You’ll put your turkey carcass, acid, and water in your stockpot to soak for about an hour. However, be careful how much water you add. You’ll want to just cover the bones with your water, as I show you in the following picture.
Too much water will dilute the flavor and strength of your roast turkey bone broth. You’ll also have to drink or use more of it to get the same amount of it collagen as a more concentrated amount of bone broth.
Homemade Vinegar Recipes
In the following videos, I show you how to make homemade vinegars that you can use to create your acidulated water or in other recipes. My homemade apple cider vinegar recipe series goes in-depth to help you make this popular vinegar over three detailed videos. You’ll start with the apples and wind up decanting homemade vinegar with the mother.
Note that any vinegar mother that may be in your acidulated water will be cooked during the bone broth simmering process, but that’s okay. It was there to help you draw out the collagen from the turkey carcass.
How to Choose Vegetables for Your Bone Broth
After you’ve let your turkey carcass soak in acidulated water in your stockpot for an hour, you’ll want to:
- Bring the contents of your stockpot up to a boil on your stove top.
- Skim off the foam or scum that may accumulate at the top.
- Turn your stove top heat down to low.
- Add your vegetables and other aromatics.
- Let your bone broth simmer for six hours before straining and decanting it.
Choose vegetables for your bone broth that are getting past their prime. In my recipe video, I add rough chopped carrots, celery, and onions. Be sure to keep the onion skins on since that provides additional nutrition. (You can also use onion skins to make an Ancient Home Remedy for Colds and Flu.) I also add peppercorns and bay leaves for flavor.
Note how my roast turkey bone broth looks as it is simmering in the following image. You want it to be at 180°F with light bubbles rising to the top. I describe it as a “bloop, bloop.” That’s the magical sight and sound to make sure your bone broth is warm enough to cook the ingredients but not too hot that the gelatin will break down.
After your bone broth has simmered for six hours, you’ll want to strain out the solids and decant it, as I show you in the full recipe video and describe in the printable recipe below. I like to store my roast turkey bone broth in French jelly jars with plastic lids.
The lids are especially handy in case I freeze my bone broth and the contents expands. If I didn’t have enough headspace in the jar, the expanded frozen turkey bone broth would pop off my lid rather than risk breaking the glass.
More Turkey Bone Broth Recipes
In today’s video, I show you how to make turkey bone broth on the stovetop, since you don’t need to have any additional equipment other than a stock pot. If you happen to have a slow cooker or Instant Pot, I show you how to make turkey bone broth in those devices, too, in the following videos.
Memorable Poultry Recipes
For home cooks starting on their traditional foods journey, I always recommend starting with a roast chicken. It’s so easy to make, and once you master cooking a chicken, you’ll feel confident to tackle other nutrient-dense recipes.
In the many videos I’ve made over the years, you know how much I love making a roast chicken and saving the bones afterward to make chicken bone broth. During holiday time, we also enjoy a roast turkey presented and carved at the dining room table accompanied with lots of sides. A nice and juicy turkey can give you lots of leftovers and a carcass you can use to make turkey bone broth too!
But have you thought about making other poultry recipes to make your holiday festivities even more memorable? Think about bringing a special poultry dish to your holiday table that you usually wouldn’t do during other times of the year. In the following videos, I show you how to make Rock Cornish hens, duck, and goose.
Rock Cornish hens are a lot of fun since everyone will feel special having a little “turkey” of their own.
Duck is a dish you don’t see often, but I’m pleasantly surprised at how easy it is to find a frozen duck at my local grocery store and nearby big box store, especially this time of the year.
For roast goose, I always think of my favorite story of redemption, The Christmas Carol, written by Charles Dickens. So if you make this recipe for your Christmas festivities, I hope you’ll picture Bob Cratchit and his family enjoying the meal with you and talk about the parts of the story you love with everyone around the dinner table.
I guarantee that you and your family will remember the time you made one of these special poultry recipes!
More Bone Broth Videos
You can make bone broth from all kinds of bones. In the following videos, I show you how to make bone broth from chicken, beef, fish, and pork bones. If you like ramen, be sure to make homemade pork bone broth. It’s the perfect accompaniment!
More Broth Recipes
And if you want a broth that leans more to the vegetarian side, try out the following broth recipes. Note that I add chicken feet to the mushroom broth to help make it more gelatinous, but you can choose to leave it out if you want a completely vegetarian broth.
Looking for Bones or Chicken Feet to Make Broth?
If you can’t find beef bones or chicken feet in your neighborhood supermarket or farmer’s market, check out US Wellness Meats for their wide selection.
- Use discount code MARYNEST and my link to save 15% off regular-priced items on your US Wellness Meats order. You can shop for a variety of products, including:
This post is not sponsored. I’m a long-time customer of US Wellness Meats because I have always been impressed by the quality of their products. Check out my US Wellness Meats unboxing video to see the types of products you can get, including bones for beef bone broth!
Download Your Free 36-Page Pantry List
For an extensive list of the traditional foods you can make and purchase to stock your pantry, be sure to download my free 36-page Traditional Foods Pantry List. This comprehensive eBook is full of links to recipe videos, helpful articles, and more!
And if you’re looking for a printed book full of my traditional foods recipes that shows you how to create a traditional foods kitchen, be sure to order your copy of my new bestselling book, The Modern Pioneer Cookbook.
Kitchen Academy Videos
Are you looking for more traditional foods videos? If so, I invite you to join the Traditional Foods Kitchen Academy. Members of this optional paid YouTube community get access to exclusive videos, live streams, and other members-only perks. Plus, your YouTube comments include a special members-only badge.
In the following members-only video replay, I talk about how to make perpetual bone broth along with other topics that we chatted about in our recent live stream.
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I look forward to having you join me in my Texas Hill Country Kitchen!
How to Make Roast Turkey Bone Broth
Equipment
- 1 10-quart stockpot
- 1 Spider strainer or slotted spoon
- 1 Flour sack towel or cheesecloth
- 1 Heatproof glass bowl or large measuring cup
- 1 Half gallon jar with tight-fitting cap Optionally, you could use 2 quart size jars
Ingredients
- 1 Turkey carcass, plus turkey scraps including wing tips, neck, and tail
- 1/4 cup Apple cider vinegar Optionally, you can use 1 cup of white vermouth or 2 tablespoons of lemon juice.
- 3 Carrots, unpeeled, rough chopped
- 3 Celery stalks, rough chopped
- 2 Yellow onions, unpeeled, rough chopped
- 2 Bay leaves
- 10 Whole black peppercorns
Instructions
- Place turkey carcass and scraps into stockpot.
- Add vinegar to stock.
- Add water to the stockpot sufficient to cover the carcass. Do not worry if any bones float to the top of the water.
- Allow the carcass to soak in the acidulated water for 1 hour.
- Place the stockpot on the stovetop and bring it to a boil on high heat. Once boiling, immediately turn the heat down to the lowest setting and skim off any foam that has risen to the top.
- Add all remaining ingredients. Stir well and allow to simmer on low, uncovered, for 6 hours.
- After 6 hours, turn off the heat, remove the stockpot from the stovetop, and place it on a heatproof surface.
- Using a spider strainer or a slotted spoon, remove all the ingredients from the liquid. The remaining liquid is the bone broth.
- Wet the flour sack towel and ring it out well. Line a mesh strainer with the damp flour sack towel and place it over a heatproof bowl.
- Carefully pour or ladle the hot bone broth into the lined mesh strainer. The flour sack towel will retain any debris still remaining in the bone broth.
- If using a fat separator to defat the bone broth, pour the bone broth into it and then decant the bone broth into a jar.
- If not using a fat separator, simply pour the bone broth directly into a jar.
- The defatted bone broth will stay fresh in the refrigerator for approximately 1 week. Bone broth with the fat intact (which will create a "fat cap" on top of the broth) will stay fresh in the refrigerator for approximately 2 weeks. Once the fat cap is cracked, the bone broth should be used within a few days.
- If frozen in a freezer-proof container, bone broth will stay fresh in the freezer for approximately 6 months but will be at its peak within the first 3 months.
Video
Notes
Shop for items used in this blog post or video
Favorite Bone Broth Making Supplies
- 10-Quart Stock Pot
- 8-Quart Instant Pot
- 7-Quart Slow-Cooker
- 10-Quart Slow-Cooker
- Spider Strainer
- Mesh Strainer
- Flour Sack Towels
- Glass Bowls
- Fat Separator (Clever kitchen device to help you decant bone broth)
- Half Gallon Jar
- 2-Cup Glass Storage Jars with Plastic Lids
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