“All disease begins in the gut” — Hippocrates
Ask ten people what the difference is between stock and broth and you will get ten answers, most of them about seasoning. In a GAPS kitchen the distinction is not culinary at all. It is about time, temperature, and what those two things do to the parts of the animal you are cooking.
Meat stock is cooked briefly — a couple of hours for chicken, three or four for larger joints — with the meat still on the bone. Bone broth is cooked for a day or more, long after the meat has gone, to draw minerals out of the bone itself.
Both are good food. Only one of them belongs at the start.
Why the short cook comes first
The long cook that makes bone broth so mineral-rich also liberates a great deal of free glutamate. For most people that is unremarkable. For someone whose gut wall is already inflamed and permeable — which is the whole premise of starting the Introduction Diet — it can be a great deal to ask of a system that is not yet ready to handle it.
Meat stock sidesteps that. It carries the gelatine and the amino acids that help repair a gut lining, in a form that is gentle enough to take several times a day from the very first morning.
The Introduction Diet is not a test of endurance. It is a sequence, and the sequence exists because each stage prepares the ground for the next. Dr Natasha Campbell-McBride
What good stock looks like
- It gels when it cools. Not always, and not for every cut — but a wobble in the fridge is a good sign that the gelatine came out.
- The fat stays in. Skimming it off removes exactly the part that carries the fat-soluble vitamins.
- It tastes of something. Salt it. A stock nobody wants to drink is a stock nobody drinks.
Joints, feet and skin
The cuts most people ignore are the ones that make the best stock. Chicken feet, oxtail, lamb neck, a pork hock — all cheap, all full of connective tissue, all far better for this than a lean breast.
When bone broth earns its place
Later. Once the Introduction stages are behind you and the gut is tolerating a widening range of foods, the long cook and its minerals become genuinely useful. It is not that bone broth is bad. It is that it is a stage-four food being handed to people on day one.
If you take one thing from this: start short, start salted, start with the meat still on the bone.