How to Make Beef Stock From Bones

Two rules: roast the bones first, and never let the pot boil. Everything else is time.

October 21, 2026 · 3 min read

Get the bones right first. Marrow bones make thin stock because marrow is fat, not collagen. You want knuckle and neck, which is set out in what to do with beef bones.

Beef Stock From Bones Makes about 3 quarts
4 lb Beef Broth Bones	1 roast ~45 min until deep brown	2 cold water, bare simmer 6 hr
2 onions, halved	3 roast alongside, last 20 min
3 carrots, in chunks
3 sticks celery
2 bay leaves
1 Tbsp black peppercorns
6 quarts cold water
4Skim the foam off in the first twenty minutes and then leave it alone.
5Strain, chill, and lift the set fat off the top. Keep that fat: it is tallow.

Numbers show the order to work in. Each cell spans exactly the ingredients it uses.

Roast the bones, always

Raw bones give a pale, flat stock. Roasted bones give color and depth, because browning builds flavor compounds that simmering alone never produces. Forty-five minutes, until they are genuinely dark rather than just beige.

Never let it boil

This is the rule that matters. A boiling pot churns fat and fine particles into the liquid and emulsifies them, and the result is cloudy and greasy and will not clarify afterwards. A bare simmer, barely breaking the surface, extracts just as much and stays clear.

“We used to just kind of not try to outsmart God, let the animal do what it's supposed to do and stay out of the way.”
Gray Shipley

“And it takes three years to make a steak.”
Gray Shipley

Cold water at the start

Starting cold lets the proteins that cause scum rise and coagulate at the surface where you can skim them off. Starting hot locks them into the liquid. Skim for the first twenty minutes and then stop fussing.

“There's a saying that farming isn't rocket science. It's way more complicated than that.”
Gray Shipley

Chill it and the fat sets in a disc on top. Lift it off and keep it: that is tallow, and it is the same thing used in roast potatoes.

The bones for this

Beef Broth Bones

Joint-heavy broth bones. Collagen is what gives stock its body.

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Common question

How do I make beef stock from bones?

Roast the bones first, then simmer them barely at all for several hours and never let it boil.

Authoritative sources

Food-safety temperatures and storage times on this page are cited to the agencies above rather than to us.

About this guide

Written at Shipley Farms in Vilas, North Carolina: a family cattle farm raising and dry-aging beef in the Appalachian Mountains, now in its fifth generation. No shortcuts since 1872.

Every quote on this page is Gray Shipley talking, the man who runs this farm. We sat down with him, turned on a recorder, and kept his own words. Hesitations are trimmed so they read on the page. Nothing else is added or reworded, except where Gray revised his own words in review.

Nobody knows this beef better than we do. On food safety we leave it to USDA FSIS and FoodSafety.gov, and we have linked their pages above. Reviewed 3 October 2026.