Why there is no vinegar in our bone broth
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Nearly every bone broth recipe you will find tells you to add a splash of apple cider vinegar before you start. The reasoning is always the same. The acid pulls minerals out of the bones, so you get more calcium, more magnesium, more of whatever the article is selling.
I made broth that way for a while. Then I stopped. Here is the thinking.
Where the vinegar advice comes from
The usual source is Nourishing Broth by Sally Fallon Morell and Kaayla Daniel, published in 2014. It is the book that did more than anything else to bring bone broth back into home kitchens, and it is a good book. It is also where most of the vinegar instruction on the internet traces back to, which makes it worth reading rather than quoting.
Two things in it are worth sitting with. The first is that the calcium you pull out of bones stays low even with acid in the pot. Not zero. Just nowhere near the amount the recipe blogs imply. The second is that amino acid levels come in substantially higher in a long-cooked broth than a short-cooked one.
So the book most often cited for the vinegar trick makes the case for time, not for acid.
What vinegar actually does
Two things, and neither one is what you want.
It helps a little with mineral extraction, at a scale that does not change what is in your cup.
And you can taste it. Acid in a pot that runs for a full day does not cook away to nothing. It settles underneath everything else, slightly sharp, and it flattens the beefiness you just spent 24 hours building.
If the broth is going into a stew with tomatoes and red wine, you will never notice. If you are drinking it from a mug on a Tuesday afternoon, you will.
What we do instead
We simmer for 24 hours and we leave it alone.
Collagen is what most people are actually after, and collagen does not need any help. It sits in the connective tissue around and inside the bones, and heat plus time turns it into gelatin on its own. You can watch it happen. Chill a properly made broth and it sets like jelly. That is not something anyone added. That is the bones giving up what they had, because somebody waited.
Time is the only lever we pull. Whole cuts of grass-fed beef and bones, free-range turkey and chicken, free-range chicken feet, organic carrots, celery and onion, sea salt, whole spices, water. A long quiet simmer. Strained by hand through fine mesh. Frozen fresh.
That is the whole method, and it comes from Emilia-Romagna in northern Italy, where broth has its own place at the table.
Why you can see the difference
Here is the part that makes this more than a preference.
A broth made this way is clear. You can hold it up to the light and see through it. That clarity is not decoration, it is evidence. It means the pot was never boiled hard enough to crack the proteins apart, never stirred hard enough to drive the fat into the water, and never rushed.
Escoffier used the clarity of a consommé as the test of a serious kitchen more than a hundred years ago. The test has not changed. Cloudy broth is not a sign of richness. It is a sign of agitated fat, bone fragments, and the gamey taste you cannot cook back out.
Vinegar is one of the shortcuts people take to get to the finish line faster. The others are boiling, stirring, concentrates and powders. They all show up in the glass.
The honest version of the advice
If you make broth at home and you want to add vinegar, add it. A tablespoon in a stockpot is not going to ruin anything, and plenty of cooks I respect do it. I am not telling you how to run your kitchen.
But if you are adding it because you read that it unlocks the minerals, know that the book everyone is citing does not really say that. And if you have ever tasted your own broth and found it slightly sour underneath, now you know where that came from.
The thing that actually changes your broth is the thing nobody wants to hear. Leave it alone longer.
Common questions
Do you need vinegar to make bone broth?
No. Vinegar is usually added to help extract minerals from the bones, but mineral extraction stays low with or without it. A long simmer does far more for the finished broth than acid does.
What does apple cider vinegar do in bone broth?
It slightly increases mineral extraction and it adds a sour note you can taste in a broth you drink on its own. In a broth destined for a stew or a sauce, it tends to disappear.
How much vinegar should I use in bone broth?
Most recipes call for one to two tablespoons per large pot. We use none and simmer for 24 hours instead.
Does bone broth without vinegar still have collagen?
Yes. Collagen converts to gelatin with heat and time, not with acid. A broth that gels when chilled has plenty of it.
How long should bone broth simmer?
Ours runs 24 hours at a slow simmer, never boiled and never stirred. Long-cooked broth draws out substantially more amino acids than a short cook does.