Cutting a Leftover Ham Bone for Bone Broth

The twenty pound ham that was purchased for Easter turned out to be a more significant part of my time and life than I had expected. This past weekend, we ended up going over to my in-laws house for an appetizer and burger type “pub night” dinner. I made up some deviled ham out of the ground ham from my last blog post. We also stuffed some of that ham with cream cheese and shredded cheese into baby bella mushrooms and baked them, which turned out fantastic.

I had been admittedly a little intimidated by the side of the ham bone I was left with. Turns out I do not have a pit large enough for the ham bone to fit so I could make the broth for my Split Pea Soup recipe.

Upon advice from the always reputable internet, I marched into Safeway to ask if it would be possible to bring the bone in and have it cut in half. The butcher kindly explained to me that due to cross-contamination, he could not cut the bone. I hadn’t even thought about that. After a short discussion, we ended up with me buying a hacksaw, and how much of a bitch that was going to be.

My next stop was the hardware store for a nice clean, brand new hack saw. At this point, I was mentally preparing for a whole bunch of work that I didn’t really want to do. I knew that if I didn’t just get it taken care of, I’d have a spoiled ham bone in the fridge. After the hack saw was obtained, I went home, psyched myself up for the task and got to work.

After washing the hacksaw, I wrapped each end of the bone in foil to give me a firmer grip on it. I placed the hacksaw in the middle and got to work. I’d say in total it took about twenty seconds for me to cut through it. After which, I exclaimed “Are you serious, that was it?”. I also heard my wife start laughing from the bedroom. That was much easier than I had expected.

Now that the bone was cut in half, I needed to scrape away the bone dust. I’ve never done this before, and I know there’s scraper tools on amazon, but I wasn’t sure what to expect. The butcher had told me I could use a fork to get it off. For whatever reason, I had dust in my mind. I was thinking of dry particulate matter which would contaminate the surrounding meat. Thankfully, that wasn’t the case. Bone dust is moist, probably due to its moist surroundings. I used a fork to scrape away all of the bone dust I could, and gave it a rinse for good measure.

Now that that’s out of the way, we can carry on to the bone broth. I didn’t write this recipe down, but I used two small yellow onions, three stalks of celery, three large carrots, salt, pepper, sage and thyme. I threw in four small bay leaves and set it in the slow cooker on low for 10 hours with enough water to just cover the bone.

I went to bed, and extended the time on the slow cooker after waling up, about seven hours later. All in all, I think this bone broth cooked for about 16 hours and was left on warm for several more. I could have, and probably should have, pulled it earlier. I was left with just over a quart of nice, thick, almost demi-glace texture broth after cooling in the refrigerator.

Before using the broth, I combined it with enough water to make two quarts, and it was plenty ready for split pea. I suppose I should have envisioned a ham steak and realized the bone wall wasn’t that thick. For some reason I was thinking it was going to be more similar to beef. Let’s just say this ham was large enough for me to take a selfie with, so my intimidation wasn’t all that ridiculous.