Beef – Flavorful beef broth without bones

Taste the meat and if it still seems edible to you then there is no reason to throw it out.

When I make stock, I keep it on a simmer for much longer than three hours and any meat is completely tasteless by the time I'm done. Three hours, however, is about how long you would cook meat to make a stew, so it's quite possible that you could eat it.

On the other hand, not all cuts of meat stew well and I'm not familiar with this cut. If the meat has plenty of connective tissues (i.e. collagen) to gelatinise it shouldn't dry out too much. But the proof is in the pudding: taste it.

Good home-made stock is easy and cheap to make. All you need is an old stock pot (no lid needed, you want the water to evaporate), and a bunch of pork bones and connective tissue. The bones will add the pork flavor, while the connective tissue will break down into gelatin.

The best way to get the pot is a thrift store (charity shop to UK types), and the best way to get the bones is to make friends with a butcher - they often have loads of bones and connective tissue that go into the garbage and are happy to sell it dirt cheap.

To make the stock all you need to do is add the bones and connective tissue to the pot with enough water to cover them completely, and cook it down for hours and hours. Many chefs would recommend adding stock vegetables like onions and carrots at the beginning, and straining them out after an hour. After a few hours you'll have all the good stuff out of the bones and connective stuff, so strain them out and then simmer the stock until you have the consistency and flavor concentration you want. You can cook it down until it's a syrup if you want, although that takes a long time. You can then freeze it for months.

If the amount of gelatin you want isn't there you can simply add unflavored gelatin, it's very inexpensive and easy to use.

EDIT: As for smoke, I wouldn't add it in to your broth. You won't always want the smoky flavor and if you do it's easy enough to add some smoked pork or liquid smoke later if you do. Leaving it out gives you more flexibility later.