# Cooking chicken bones in a pressure cooker



## Kyllobernese (Feb 5, 2008)

Somewhere I read about putting the chicken carcass when you have all the meat off it, into a pressure cooker and cooking it till the bones are soft. I cannot find anywhere that tells you how long to cook it for. Does anyone know?

I should have mentioned that the chicken had already been cooked on a Rotisserie so it was not raw.


----------



## sandgrubber (May 21, 2014)

I use a pressure cooker a lot. The long bones do not get soft and will still sliver. The caretlidge (sp?), tendons, etc, do tend to fall off the bone, and you can pick off stuff to feed your dogs from the carcass. I sometimes take a meat cleaver to the ends of the long bones and give the ends to the dogs . . . but that doesn't require pressure cooking.


----------



## luv mi pets (Feb 5, 2012)

This article says she does it for an hour and the bones in the middle are still tough. http://dogaware.com/articles/wdjhomemade4.html

I know a breeder who did the whole chicken in a crockpot for 8 hours, let cool, and blended the whole thing in a blender, put in containers and fed that to their dogs. Their dogs loved it and they had very shiny coats.


----------



## Kathyy (Jun 15, 2008)

I've put just the bones plus water into a slow cooker. In about 24 hours a fork will pierce long bones and I take the bones out and put them through a food processor. Most of the bone will disintegrate into a fine paste. The article is writing about turkey bones, not chicken. Turkeys are a lot older and bones more calcified at slaughter than chickens. Since it is basically an experiment I'd try 30 minutes this time and if it doesn't work then either just use the broth and toss out the bone or put it back in the pressure cooker for another 30 minutes to see if it works.

A whole chicken cooked like that would be about 3x the calcium and phosphorus needed for nutrition. When Max stopped tolerating a raw diet I combined that 5 pound bird with pureed bone with 10 pounds [weighed out raw] of liver, pork and beef to make up a more balanced diet. 

I also wouldn't cook the meat that long. If you try this then cool the bird once meat is cooked, bone it and just cook the bones.


----------



## NicoleIsStoked (Aug 31, 2012)

Castor and Pollux has a canned food that has a whole pressure cooked wing and drumstick in it that's supposed to be safe to eat including the bone. My dog had it once and was fine. I could literally squash the bone with my fingers.


----------



## sandgrubber (May 21, 2014)

NicoleIsStoked said:


> Castor and Pollux has a canned food that has a whole pressure cooked wing and drumstick in it that's supposed to be safe to eat including the bone. My dog had it once and was fine. I could literally squash the bone with my fingers.


There's pressure and there's pressure. A commercial establishment may be able to do things you can't do at home.


----------



## Willowy (Dec 10, 2007)

I found a few sites about cooking bones to mush for pet consumption but I didn't have time to post them at that point, and then I googled "cooking bones to mush" right now and didn't find the same sites so I'm trying to figure out what I googled the first time!  

Anyway, one site for making bone broth for humans says to pressure-cook it for 2 hours, and of course it says to strain the bones out for human consumption, but it sounds like the bones would be pretty soft at that point.


----------



## Janet59 (Jun 20, 2020)

Kyllobernese said:


> Somewhere I read about putting the chicken carcass when you have all the meat off it, into a pressure cooker and cooking it till the bones are soft. I cannot find anywhere that tells you how long to cook it for. Does anyone know?
> 
> I should have mentioned that the chicken had already been cooked on a Rotisserie so it was not raw.


I used to cook chicken and turkey bones in a stove top pressure cooker, and they did turn to mush, but this was years ago, and I don't remember how long I cooked them for. I might have added a splash of vinegar to the water to help dissolve the calcium. I'm attempting this in my electronic pressure cooker as I type. I set it to high pressure and 45 minutes, but that didn't work. I'm going to try again, maybe adding a bit of vinegar. I saw one website that where a woman said that she processed the bones twice in the pressure cooker, the first time she did it for 45 minutes to make bone broth for soup, then she poured out he liquid, added fresh and repeated the process to turn the bones into mush which she used to feed to her chickens and dogs.


----------



## RonE (Feb 3, 2007)

5-year-old thread.


----------

