What To Do With Roasted Marrow Bones

Eating bone marrow is an experience best described as “viscerally decadent”. Once roasted, the luscious meat butter inside the bones can be scraped out and spread on toast, mixed with rice and vegetables, or eaten on top of more meat for a crazy carnivorous experience.

Photo: Eric Chan (Flickr Creative Commons)

Though marrow bones are usually served at fancy steakhouses and small plates-focused bistros, there is no reason you can make and eat them at home. All you need is a bag of bones, some salt, and your oven.

Pretty much every grocery store with a butcher will have these things. (They may just say “beef bones” on the packaging.) If you want them sliced horizontally (like you see above), call ahead and ask the butcher to cut them up for you. But if there’s no time for phone calls – you are very busy! – and you need your marrow now, it isn’t crucial that they’re split in half.

Once you have them, just preheat your oven to 232C, sprinkle some salt all over the bones, and roast those babies for 15 or 20 minutes, until the marrow gets all soft and spreadable.

My favourite way to eat bone marrow is just slathered on toast (and my face!), but you could balance out all the richness with a simple parsley salad, or some pickled onions. Dig out the marrow with a butter knife, spread it on some charred white bread, and top with something crisp and acidic (if you must). You can also serve the bones alongside some pasta, rice, or any other dish you think would play well with and extra dose of meat-based fat. Once you’ve disencumbered the bones of their marrow, throw them in a stock pot with some veggie scraps to make a little something the kids are calling “bone broth”. (It’s stock. It’s good stock, but it’s still stock.)

This is part of The Grown-Up Kitchen, Lifehacker’s series designed to answer your most basic culinary questions and fill in any gaps that may be missing in your home chef education.