Cauldron Broths: Putting the "Bone" in Appetit

A veteran of Seattle’s food scene is now boiling bones in Bellingham

By Chelsea Lin February 16, 2017

This article originally appeared in the February 2017 issue of Seattle magazine.

Gabriel Claycamp is a man with a storied past in the Seattle food world. You may remember him for his cooking-school project Culinary Communion back in the ’00s, or for his role in the Gypsy underground dinner parties featured on a 2007 episode of Anthony Bourdain’s No Reservations, or for the great bacon he made when he first started The Swinery in 2009. But Claycamp wants you to forget all about that.

In October, the entrepreneurial chef, now based in Bellingham, launched Cauldron Broths (Bellingham; 206.551.2598; cauldronbroths.com), a made-from-scratch line of certified organic broths. Bone broth, the newly minted darling of the health food world, is just good-quality stock—Claycamp says that any confusion is based on consumers’ familiarity with the bland, boxed grocery-store version of stock. His broths are so thick, they are gelatinous. “But in the chef world,” he says, “we were never using Swanson stock to begin with.”

Claycamp says his facility is “more brewery than kitchen,” with 9-foot-tall pots able to hold some 650 pounds of bones, along with huge hoists to maneuver them. There’s no retail counter (yet), though he’s selling wholesale 5-gallon buckets to restaurants and hotels. Home cooks can buy smaller 24-ounce pouches ($17) of beef or chicken broth in grocery stores, and other quantities are also available online. There are also the fatty, flavorful options of schmaltz and tallow. But you needn’t just cook with these—the broths are so delicious, they make for a meal on their own.