: Using half-eaten bones to make stock -- sanitary? Is it safe use half-eaten bones from a family dinner meal to make stock? Or is this unsanitary, and it's better to just obtain bones through filleting and deboning while raw

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@Joshua Engel covers the safety and sanitary aspect very well.

But if you are keen to give it a go, perhaps you can roast the bone remains first...

Boiling won't kill all the germs, neither will roasting - but it will kill more than boiling.

If you have good heat in the oven (180 - 200C) for a good 30 minutes or so (longer if you turn the heat down so they don't burn), they will probably develop a better taste when boiled for stock afterwards.

Throw in some veges for the last 20 minutes, and also add them to your stock

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It's not sanitary, in the sense of following the health rules. Especially since it's unlikely that you're following the two-hour guidelines: the gnawed bones have been in the danger zone enough to potentially pick up an enterobacter that produced heat-stable toxins. Boiling will not fix that. And having been in somebody's mouth increases the chance that such bacteria is one that infects humans.

Consider it this way: even if you're not squicked out by the basic concept, how would you feel if the bones had been left out on the plate for a day? A week?

As for whether it's safe, the short answer is "no".

The odds it being actually dangerous are pretty low. The food safety rules are designed to keep the most at-risk people safe: small children, people with compromised immune systems, etc. Given how many other opportunities there are for food-borne infections to be picked up, I'd consider something that I picked up and simmered for many hours to be about as free from pathogens as anything I got out of the dirt, i.e. vegetables, which we often eat raw.

So I'll admit to having done it, but I wouldn't feed it to anybody except myself.