Healthy Easy Vegetable Stock Recipe

A healthy, nutritious, fat-free and savory vegetable stock is a staple for vegetarian and low fat cooking. Stock is the basic building block of your kitchen as you can flavor your stir-fries dishes, soups, stews or even rice in place of water, high-calorie gravy or butter. It serves as a diet alternative with whopping nutritional value.

Making vegetable stock is comparatively less time-consuming than making poultry or beef stock, as it is more easier to extract maximum flavor out of vegetables than out of bones. In contrary to vegetable stock, you need an acidic medium (by adding vinegar) as a catalyst in making poultry or meat stock in order to soften the bones. You can just omit adding vinegar for vegetable stock. In fact, if the vegetables are simmered too long, quality can start to diminish beyond a certain point.

You can either make vegetable stock out of veggies scraps or from fresh veggies. To make from scraps, save well-washed vegetable trimmings and tidbits such as outer peels of carrots, leafy green tops of leeks, stems of cauliflowers and mushrooms, ends of green beans, the rind of tomatoes and et cetera into a freezer bag and store them in Ziploc bags in the freezer. Once you have accumulated one gallon bags full of scraps, unfreeze them and you can start making vegetable stock.

How to Make Delicious and Nutritious Vegetable Stock?

• Cabbages (include broccoli and cauliflower) and tomato impart an overpowering flavor and overwhelming taste to your vegetable stock. Try to avoid using them or at least use sparingly.

• Certain herbs infuse a distinct flavor and some tend to be bitter as they steep. Use sparingly and only add in the last 15 minutes before you turn off the heat.

• You can vary your stock ingredients to suit your taste buds by adding some fibrous root vegetables such as turnips and parsnips or vegetables such as fennel bulb and spinach.

• To make your vegetable stock out of vegetables scraps, you can use the water after boiling corn or green beans as your stock foundation as it has already chocked full of veggie flavor.

• Develop the flavor of the stock with layers flavoring. This can be done by roasting carrots, leeks, celery, yellow and red onions and garlic, uncovered, for 1 hour in a roasting pan, prior to making stock in a stockpot.

• Alternatively, you can sweat the mirepoix (onions, carrots and celery) over low heat in oil or butter prior to making stock. This process of sweating (or butter-steaming) the vegetables is to soften and release the moisture in them, but not excessive until browning them.

• When vegetables begin to give off their liquid (after 10-15 minutes of sweating vegetables), add the cold filtered water. This decreases the likelihood the vegetables will be overcooked and helps to regulate the temperature of the stock. Reduce the heat to a bare simmer as this will maximize the flavor extraction while keeping the stock clear.

• Make a sachet (cheesecloth sack of herbs and spices) by tying the dried thyme, bay leaf, whole black peppercorns, clove, fresh parsley stems into a piece of cheesecloth. The Sachet is tied to the handle of the stockpot and suspended in the simmering stock, making it easy to retrieve. It adds tremendous flavors to the soup.

• Discard the sachet containing herbs and spices from the finished stock. Strain the stock gently using a fine meshed sieve or colander lined with cheesecloth. Discard the vegetables.

• To lengthen shelf life and storage period of vegetable stock to few months instead of few days, transfer the cooled down stock to ice cube trays and freeze in freezer. This way a home cook can use only the desired, smaller, pre-portioned amount without defrosting the entire batch of the stock.

• Only add salt when you know what your stock used for. Salt amounts depends on final recipe. Since stock is often further reduce during simmering, salting the stock would make the resulting final recipe too much salty.

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