Description
No need to buy vegetable broth from the store ever again! This step-by-step guide to making it at home is easy, cheap AND low-sodium!
Ingredients
- 2–3 cups saved vegetable scraps*
Optional Ingredients (if you don’t have scraps/want to add more flavor):
- 1 onion, roughly chopped with skin
- 2 carrots with skins, finely chopped
- 3 cloves garlic, roughly chopped with skin
- 2 stalks celery, chopped
- 1/2–1 pound tomatoes, roughly chopped
- 1/2 cup greens, roughly chopped
- 1/2 cup mushrooms, roughly chopped
- 3 sprigs fresh thyme
- 1/2 small bunch parsley, roughly chopped
- 1/2 teaspoon whole peppercorns
- 1/2 teaspoon sea salt (or as desired)
- 2 bay leaves
- 8–10 cups filtered water*
- Optional: 1/2 leek, roughly chopped
Instructions
- Add all of the ingredients into a large pot. Add more water as needed to reach about 1″ above the vegetables.
- Bring the water to a boil and then cover and lower to a simmer for 45 minutes to 1 hour. The longer the better as it will deepen the flavor!
- Allow the broth to cool for about 20 minutes and then adjust salt to taste.
- Strain through a fine-mesh strainer, being sure to press the vegetables up against the side of the strainer to squeeze out as much liquid as you can. The vegetables can then be used for compost!
- Allow the broth to cool completely before transferring to storage containers. Store in the refrigerator up to 5 days or in the freezer up to 1 month (sometimes longer)*
Notes
- You can make vegetable broth solely from your scraps. This is what we usually do as we have so much that accumulates in our freezer, but for the sake of this blog post and for those just starting out that may not have scraps saved, we purchased produce and put together this recipe. There are vegetables that we do and do not recommend be saved for scraps, and to help you our we have included a list below along with tips for storage!
- We store our vegetable scraps in this reusable bag (pictured above) and we highly recommend it!
- Feel free to exclude any ingredients you don’t like or even add vegetables in that you feel like would enhance the flavor for your taste buds
- For a pressure cooker: Cook on high pressure for 15 minutes.
- For a slow cooker: Cook on low heat until vegetables are tender, about 6 hours.
- The water may also depend on the size of the pot you are using, vegetables, etc. — just try to make sure the water line is above the vegetables!
- We store our broth in large quart jars in our refrigerator or freezer, depending on when we are going to use it. We found these awesome BPA-free lids for the mason jars that we use as well! You can also freeze your vegetable broth in an ice cube tray or two so you can use smaller amounts of stock at a time and not have to defrost the entire container.
- Prep Time: 10 minutes
- Cook Time: 1 hour
- Category: Soup
- Method: Stovetop
- Cuisine: Vegan