Vegetable Broth
The soul of soups, stews and rice dishes
Learning how to make your own vegetable broth is one of the most important skills you can learn in cooking. Most soups, stews and rice dishes use vegetable broth to create the foundation of flavor. Using fresh ingredients to create your own broth is a simple way to improve the flavor of your food…and it is healthier.
Store-bought broths – especially powders and cubes – use questionable ingredients and often a lot of salt to increase shelf life. The effects of these ingredients in your cooking are concentrated with prolonged cooking, meaning your food will taste manufactured and salty instead of fresh and healthy.
My standard recipe for creating a tasty broth is versatile – using different vegetables and different amounts is fine. In fact, I often add different seasonal ingredients to the mix to create specific types of broth that will highlight a specific flavor. For example, I like to add the skin and seed core from pumpkins to make a tasty pumpkin broth I use when making pumpkin soup or pumpkin risotto. Or during the spring months, I save asparagus trimmings and add them to the broth to elevate the asparagus flavor. The same strategy is effective with mushrooms, carrots and tomatoes.
This nonfat vegetable broth keeps about 5 days in the refrigerator and up to 6 months in the freezer. You can save storage space by reducing the broth to about one half its original volume. The concentrate only needs a bit of water added when you begin cooking with it.
As always, I appreciate hearing from you, so feel free to leave a comment and let me know what’s on your mind.
