Vegetable stock from scratch

So, as I said in my previous post, the time of comfort food has come. Thankfully there are some great recipes in Italian cuisine, like the one I’m going to talk about in my next post. But first, you will need to learn how to make some proper vegetable stock. And here’s how you do it the healthy way. If you can’t be bothered with the real deal, use a stock cube, but that’s cheating. Just sayin’.

Vegetable stock

a family recipe

Although I think there are many varieties of vegetable stock, and others possibly know this version as their family recipe, let’s just say I haven’t adapted it from someone else. This is how we actually do it.

Ingredients:

ca. 3 litres of water

2 big carrots

2 big parsnips

1 big tomato

1 sweet yellow pepper, the Hungarian variety (“tv paprika”), but you can use a regular bell pepper, too

½ celery root

¼ kohlrabi, peeled (just eat the rest of it raw, or put it into a soup)

1 yellow onion

2-3 bulbs of garlic

1 bunch of parsley

1-2 small leaves of a Savoy cabbage*

5-6 whole black peppercorns

salt

This might seem like a lot of work, but it’s actually just cutting up the vegetables** (apart from the parsley, tomato and sweet yellow pepper), putting them into a big dish, pouring water over them, covering them with a lid, bringing the water up to the boil, and then simmering it for 1,5-2 hours, until the stock tastes good. You can intensify the flavour by reducing your stock to a smaller amount, but beware, because it will be saltier, too!

Your stock will be about 2 litres in the end, and it will be like liquid gold.

After you’re done, don’t throw your vegetables away! Purée them (not the onion, bell pepper and the garlic) and freeze them – they can be used as vegetable stock cubes in the future. You can freeze your stock, too. It will last about forever in your freezer.

My next recipe will be about ginger, honey and pork.

Enjoy!

*It’s not necessary to use Savoy cabbage, you can leave it out, but I’ve been told it makes your stock cleaner. You only need one or two small leaves, so... don’t buy it if you won’t use the rest of the cabbage later on. Your stock will be perfectly okay without it.

**Make sure you cut them into quite big chunks, because that way they don’t dissolve in the long cooking process. For example you only need to cut your onion in half, but you can just put it in whole, it doesn't matter, because it will fall apart anyway.