Delicious Vegetable Broth Made Easy

After yesterday’s post on ribollita, I wanted to follow up with some of the basic recipes I use to recreate the flavor and love built into every dish.  The first critical component is fresh, homemade vegetable broth. 

Basic Vegetable Broth

2 Yellow onions, cut into 1/2” dice

1 mediumCarrot, cut into 1/2” dice

1 stalk of celery, cut into 1/2” dice

10 Mushrooms and their stems, fresh or dried

10 Parsley stems

2 bay leaves

8 whole black peppercorns

Vegetable broth is basically a vegetable tea. Start with cold water, add all the ingredients and turn the stove onto medium high.  Bring the water up to just below a boil and simmer for about twenty minutes and then take off the heat, toss in the parsley stems for ten minutes then and let the broth sit until you need it.  If you are not going to use the broth within a two hours or so, make sure to get it into the fridge as soon as possible once it is cooled off to maximize its storage time.  And remember, you can always freeze extra broth –leave some extra ice trays floating around dedicated for broth.  

As far as the vegetables go, use equivalent amounts of scraps as much as possible – save your onion tops, carrot pieces, mushroom stems and so on.   If you don’t have enough scraps, don’t worry about it – it is worth it to use a whole vegetables since the home made broth is so much better.  Make sure not to add strongly flavored or deeply colored  vegetables.  No broccoli, cauliflower, Brussels sprouts, garlic, beets, or leafy greens. And you will notice that there is no salt added to this broth.  That is by design, to ensure that by adding more liquid in the form of broth to dishes you do not inadvertently add to much salt. 

While many recipes will call for vegetable broth, if you don’t have homemade broth DO NOT USE canned or boxed broth. They are all disgusting. They are worse than just using water since all you will taste is disgusting broth.  Plus, they are generally loaded with salt, giving you no control over how much salt is in the dish in proportion to the broth.  So if you don’t have time to make the broth, don’t worry – just skip it.  Use water instead and throw in a bay leaf and a dried mushroom or two.