I can’t believe today is the last day of the marathon! Last 6 days, I have been posting soup recipes and I have used homemade vegetable stock in 5 out 6 recipes that I have posted. I thought I should share the recipe for homemade stock as I have used it in almost all the recipes. I don’t like canned stock and the carton/packaged stock is ok in taste, but has lot of sodium in it. The same goes for the bouillon, which is used to make instant stock. When I decided soups as my theme for this marathon, I wanted to use homemade stock for my soups. I made vegetable stock instead of chicken stock. Chicken pieces can be add to the recipe to make chicken stock and needs to be cooked for another hour. I hope you all are not disappointed to see stock recipe instead of a soup! I was debating between a soup and stock and went for this as I have used this in my soups.
Total Time: 1 hr 10 minutes - 1hr 40 minutes
Preparation: 10 minutes
Cooking Time: 1 - 1 ½ hrs
Ingredients:
- 8-9 cups Water
- 4-8 Bay Leaves
- 2 Star Anise
- 15 Peppercorns (I usually add 8-10 but today added more to spice up the stock)
- 8 Cardamoms
- 8 Cloves
- 1 ½ “Cinnamon
- 1 tsp. Cumin Seeds
- ½ medium sized Onion diced
- 1 large Carrot scrapped and diced
- 1 cup diced Celery
- 2 cups shredded or diced Cabbage
- 1 stalk of Curry Leaves
- Few Coriander stems
- 3” – 4” piece Ginger diced
- ¼ of Red Bell Pepper (Leftover after the Tofu Pizza preparation)
- ¼” of a small sized Bottle Gourd
- Few stalks of Cauliflower and Broccoli (the stalks after cutting the floret)
Can add any vegetable that you have in your refrigerator. Today I added
Preparation:
- Wash and dice all the vegetables into 1”-2” pieces. Bigger pieces are also fine and need not chop cilantro and curry leaves. Use them as it is.
- Put all the vegetables in a big sauce pan or a Dutch oven and bring them to a boil.
- Then reduce the heat and simmer it for at least 1 hour. I simmered it for one and a half hours. Always keep the pot covered when simmering, to avoid stock/water evaporation.
- Let the stock cool and strain it. Discard the cook vegetables and do not mash the vegetables in the stock. Add some salt, about 1 tbsp, and store it.
- Store in 1 or 2 cup sized containers and refrigerate for up to 3 three days or freeze it in the freezer. I hear that it stays good for up to 3 months in the freezer. Whenever you need it, thaw it and add it to your soups or to your pulaos or any recipe that calls for stock. Another way of storing stock is to freeze it in ice tray. This way it is easy to pull out small quantity of stock whenever required.
This day, this month, this year -Stuffed Okra~Masala Bhendi
Bhagi says
I've never added bellpepper or cabbage to my veggie stock for some reason..... a must try.
Bhagi
MySpicyKitchen says
This was the first time I added bell pepper and that too because I had some left over piece from previous day.
PJ says
Yes, homemade stock is the best and yours looks nice.Thanks for sharing Usha 🙂
Suman Singh says
oh wow, I've never made vegetable stock at home..this is really a nice and easy recipe..thanks for sharing!
Harini-Jaya Rupanagudi says
Good one Usha. I thought pressure cooking is the fastest to make stock, right?
Thanks a lot for all your soup ideas!
MySpicyKitchen says
Harini, yes. Fastest way is to use a pressure cooker. For some reason, I don't use the cooker that much, other than cooking legumes and mutton. I should mention it in the post that one can use a pressure cooker to speed up the cooking process.
sowmya says
good post..I wanted to post the stock recipe , but could not..will do it sometime..Nice to see all your soup recipes..
Priya says
Homemade vegetable stock looks wonderful and very handy..
Srivalli says
Wow looks great Usha..it was wonderful checking on your soups..great job!
SouthIndianHome says
Nice recipe for the vegetable stock