BM#4 Day 7 - Homemade Vegetable Stock

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

Can add any vegetable that you have in your refrigerator. Today I added

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)

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.