Background: After shoving takeout food in my feelings hole for a couple years during the pandemic, I got curious about eating differently. My kids only ate beige salty foods at the time. Dinner time, which used to be my favorite time of day, became less about cooking something balanced and interesting and more about just slogging through. I needed a new challenge. So I decided to try to eat only plants between 8 a.m. and 5 p.m., M-F. Veg stock became central to this challenge. I remembered a few tricks from my days as a restaurant cook and a learned a few new ones. Here are the steps:
- Get two pounds of cremini mushrooms and chop them coarsely.
- Put a small amount of oil in a stock pot and sauté the mushrooms.
- Salt and pepper the mushrooms to taste and stir vigorously.
- Cut veg for mirepoix or pull the already cut veg you prepped out of the freeze and add to the mushrooms.
- Sweat your veg in the bottom of the pan for a while on medium to low heat.
- Pull out all the veg scraps you have from the freezer and add them to the pot.
- Add any veg you have that’s getting tired in the crisper of your refrigerator.
- Look around your kitchen for that onion that’s been there a minute and add that.
- Add your favorite modality of garlic.
- Throw some bay leaves in there.
- Cover the vegetables with filtered water and simmer until all the vegetables can be mashed with a chef’s fork.
- Add a can of tomato paste and whisk until it’s dissolved into the stock.
- Adjust seasonings.
- Strain the stock.
- Use right away or store in the freezer.
Why It Works:
- Mushrooms are full of umami and cremini mushrooms have more of it than white mushrooms but aren’t as expensive as some exotic mushrooms or dried mushrooms.
- Cooking the mushrooms brings our more umami.
- The salt, pepper, oil, moisture, and bits of mushroom agitated by the vigorous stirring will create a fond in the bottom of the pan, which will give your stock more flavor.
- If frozen, they might splatter a bit.
- Sweating means you are drawing the moisture out of the veg by heating slowly.
- While your veg is sweating, it’s a good time to clean out your freezer.
- Avoid greens. They will make the stock bitter.
- You are looking for anything that will add more flavor and use up a resource that would otherwise not be used.
- This step is optional but encouraged.
- Do bay leaves do anything? If they are fresh, yes. Dried bay leaves are not fresh and, over time, they will lose their flavor. Because every recipe ever only calls for one bay leaf, everyone has a spice jar of expired bay leaves in their spice rack. So it might take more than you think to taste it. Add one more bay leaf each time you make this until you think, “Hmm…That’s too much bay leaf.” Or “Hmmm…I wonder what fresh bay leaf would do.”
- One way to use this time and energy efficiently is to throw some whole cleaned or peeled vegetables that you want to use cooked in another way. I throw whole peeled carrots in there and pull them out when they are fully cooked. I add garlic and habaneros to make a nice creamy hot sauce. You could boil potatoes in it or steam broccoli in a covered strainer on top. Dense root veg work well here.
- Like mushrooms, tomato paste is high in umami. But if you add it too early, the concentrated sugars in the paste can burn.
- At this point, depending on how you season, you could covert it form stock to broth. Stock can be used in anything. Broth is going to have a salt content and flavor profile that narrows its uses. For example, broth will get saltier as it is reduced for a sauce. The addition of Chinese five spice will take it in a different direction than Italian seasoning.
- I use a chinois for straining. If the fine mesh one is dirty, I use a coarse China cap strainer and strain into another stock pot or pitcher.
- I make beans with this right away and store the rest in labeled take-out containers in the freezer.
Mods:
- Add dried mushrooms when you add the water. This will boost the flavor, but it can be expensive. Because I live in a place where it’s miserably hot most of the year, I sun dry mushrooms in the summer for this purpose.
- Throw a bumper crops of summer squash, zucchini, and tomatoes in there during the summer, if you’ve got them.
- Add miso paste at the end when you are adjusting the seasonings. This will boost the salt and umami, too, but go easy until you have it dialed in.
- When I need veg stock but only have a few odds and ends, I use “Better Than Bouillon” vegetable base. Like miso, go easy. It will add umami, but also sodium.