How to Make a Perfect Soup Stock

I wonder how many of you out there shy away from making your own soup stock. Until a month or so ago, I was amongst you. I always made my soups with salt or Organic Aussie herb salt for flavouring. I vaguely remember making a stock once and couldn't understand why anyone would bother as it didn't taste all that good. However now I am completely addicted to making stock from scratch, it makes the soup so tasty. With the help of a few tips from the internet and from The Vegetarian Cooking School students we managed to make a stock that is so delicious you could just have that with crusty or gluten free bread!

The beauty of making stock is that you can save lots of discarded veg or wilted veg. Just keep a container in your fridge with stock items then once a week make up a batch. If you have a big freezer you can easily freeze the stock.

Things to keep are silverbeet and kale stalks, celery leaves, carrot tops, the green parts of the leeks, herbs that have wilted any leafy greens that have wilted.

Basic stock recipe

2 onions

3 stalks celery

2 carrots

11 pepper corns

1 tsp salt

1 leek

1 bunch parsley

2 bay leaves

Then follow these tips

Cut your veggies really small you get better flavour out of them.
Place your veggies in a saucepan with a generous amount of olive oil and add 2 tsp of salt to the top, give a quick stir then leave on a low heat for a good 15 to 20 minutes. This sweats the veggies and produces lots of flavour.
Add the water and pepper corns and let simmer with lid on for an hour.
Reduce the liquid by taking the lid off for an hour.
If you have a indoor fire place you can make the stock on top of the fire place.
For a rich stock add 300g chopped mushrooms.
Use onion and garlic if you can but you don't have to if you have an allergy.
Use parsley for the herbs but if you know you are making a soup that needs basil you can use basil or if the soup has coriander you can use coriander.

Categories:Soups

Tags:soups stock