Homemade Vegetable Bouillon (raw, vegan, gluten-free)
by Shannon Joyner, Editor

It's soup season! With the harvest in and winter on the horizon, it's the perfect time to make a batch of vegetable stock concentrate to provide a base for your soups, stews, sauces, broths, grains, and even compound butters. Sure, you could just buy some bouillon at the store, but where's the fun in that?

Besides, those store-bought cubes and pastes are mostly sugar, salt, and flavor enhancers (MSG or hydrolyzed whathave- you, MSG in all but name and highly processed to boot). And some of them only contain 1% actual vegetables! Ew. Yes, they're convenient and they taste good, but across the world, industrially-produced bouillon has become an "essential" ingredient that is transforming the way humans make food. A 2023 article from Women for Food Sovereignty in West Africa says Senegalese cooks now use as many as five bouillon cubes in each dish, raising sodium to unhealthy levels and contributing to previously rare kidney and cardiovascular disease in the region. Luckily, making your own delicious, healthier stock base is easy. It lasts a long time in the refrigerator or freezer, and you can adjust the ingredients to your taste, culture, and health concerns. You can even dehydrate and blend it to make a fairly shelf-stable powder if you want to invest the time and energy.

This basic recipe will get you started. Feel free to experiment with different combinations, and flavor profiles: add ginger, miso, and sesame oil for an Asian base; pizza seasoning and extra garlic and tomato for Italian; galangal, chilies, and lemongrass for Thai...you get the idea. This recipe is raw because I think it gives a fresh taste to the dishes it's used in, but some cook their broth base to remove moisture and concentrate flavor. NOTE: You can vary the salt content too, but the reason this broth base has a pretty good (refrigerated) shelf life is because it is preserved with a lot of salt. If you use less salt, the base will spoil faster; freeze it preserve it longer. One important tool you'll need is a kitchen scale to weigh your ingredients.

Vegetable Stock Concentrate (yields ~5 cups of concentrate)

Ingredients
200 g/~1.5 c celeriac (celery root; can also use outer celery stalks with leaves)
250 g /~2 c grams carrots
50 g/~0.25 c sun-dried tomato (drain if oil-packed, can also use tomato paste)
150 g/~1.5 c leeks, white and light green parts
100 g/~0.75 c parsnip or parsley root
200 g /~1.5 c chopped onions, (can sub 3.5 T dried minced onions)
20 g/~4 large cloves garlic
50 g/~1 c chopped parsley with stems, plus a few sprigs/pinches of your
favorite fresh/dried herbs (I use rosemary, thyme, oregano, and sage)
1 bay leaf
1/2 tsp each ground black pepper and ground turmeric
~240 grams kosher salt (aim for ~22-25% of the total vegetable weight)
2 tablespoons extra virgin olive oil

Instructions

1. Wash, peel (optional, but peels may make your broth bitter), roughly chop and weigh your vegetables and herbs. Total weight should be around 1050 g. Transfer to a food processor and pulse into a uniformly grainy paste (you may need to work in batches).
2. Add oil and salt and continue to blend until the paste becomes fairly smooth and only slightly grainy.
3. Spoon paste into sterilized jars, seal tightly, and refrigerate. Stored in the refrigerator, it should last up to ~2-3 months, but always check for signs of spoilage before using. You can also freeze the paste in ice cube molds and then store in a zip-top bag in the freezer, where it can last 6 months or longer.

To use: add 1 teaspoon of paste per 1 cup/250 ml of water for broth, or add some directly to whatever you are cooking.

Each teaspoon of paste adds about 1.2 g of salt to your dish (390-480 mg of sodium, depending on the brand of salt, but still much lower than the average commercial bouillon concentrate at ~560-720 mg/cube), so use a little at a time and taste as you go. Yum.

♥

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