Make Homemade Vegetable Stock

How can homemade vegetable stock make your life and the world better? It’s one way to help reduce food waste. And since you’re already working on reducing plastic in the kitchen, let’s look at food waste too!

Every year in the US, we waste approximately 429 pounds of food per person—that’s 31% of our available food supply. Meanwhile, 37.2 million of us are living in food insecure households, and wasted food ends up in landfills, where it produces methane as it breaks down. (This is all according to the EPA.)

So there are a variety of ways we can work to keep our food from reaching the landfill, saving us money along the way, and here’s one of them: delicious soup.

(Or whatever you prefer to make with your homemade vegetable stock.)

Homemade Vegetable Stock

Let’s use up vegetable trimmings before relegating them to the compost by making vegetable stock from scraps. First, make space for an airtight, freezer-safe container in your freezer, and welcome it to its permanent new home. Just leave it there.

As you’re cooking, wash your vegetables thoroughly (as you normally do), and add your scraps to the container in the freezer. (If something is caked with dirt, you can try soaking it in cold water while you finish cooking; if it doesn’t come out, though, don’t use it.) And while you’re cutting up veggies for your meal, take a second to glance skeptically at the contents of your crisper drawer. Is anything still good but getting to the edge? Wash it, chop it, and add it to the stock container in the freezer.

For your vegetable stock recipe, you can use:

• Asparagus trimmings

• Beets

• Bell pepper stems and seeds

• Carrot tips and root ends

• Celery trimmings

• Corn cobs (our favorite)

• Ginger peels

• Garlic, including the skins

• Green bean trimmings

• Herbs: err on the side of the more delicate ones like parsley, and be careful to use stronger resinous ones like rosemary only in small quantities. And keep in mind that if you use something very strong like cilantro, your stock is going to taste strongly of cilantro. (TBH, that sounds pretty awesome to us, but maybe not for every purpose.)

• Mushroom stems

• Onion peels and trimmings

• Pea pods

• Potato trimmings and peels (including sweet potatoes)

• Squash trimmings

• Tomato parts

• Probably not cruciferous vegetables like broccoli

The next time you need stock, transfer the frozen veggies to a stock pot. It’s okay to pick and choose a little for flavor; that frozen cilantro can wait until next week if necessary. Just don’t let it thaw and then refreeze it.

Cover the vegetables with water. Bring the stock to a boil over high heat. Reduce heat and let simmer for about 10 minutes. (Note: If you’re using fresh veggies instead of frozen, this will take longer—let it simmer until the veggies are soft, about an hour depending on what they are.) Strain it and (finally) compost the scraps. Use the homemade vegetable stock to make dinner.