Vegetable Broth

How to make homemade vegetable broth or vegetable stock.

Thank you to Hammer Stahl for providing us with complementary cookware to make our Vegetable Broth, and for review purposes.

Every home cook should know how to make a great homemade Vegetable Broth – and we’re sharing our recipe with you today!

Sure – you can easily buy canned vegetable broth or vegetable stock at the supermarket – but homemade vegetable broth tastes so much better, it doesn’t have any additives, and it’s much less expensive too.

Making a homemade vegetable broth is also quite easy – and you can make it with a variety of vegetables you already have in refrigerator and pantry. (*See the note below in our recipe about using different vegetables.)

We used carrots, celery, onions, kale (and even the leftover kale stems), leeks, tomatoes, garlic, parsley, thyme, and simple seasonings such as salt, peppercorns, and bay leaves. We also added a tablespoon of dulse – dried seaweed flakes that add a wonderful depth of flavor – but this is an optional ingredient.

You may also be surprised to see that we added some egg shells to our pot of vegetables. Adding the egg shells is an old culinary trick that helps clarify the broth.

You’ll simply add all of the ingredients (except the salt – that will be added later) to a large stock pot along with some cold water. (Hammer Stahl’s 12-quart pot was perfect for making broth – more on that below!) Then slowly bring the pot of vegetables to a simmer where it will cook for a few hours to extract the flavors of the vegetables and reduce to concentrate the flavors.

Once cooked, simply purée the cooked vegetables with an immersion blender, then strain out the solids through a fine mesh strainer. (If you still have a lot of solids in your vegetable broth, strain again through cheese cloth.) At this point, you can reduce your vegetable broth for a more intense flavor if you’d like.

Once cooled, we freeze our vegetable broth in quart-sized zipper seal bags.  Freeze them flat on a small baking sheet for easy storage – then thaw when you are ready to use the vegetable broth as needed for recipes.

So about that beautiful stock pot we used to make our Vegetable Broth…that is Hammer Stahl’s 12 quart Dutch oven – a wonderful, heirloom-quality, multi-gauge stainless steel pot that we absolutely loved cooking with.  (My husband Jack is hard to please when it comes to his cookware – and he loved this pot.)

Hammer Stahl is one of the oldest manufacturers of cookware in North America. They offer 7-ply American Clad Cookware, German steel cutlery, and a full assortment of stainless steel bakeware and other accessories.

Their multi-clad cookware transfers heat evenly and efficiently, and the surgical-grade steel is durable and easy to clean. We cooked our vegetable broth over a flame on the stove for three hours without any sort of heat diffuser, and we experienced no sticking or burning, no discoloration, and cleanup was a breeze!

The cookware also has stay-cool handles. It’s dishwasher safe, induction-ready, and comes with a lifetime guarantee.

While we’ve only tested this 12-quart pot, if all of their products are of equal quality – you can’t go wrong with Hammer Stahl.  If you are serious about investing in some quality pots and pans, cookware, or knives that will last you a lifetime, Hammer Stahl definitely deserves a place on your list of brands to consider.