Chinese Vegetarian Recipes

Vegetable Stock Recipe

Vegetable Stock Recipe

Frankly, I don’t know if it is I who am too lazy or it is the time that is too limited for me to prepare for a vegetable stock recipe. I always use clean cool water as a substitute for the stock. You can guess that the taste would be much worse. However, I have been living with this for some time. So if you are not willing to make it, you can learn from me.

Once you know how to make a proper vegetable stock, however, you will find that it is too easy to postponed or avoided. You can have an inventory for the coming week with one go. With that being said, preservation is also an issue that will be dealt with later in this post. You must want to know what the vegetable stock recipe would look like immediately. Okay, let’s go.

Ingredients:

Carrots : 150 g

Onion: 150 g

Celery stalks: 50 g

Cabbage: 200 g

Tomato: 2 medium sized

Apple: 1 small sized

Water: 2 liter

Vegetable oil: 1 teaspoon

Seasonings:

Bay leaf: 2 leaves

Peppercorn: 2 grains

Preparation work:

1. Roughly chop the carrots, onions, celery stalks and the cabbage;

2. Dice the peeled tomatoes (Immersing in hot water will facilitate the peeling) coarsely;

Cooking Steps:

1. Preheat the stockpot;

2. When the stockpot is dry and hot, pour the vegetable oil inside;

3. When the oil is hot, drop the chopped carrots, onions, celery stalks and cabbage into the stockpot and stir;

4. Cook them for 10 minutes (The water will come out from these vegetables. So they will not burned by the hot oil. Instead they will be cooked into soup.) when the vegetables become soft.

5. Pour the water into the stockpot and drop all the seasoning into it;

6. Stir them fully;

7. Cover the stockpot with a lid or tin foil until it boils;

8. Turn the heat down to medium or low and simmer it for 30-40 minutes; (Don’t boil for over an hour because the vegetables will be boiled out and start to split themselves.)

9. Turn off the heat and strain the soup out.

10. The soup is what we want.

Tips for preparing the vegetable stock recipe:

1. Remember this is only one of the recipes out there. You can switch the ingredients with something that you like. For example, you can trade the cabbage with courgettes.

2. Don’t use starchy vegetables such as potatoes and yams because they will make the stock too thick in the end. Don’t use something with dying property like red pepper which will make the stock red and the soup in which the stock is used later on red, too.

3. If you like some special flavor that you want to incorporate into the vegetable stock recipe, then don’t hesitate to add it such as green bell peppers and so on.

4. Don’t use salt in the stock. This will discompose the salt because you will not eat the soup immediately.

5. Storage. Exposed to the ambient temperature, the vegetable stock will get rotten in a few days. So you can refrigerate it. The way that I prefer to storage it is: I pour it into the ice cube trays and freeze them in the refrigerator. Whenever I need it, I just take one cube out for one meal. That way it can be preserved for as long as I want.

Related recipes:

1. Vegetable Soup Recipe – Mung Beans and Chinese Cabbage