How I turn SCRAPS into Vegetable Broth | Low-Waste Hacks

hey everyone its Caitlin and welcome to another video in today's video I'm going to show you how to make low waste essentially free a vegetable broth I use vegetable broth in a lot of my recipes because it can add a ton of flavor especially in soups but I also use it sometimes to saute vegetables if I choose not to use oil when I'm cooking but regardless I feel like vegetable broth is a staple in many many recipes but the thing is it can kind of get expensive and it's also very wasteful so most vegetable broth comes in like those plastic tetra packs or cartons that you see in the grocery store as well as chicken stock other meat based stocks as well obviously but the thing about those is that they're kind of expensive like I just said and then also that cart move it's really hard to recycle it to make sure it's really cleaned and still at the end of the day now all the materials from that carton are going to be recycled so if you're looking for a more a low waste alternative I suggest making your own it's actually really easy and you already have everything you need in your kitchen because all you're going to do is save up your leftover vegetable scraps over time put them in a freezer bag and then when you're ready cook them for a little bit with water and voila you have a vegetable broth I show this process a few times on my Instagram stories but you guys are always asking for a blog post slash a tutorial so I made a blog post it's going to be linked below but without further ado let's just get right into it so like I said you get a bag you fill it with veggies scraps so I like to use these reusable avocado I think these are bullet avocado bags basically just any reusable size a ziploc bag you can also use a freezer bag and just reuse the same one over and over again like more conventional plastic one but basically whenever you chop your veggies you're just going to save the ends and the stems of essentially whatever you're chopping and then put them in this bag in the freezer until the bag gets full and in terms of the veggies that you can use you can pretty much use any of them most vegetable broth are comprised of a mix carrots onions and celery so you could definitely save the ends and peels from your carrots or the ends of your onions before you chop them off like I have little frozen one here that had too much of the hard fiber on it to cut I also have an onion top right here you can save let's see let's dig in the ends of celery right now it's kind of winter so I have some parsnip peels in here I got some red onion I have some mushroom stems mushrooms and tomatoes are also really great to add to your vegetable broth will add more umami flavor and sometimes I throw in like tiny clothes of garlic that are so small it's like not even worth peeling and chopping them and then I also some fresh herbs like some cilantro stems and parsley stems they just add more flavor as well so when you use this method your veggie broth is going to be a little bit different every time but your main base is still probably going to be some onions celery and carrots and also pepper cores I have a fair amount of those right now and there are a ton of recipes online for more gourmet Bross where you're using whole food ingredients and you can totally make that too but for me I don't know it just seems kind of wasteful to put a bunch of vegetables that are not going to eat in a pot and then cook it and then just discard the vegetables I know it's not that wasteful but you can still get really good veggie broth using scraps and you don't really have to pay anything for it so all this was free because I already used the main parts of these vegetables in another variation of some recipe so we have our veggie scraps and now we're going to cook them and the good news is you don't need any special devices to cook this you can totally do this on your stovetop those instructions are on my blog but I personally just do it I'm an instant pot because it's easier and it's more fuss free I use the slow cooker setting in my instant pot so if you have a slow cooker you could totally use that as well guys this process is literally very very easy I don't have a pot I just cleaned it you take your instant pot and then you dump your vegetables in it you can dump them straight from frozen these have thawed just a little Eve been sitting out for a few minutes but you literally just dump the entire bag in the pot of gallon sized bag of vegetables fits perfectly in the pot so now we're just going to add water to this and you're going to add water until I say it's about an inch below your frozen vegetables they're going to sink down a little and we want the vegetable rough flavor to be as concentrated as possible I use a little bit more or less depending on the density of my vegetables I guess so this filled it up about 2/3 of the way I'm just gonna get a little more water and then add that in so I'm gonna go to about there so in total that was about 10 to 12 cups of water it really is going to depend on the volume of your vegetable so either suggest going more by the height difference between the water and the veggie vegetables go in the pot and then we're just going to slow cook this and let he do all of the work for us so you couldn't do the same thing put your vegetables in a pot on the stove cover it so the water line is just below the veggies and then you're going to simmer it on low probably for around 3 hours if you do it on the stove more water will probably evaporate because the seal is not as tight as a slow cooker or pressure cooker so you need to watch the water levels but if you're using the slow cooker or a pressure cooker all you have to do is cook it for three hours so I'm just gonna set the slow cook timer I'll do it for three hours and then the instant pot will automatically start and annoyingly start to beep in a few seconds and then you're good to go I tested this for a very long time and sometimes I cook my broth for like five or six hours sometimes I cook up for three hours sometimes I cook up for four hours I would say I would have cook it any less than three hours because the flavor sort of isn't as strong and cooking it more is always better but I don't really find there to be too much of a difference as I'm cooking it for three hours or very much longer especially if you're not sipping the rough plane and you're using in other recipes that is pretty much it I'll show you how to strain it once it's done cooking before I leave you guys and come back three hours later I do want to say I don't have this on hand all the time you can store this in your freezer if you want to but when I don't have edgy broth on hand that I call me I like to use a Boyan paste you can find this in at most grocery stores this is their vegetable base they also have mushroom base or garlic bright base excuse me and they also have some other flavors like a vegan chicken base and a vegan beef brace which I use in a few other of my recipes on my blog but those are harder to find in grocery stores usually have to buy them online this is a concentrated vegetable paste then you can make your own a vegetable broth using this pace by just adding it to water this makes 38 cups of vegetable broth where is one carton of veggie broth is around two or three dollars usually and that's what's four cups of vegetable broth even if you don't want to make your own veggie broth at home you just get this paste instead and yes it's salty and I think that some people shy away from it because they look at the sodium content but the thing about this paste is that you don't even have to make one teaspoon per cup which is their standard measurement if you want to make a low sodium vegetable broth you can use half a teaspoon or adjust according to taste so peals aside I'll see you guys in three hours it's been three hours taking my dogs for a walk by myself a lot a head some food it's more food did some work basically I just lived my life Romain's soup I was making my veggie broth which is pretty freakin awesome the timer went off I let it cool down just for a little bit just to be easier to handle I know I'm gonna show you how Sirena by the way it smells really really good in here but basically we now have our veggie broth and then our veggie scraps as we no longer need so we're just going to strain them out there's no like perfect way to go about it what I like to do is use a really large glass bowl then I have this fine mesh strainer this is like the biggest round one I have I would recommend using a fine mesh because some of the seeds my peppers and stuff can seep through if you're using like a traditional pasta colander so I just put it on here and then pour it through but be careful because the pot is going to be high if you wanted to you could let it cool completely as well we're going to take this out and also I realized that you can't really see what's in this pot because of the camera angle so I'll insert some pictures in here of the broth before and then the broth after cooking so also you'll get a better idea of the water level too so then really easy all we do is pour it in and try not to spill we're like splatter so as you can see a lot of the veggies kind of stay in the pot which I am fine with I usually just put this broth that's already stranded out into jars and then afterwards I'll just dump the veggies in here again and get the final amount of liquid out but that's a pretty good start and there are a few things that's it escaped but then you just pull it up put that off to the side and you got your veggie broth how easy is that now one thing to keep in mind I thought this broth has no salt in it whatsoever because it's literally just vegetable to water well I guess there's some natural salt from vegetables but traditional vegetable broth has salt and entities that are preservative and also salt that's flavour so if you try the special broth and take think it tastes kind of weird it's because you still need to add salt so you can choose to add salt to taste here or you can just choose to add a little bit of extra salt to whatever recipe are making once you actually use the veggie broth that's what I typically do because sometimes any cheese's in the place of water like what I'm cooking rice and its really good but I don't necessarily want a ton of salt in my rice so I usually add salt as I go you can throw these out but if you have a compost bin you can compost in two so we just put them in our compost bin and they've already been cooked now for a little bit too little breakdown even faster which is pretty awesome so now all we have to do is store our veggie broth I'm actually going to use most - this first soup tonight really really good soup but I'll show you how I typically store it I like to get wide mouth mason jars if you have other like huge peanut butter jars or other glass starts you just have around your house that works totally fine too but generally this is about two to three mason jars because it makes about 8 to 10 12 ish cups of veggie broth and then I just have a wide mouth funnel or a canning jar kono you can easily get these online or in some grocery stores and I just roll into the jar now who's almost the possessor and then you just continue this with the rest of your liquid this vegetable broth will last in the fridge for up to a week you just want to make sure you have a good seal on it you can also freeze it you can freeze it in ice cube molds if you're just using vegetable broth in small things look if you're using it Asante veggies or something or you can also store in glass jars but if you put a glass jar in the freezer just make sure to let the broth cool completely first and also be sure to leave a little space between the liquid and the top of the jar because liquid expands when it freezes and your jar will crack which will not be fun to clean up in your freezer so just keep that in mind so I actually ended up getting one to three jars pretty much a vegetable broth from that each of these jars holds about four cups this is honestly pretty much a non recipe recipe like you can use any veggie scraps you really want I have more instructions in my blog post and I briefly talked about it before but I use this all the time personally I think it tastes even better than store-bought broth because you're making it fresh and there isn't any weird added oils or sugars or gums or preservatives which some store-bought veggie brats can have and it makes your house smell related to and this is also a perfect for like the winter season when you're already making a ton of soups and it's essentially free like you're not spending any more money to make this and you're actually kind of reduce your ways because you're cooking your vegetables down even more and just using stuff that you would normally throw out to make something that you can use in recipes so I think that's pretty cool I really excited that I chose recipe with you guys and I hope you try to make it yourself and if you have any other tips and tricks or things you like to do with your own bed you brought they have a comment down below if you'd like to see more recipe videos or like kind of food hacks or naan recipe tech things like this let leave a comment too and yeah like subscribe if you haven't already live your life be happy follow your destiny have a great day I look forward to seeing you in the next video bye

Channel: Caitlin Shoemaker

Views: 77,123

Keywords: budget friendly, what i eat in a day, what i eat in a day vegan healthy, vegan, healthy, easy vegan, what i eat, vegan recipes, plant based, frommybowl, from my bowl, caitlin shoemaker, whole food plant based

Id: I6vBGn4gKIQ

Length: 13min 13sec (793 seconds)

Published: Wed Jan 15 2020