
Veet Karen The Vegan Cooking and Nutrition Podcast
Offering practical cooking and nutrition tips to add more plant based food into your diet
Veet Karen The Vegan Cooking and Nutrition Podcast
What to use instead of stock cubes
I haven't used stock cubes for decades because they often contain poor-quality ingredients or ingredients that I don't want to cook with.
In this podcast I discuss why I don't use stock cubes and what I do instead.
In this episode I cover
Reasons why I don’t use stock cubes
Transitioning to not using stock cubes
Stock can overpower the flavour of the other ingredients
Other alternatives for stock
How to make your own stock
How to have your own stock on hand
Relevant links mentioned in the show
https://www.veets.com.au/vegan-chef-training Vegan Chef training, a fabulous immersion into cooking either to create your own business or for your own home use
https://www.veets.com.au/blog/immune-boosting-greek-lentil-soup Greek lentil soup, a must have soup in your freezer at all times
https://www.veets.com.au/vegan-foundation-cooking-course Vegan Foundation Cooking Course is a fabulous start to your plant based journey. It is a hands on experience working with Veet live online
Let me know your thoughts in the comments.
Show notes in full are at www.veets.com.au/5
Follow Veet on https://www.facebook.com/VeetKarenVegancookingandnutrition/
Hello wonderful cook!
Have you been using stock cubes?
Do you use stock cubes?
Or are you like me you haven't used them for years?
I would say it's about 20 years since I've used a stock cube, if not more and I'm going to talk to you in this podcast episode, number five of the vegan cooking and nutrition podcast, about why I don't use stock cubes and what I use instead to make my food taste sensational each and every time.
Yay!
Introduction
When I was growing up, stock cubes were a regular item in the pantry and I did wonder why my mum used them to make gravy and sometimes she would even put one in spaghetti Bolognese and I wondered why she was using them.
Didn't the food that she make already taste good without adding the stock cubes?
I don't know if I don't remember buying stock cubes or if I did I didn't use them all that often.
Reasons why I don’t use stock cubes
I did notice when I became a chef who was against palm oil, (I don't use palm oil in any part of my business or life because of the destruction to the rainforest and the devastation to the orangutans in Borneo) that a lot of the stock cubes on the shelves in supermarkets had palm oil in them, so I didn't want to use them for that any more and as I cooked for a business you know there would be all sorts of dietary requirements so using stock cubes wasn't an option.
Some stock cubes
Ø Contain MSG in them
Ø have onion and garlic and not everybody I used to cook for ate onion and garlic
Ø have preservatives in them
I did dabble with buying good quality stock powders like Marigold that are organic but found they could be expensive, and I learned to cook without them and make food taste delicious.
Transitioning to not using stock cubes
If you did want to try not using stock cubes you may find the food quite bland without them so a good lead-in to not using stock cubes is trying an organic herb salt.
Or you can make your own stock, which you can make and freeze. The recipe is below.
Stock can overpower the flavour of the other ingredients
Quite recently in the vegan chef training three of the students came together to learn event cake baking and we made this most scrumptious mushroom soup. I didn't use any stock because I just wanted the flavour of the mushrooms. I didn't want the flavour of all the other vegetables in a home made stock or stock cube and so at first the flavours felt quite subtle and maybe you would think, oh it needs a stock cube. But actually, when we all sat down to eat the soup, it was beyond delicious and the flavour of the mushrooms really came through.
Sometimes I don't want to use stock because of the of the soup or whatever you're cooking just tasting like the stock you’ve made.
Other alternatives for stock
Ø onion and garlic
Ø celery or celery seeds
Ø herbs that complement what you are cooking. For example Greek Lentil Soup. It doesn’t need stock as it has oregano, bay leaves and rosemary. That is all the flavouring you need in what you're cooking, so when I make the Greek lentil soup I don't have any stock I just use sal,t sometimes herb salt but I haven't had herb salt for years.
Occasionally I'll make my own. If I've got left over herbs I'll dehydrate them and then grind them up and put them with some salt and make my own herb salt. But because Greek lentil soup has some incredible herbs in it, I just double up the herb quantity and I get that soup tasting sensational.
So in the Greek lentil soup there's bay leaves and most recipes including mine say one bay leaf, so I add two and you know if it says two tablespoons of oregano I add four and if it says two tablespoons of rosemary I add four.
Oil can also add flavour. If you fry onions, garlic and celery in a splash of olive oil you get a really bold flavour through your soup or whatever you are cooking.
Here is a recipe for how to make your own stock
What I do is, I collect things throughout the week so if I know I'm going to need stock I collect things like
Ø onion skins and garlic skins,
Ø carrot peel and ends
Ø kale stalks
Ø silverbeet stalks
Ø celery, a little bit of celery I used to use the leaves but I find it goes too bitter
Ø a couple of mushrooms that are on the older side or sometimes fresh mushrooms
Ø a bay leaf
Ø peppercorns and – yeah, what other things do I collect?
Ø Parsley stalks or stalks of other herbs that go with the dish I am using the stock for
Ø the ends of zucchini, broccoli, cauliflower leaves – all the bits you usually put in the compost.
What I don’t use is
Potato peels (too dirty)
Pumpkin skin (too sweet)
Beetroot (too red - they make whatever you are cooking red)
Using herbs in a home made stock
If you're wanting a stock for a Southeast Asian dish, use some ginger. You could use the skin of the ginger, you could use some lemongrass,some coriander but I wouldn't put coriander if I was going to be making Italian like minestrone so I just keep it in with what's going on with the dish. I would use basil and oregano instead.
If you did know that you were making Borscht for example, which calls for thyme then you could put thyme in with the stock.
1. Collect all the stock items during the week. Add any veggies from the crisper that are wilting, like carrots for example.
2. Wash them and cut them into small pieces, this gives the stock more flavour.
3. Place in a large saucepan and add 2 tsp salt, 11 peppercorns, 2 bay leaves and a big glug of olive oil - up to ¼ cup. Place lid on saucepan and put on a low heat and let the veggies sweat for 30 minutes.
4. Add 1 to 2 litres of water, depending on how much stock you want to make. Bring to the boil then let simmer for an hour.
5. Place a colander over a large bowl or other saucepan and strain the stock/liquid from the veggies into that saucepan or bowl. Pop the cooked veg in the compost.
6. You can store the stock in glass jars in the fridge for a week or freeze it for 3 months
Fun Cooking Tip (FCT)
Okay this is a fun cooking tip. What you can do with that stock now is you can freeze it. You can freeze it in portions, you can freeze it in cubes, you can freeze it however you want and you can use it when a recipe calls for it.
What other people do is, they collect their leftover veggies like the onion peels, garlic peel, the parsley stalks, the celery, all of that which I just talked about, they collect that and put it in the freezer and then when they've got enough they'll make a stock up and then cook with that stock, isn't that great?
If you're wanting to make your food taste sensational, the best place to come and work with me is in the Vegan Foundation Cooking Course .
The Vegan Foundation Cooking Course is now an online course and it consists of 3 x three hours of online cooking with me, just me, yep, me for nine full hours and you'll get to learn how to make your food taste sensational, be packed with protein and be absolutely wonderful for you to cook time and time again.
Okay have a great week and I hope you make sensational food.
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