Easiest way to make vegetable broth

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Making broth isn’t complicated or fancy. Broth is basically an infusion. You’re taking plain ol’ water and infusing it with the flavors of whatever you’ve added to that water. It’s called broth when you use meat or vegetables, it’s called stock when you use bones. So to all you hip kids out there, bone broth is actually stock.

Want to make vegetable broth? First you need some veggie scraps. If you happen to be doing a lot of veggie prep, save the ends and peelings.

You can do this a couple different ways:

Collect them in a jar, bowl, or bag in the fridge, or,
save them in a bag in the freezer, add to it whenever you’ve got scraps, ends, or peelings.

Which method of saving vegetable scraps should I use?

Your method for saving might depend on what you plan to do with the broth. My gallon jar full of veggie scraps netted me about 3 cups of broth. Not enough to make it worth running a whole pressure canner, but certainly enough to save in the fridge for a short time to use in recipes.

If you want to make a lot of broth at once to run a pressure canner, it might be best for you to collect scraps and save them in the freezer so the scraps don’t go bad before you’re able to make a big batch.

How to use vegetable scraps to make broth

When it’s time to make the broth, place all the scraps in a big pot. Add water until the veggie scraps are submerged and covered by a couple inches of water.

Turn the burner on and bring the pot to a boil, then let that baby simmer (covered) for a few hours (or as I like to say, when you come in from doing work around the homestead and remember you had broth simmering on the stove).

Strain the veggies out (feed to your chickens!) and save the broth. Add salt to the broth if you want, or add salt later when you use the broth for a recipe.

From this point, you can:

put the broth in a jar or other container in the fridge to use within a week or so.
pressure can it to make it shelf stable. (I don’t generally make enough veggie broth all at once to can it, so I just stick it in the fridge.)
freeze the broth in ziploc bags if it works better for you.