Vegetarian Stock

Among the ingredients suitable for making vegetarian stock, the most efficacious are fresh soy bean sprouts and dried straw mushrooms, the former exuding a natural sweetness and the latter a more intense flavour, on account of being a reconstituted dried product. Unfortunately, dried straw mushrooms are seldom available in the West, so that I have to resort to the next best thing: the stalks from dried Chinese black mushrooms. Also good are certain legumes, such as kohlrabi, broccoli and ca