Name: Vegetable Stock
Yield: Yield: About 6 Cups
Cuisine: United States
Ingredients: Up to 1 cup zucchini or summer squash chunks, strips of mild lettuce or green Swiss chard leaves, or coarsely chopped chard stalks; 2 quarts cold water (quality is important here, so if you use bottled water for coffee or tea, use it here); ¼ cup celery leaves or 1 teaspoon celery seed, crushed lightly; 1 Turkish bay leaf; 4 to 6 sprigs fresh thyme or ¼ teaspoon dried leaves; 10 fresh flat-leaf parsley sprigs; 1 teaspoon salt; 5 peppercorns, crushed; Up to ¼ ounce dried mushrooms, soaked in 2 cups hot water for 30 minutes, or until soft, then rinsed for grit and finely chopped; 2 corncobs; 2 tablespoons olive oil or unsalted butter or 1 tablespoon of each; 2 large onions, 1 coarsely chopped, 1 thinly sliced; 1 tomato (optional); 2 medium carrots, scraped and diced; 2 celery stalks, coarsely chopped; 1 small parsnip, peeled and coarsely chopped; About 1 teaspoon soy sauce (optional); 6 to 8 garlic cloves, peeled and smashed; ½ pound fresh cultivated regular or shiitake mushrooms, wiped clean (pieces and stems are fine); 1 small turnip, scraped or if waxed or thick-skinned, peeled, coarsely chopped; Some liquid from soaking the dried mushrooms (or leftover mushroom liquid from another recipe), strained through a sieve lined with a paper towel or a coffee filter to remove any remaining grit

Preparation info

Yield: About
6 Cups

Difficulty
Easy

Appears in

Jewish Holiday Cooking

By Jayne Cohen

Published 2008

About

Because vegetable stock is pareve or neutral (that is, it contains neither meat nor dairy), according to the dietary laws, it may be eaten with either. But meat dishes generally rely on meat stocks; in Jewish cooking, it is foods glossed with butter or topped with cream that give vegetable stock its reason for being. Only vegetable stock can jazz up a plain pilaf destined to partner a butter-gilded fish. It is the sole stock base for a soup that will be enriched with sour cream or yo