Eureka! Homemade Bouillon!
Excerpted from Flying Tomato Farms
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My dear friend Matt from Cookrookery sent me a link to one of his regular reads: 101 Cookbooks, and specifically to this great post on homemade bouillon. The original recipe comes from Pam Corbin’s River Cottage Preserves Handbook.
The Ingredients
The idea behind this recipe isn’t really new in the sense that great cooks have been using concentrated blends of flavors to season dishes for centuries. Scrolling down through the comments, sofrito–that wonderful blend of peppers, onions, garlic, and herbs–is the most often mentioned.
This isn’t quite the same thing, but it’s something I hadn’t thought of–instead of making and then trying to find fridge or freezer room for vast quantities of liquid stock, why not just puree the vegetables, preserve with salt, and freeze a concentrated paste instead?
So, that’s what I’m doing. I’m tweaking the recipe in a few ways–using lots of the veggies I have in the crisper (the last of the garden parsnips, carrots, and celeriac) as well as the stalks from a fennel bulb, three crushed cloves of garlic, some frozen sliced leeks, and a handful of dried Red Pear tomatoes.
Roasted Goodness
Instead of chopping and pureeing the veggies raw, I’ve roasted them with just a little olive oil. I didn’t use parsley because I’m out of my own, and the grocery store offering was a tiny, stemmy, wilted bundle. I didn’t use cilantro, either—even though I’m fond of it.
I did break up and use a couple of dried hot and sweet red peppers in the mix—no seeds, though, so it won’t be too spicy.
What appeals to me about this recipe is that it doesn’t call for simmering the veggies in water and then tossing them (or feeding them to the worms—mine have got quite a feast already). You keep all the fiberful parts and it doesn’t take up a ton of room.
