I love soup! Really, I do. I could eat it every day of the year. However, I am picky. I do not like canned soup so I end up making lots of pots o’ soup myself. Often my soups have a chicken stock base (homemade, of course) but there are times when I do not have stock on hand. Then, the soups have a water base. Which, you know, makes a pretty insipid soup. I have never gotten into the habit of using bouillon cubes but have, in the past, used soup base. I like it but it’s pretty expensive and can be full of equally as mysterious ingredients as bouillon. When I saw this recipe for a homemade veggie bouillon, I thought, “why the heck not!”. I had to run out and buy all the ingredients because, you know, celeriac and fennel are not normal veggies in this house. Neither are shallots.
The recipe came together pretty quickly.
According to the recipe, I should have had around 3 and a half cups. I wound up with way more than that.
It smelled pretty good but, man, was it salty tasting! Which should be no surprise since this is just a base — you add a teaspoon for every cup of water in your soup. I was left wondering if this would really work.
Meanwhile, I put all the veggie peelings and leftover bits in a stock pot to boil.
Then strained it and had even more stock to play with.
Finally, I made soup. Using some veggie stock and a few spoonfuls of soup base, I cooked up a pot of cream of broccoli soup.
It was the best soup ever! I think I’m going to like this homemade soup base. And, fortunately, I have tons of it so I can make (and eat) soup every day!
And just for some fun math (oxymoron?), I figured out the cost of the soup base. To buy all the ingredients cost around $10.33 (leeks, fennel & celeriac are pricey) not including the salt….but that would be cheap anyways. If you use a teaspoon of soup base per cup of water, my size batch (a little more than 6 cups) should yield around 288 cups of soup for a cost around 3 cents per cup. That seems impossible to me but, then again, I could seriously have screwed up the math. So this stuff is good and cheap and soup! My favorite things!
