Quick Vegetable Stock/Soup

Hey remember the other day when I made that one pot noodle thingy, and talked about stock, and how I made a really quick stock? No? Well, you can always brush up on your Gastronome by clicking here.

Soup! What could be more boring, ammiright?

Well, yeah, but you know those nights when you come home and you want some hardy vegetable soup, but you’re not sure how in your laziness laden stupor you can pull it off. Well the easiest way is to have vegetable stock on the ready, and to be honest with you, I actually stock up on boxed vegetable stock (stock up on stock…see what I did there??), and will use it to add to dishes, or to even make soup with; Just add a few vegetables, and you have your own fresh soup. Now I know the snarky ones out there are already trying to figure out how to properly eloquate why or how I’m a complete sham and mockery to society at large, but I’m comfortable with that.

All right so weird rant aside, I’m not here to tell you how to open up a box of vegetable stock, and use it for making soup (you sham and mockery what you are)…what I am here to do is to tell you how to make fresh vegetable stock, on a regular weeknight, and still have time to spare to watch Keeping up with the Kardashians.

Now just to clear the air on some definitions, stock vs soup..what’s the difference you ask? Now I’m no culinary linguist, but the working definition that I go with is this: Stock is basically flavored water. So chicken stock (which I’m sure you’ll no doubt remember) is chicken flavored water; Vegetable stock, is, well, vegetable flavored water. Stock has many applications. One of those applications is Soup, which is the name of a dish, in which we’re consuming some sort of liquid, usually combined with either vegetables, or some other food item, that can be eaten out of a bowl, with a spoon. (Another use of stock can be adding it to anything in place of plain water to get the taste of whatever you’re attempting to do. So for example, you can make rice with chicken stock instead of water to add more flavor…this is another good reason to have boxed/canned stock ready to use, to help spice up random dishes…).

Since stock is just flavored water, the “ingredients” for a stock are whatever flavor you want the final result to be, plus water. Then in order for the whole shooting match (it’s a little weird how often I use that term, isn’t it?) to work, we apply heat, which then allows the water (which is the solvent) to draw out flavor molecules (the solute) to form a solution. The higher the temperature the more readily the solute will dissolve into the solvent, and the faster you have stock. So for all intents and purposes, the hotter the water the faster you’ll have stock. (One problem with this is when making chicken stock, there are some bad flavor molecules that will only dissolve once the temperature reaches over 200ish, so while you can boil a chicken stock, and have it quicker, it’s generally not recommended because of the bad flavors that come with it…however, I’ve done it, and while I haven’t done a blind taste test, it’s a little hard to notice the difference…but more on that another time)…

Anyway, back to vegetable stock, with vegetables, there’s really no concern of harsh flavors associated with higher temperatures, so all you need to do for vegetable stock is cook the heck out of the vegetables, until they’ve given all they can to the water, strain the liquid, and you have yourself vegetable stock.

So traditional vegetable stock is made by dumping a whole bunch of whatever vegetables you want into a pot, covering with water, adding spices, and cooking it until you’ve deemed it ready, and that can usually take up to an hour or so. Now, we’ve discussed increasing the temperature in order to make the stock faster, but there’s another way to make it faster. If you decrease the particle size, then you’re increasing the surface area (ie there’s more of the solvent in contact with the solution), which will decrease the amount of time the water will need to do it’s thing.

I know this all sounds scientific-y, but it’s just common sense. Think of it this way, it takes longer to dissolve one of those sugar cube in hot water, than it does for regular sugar to dissolve, because of the amount of area that’s exposed to the hot water is less in the large cube, than in the regular sugar. Make sense?

Anyway, really short story long, what I’m trying to say is if you take your vegetables, puree them in the food processor until they’re what’s technically called a mush, add your water, spices, and what not, bring it to a boil, it will cook and be done in like 20 minutes (I actually don’t remember how long it took, but I think it was around that). Then all you need to do is strain the mush out, and now you have your quick vegetable stock.

Of course you can use this to make the one pot dish I posted the other day, or you can try what I did here. I decided to cube up some tofu, and since the food processor was out, I took some random pasta I had, and whizzed it for a little, so I can get pieces of different size pasta in my soup. Cooked the pasta, tofu, and vegetable stock, and I think some soy sauce, for about 10 minutes together, and there you have it, a quick soup. As you’ll notice in the picture all the way on the top, I topped with some sriracha, and headed off to watch Keeping up with the Kardashians.