Amazing vegetable stock is almost free at my house!
As we cook, we keep our vegetable scraps. We have a gallon-sized ziplock in the freezer, and scraps like: onion caps, potato peels, carrot tops, beet-bits, the tiny little interior cloves of garlic, herb stems, and lots of other things get tossed into the bag. We're currently limiting the amount of broccoli- and cabbage-relatives because of a bitterness that sometimes appears, but for a long time we just used everything.
These are some carrot peelings I had leftover last week after making miso-glazed carrots. They went into the bag:
Last night, I took a full bag out of the freezer, emptied it into the electric pressure cooker (we use an Instant Pot, but aren't cultish about it...any pressure cooker will do fine) and filled the pot with water. Here's what it looks like, in all it's unappealing glory:
Then I added some bay leaves, pepper corns, and Mexican oregano leaves, and set it to pressure-cook for 40 mins and turn itself off.
This morning, I checked it out and this is what I found:
At this point, I strain out the solids, squeezing and mashing to extract all the easy-to-get liquid without breaking down the solids so much that they'll go through the sieve:
And that's basically it. It's hardly any work and this produced almost ten cups of stock!
The spices that I put in are different each time depending on my whim. And each batch is different. For me, that's good, but I can imagine people who care more about consistency and they might want to do things to normalize their mixture of inputs.