Pantry Staples: Make Your Own Vegetable Bouillon!

It’s really surprising how few recipes are out there for homemade bouillon. Stock, yes. Court bouillon, sure. But a concentrated bouillon paste that we can use to whip up a quick vegetable broth or add flavor to a pilaf? Not so much. In fact, we only found one recipe that fits what we’re looking for.

Bouillon cubes and pastes can be a real help to those of us who either don’t have tons of space in the freezer to store homemade stock or consistently manage to forget we ran out of it last week (I’ll raise my hand for that one). We’ve talked about our love for Better than Bouillon, but it didn’t occur to us until now that we could make it ourselves.

The only recipe we found is on Heidi Swanson’s blog 101 Cookbooks and originally comes from the River Cottage Preserves Handbook:

• Homemade Vegetable Bouillon from 101 Cookbooks

This bouillon is basically a finely-ground paste of several different vegetables, garlic, herbs, and a healthy amount of salt. Heidi recommends using one teaspoon per cup of liquid in our recipes.

Have you ever made your own bouillon?

Related: Is It Cost-Effective to Make Pantry Staples Yourself?

(Images: Bouillon Cubes/Flickr member tsmall licensed under Creative Commons and Homemade Bouillon/with the permission of Heidi Swanson)