Recently I decided to experiment with making my own vegetable broth from some veggie scraps I had been saving over the last few months. With the change of seasons, temps have dropped and I’m not sure about you, but when a chill hits the air it signals a craving for hearty comforts foods. As some of you may already know, I make food for our lovely dog Lincoln. If you’re interested in my recipe and process, you can read about it here.

A few months ago, while prepping the veggies for dog food it hit me that I could possibly get a 2nd and 3rd use out of some of the scraps. It’s typically more cost-effective to buy the larger 5lb bags of whole carrots and then cut them myself. I remove the tops of the carrots and had normally been putting them directly into our compost (2nd purpose). This time I placed those tops in a freezer-safe bag and added to it each time I had more veggie scraps. It took about 2 months to fill two gallon-sized bags with remnants of carrots, celery, and scallions that were used for other meals and/or dog food.

I’m definitely not the master of broth making, but here was my process. I only used one of the gallon-sized bags and my instant pot was completely full. I placed the veggie scraps in frozen. I added 10 cups of water to the pot, 2 bay leaves, a tablespoon of turmeric and a tablespoon of minced garlic. Lock the lid in place and put the seal to closed. Set Instant Pot to 20 minutes of manual high pressure. After 20 minutes allow a natural pressure release. Once this was complete I allowed the pot to cool. I removed the veggies scraps to a colander and placed that colander over a pot as the veggies still had a great deal of broth inside of them. Especially the celery. I applied some pressure with a wooden spoon and got a significant amount of broth. I finally strained the broth and placed in large canning jars. There was enough broth to completely fill 3 large jars and still have a little leftover. Later in the week I used this broth to make vegetable soup and felt extra proud of myself for making the broth as well. Keep in mind this is a very mild broth. Once I made soup, I added salt and other spices to get more depth of flavor. After this first experiment, I believe next time I will add plenty of spices to the veggies to form a more flavorful broth. The veggies that were used to make this broth were then placed in our compost (3rd purpose).

This really couldn’t have been any easier. It was incredibly easy to save scraps. This could be made on the stove, in a crockpot or with a pressure cooker. If you give this a try to make sure to comment below and let me know how yours turned out. As always thank you for visiting the blog! If you enjoyed this post be sure to click the little heart button below and leave a comment so we know that you were here. Thanks again!