How to Make Homemade Vegetable Broth in an Instant Pot

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Vegetable broth is quick and easy to make with an Instant Pot. It is simple and very useful for lots of cooking purposes. You can use it as the basis for soup, making a sauce for stir-fries, cooking vegetables, and making salad dressing.

You can also use it in mashed potatoes, for simmering foods, and adding extra flavor to quinoa, rice, and other grains.

This is a great way to use up some vegetable scraps, which can then be composted. Add a few vegetables you probably have in your refrigerator or pantry already, like carrots, celery, and onion. You can even add in garlic for more flavor.

How to Prepare Vegetable Broth in the Instant Pot

1. Save up your vegetable trimmings. Carrots, celery, tomatoes, zucchini, peppers, mushrooms, potatoes, leeks, kale, garlic, and onions all are great for broth. I suggest choosing organic vegetables. Toss them in a container in the freezer. Skip the skins of onion and garlic and cruciferous vegetables like broccoli or cabbage, as they could make your broth bitter.
2. Add a chopped carrot, celery stalk, and half of an onion. You don’t need to peel the carrot or chop the veggies in small pieces. I just chop them each into a few chunks. You could also include some apple or pear pieces (skip the seeds). Add in some fresh herbs like parsley, and even a bay leaf if you have it. Toss in fresh herbs if you have them like basil, thyme, oregano, and parsley. Add a dried bay leaf, and/or a few peppercorns.
3. In the Instant Pot, cook the vegetable scraps and vegetables with 10 cups of water for 25 minutes on high pressure. Let the pressure release naturally or wait at least 15 minutes to release it.
4. Cool and strain. Discard or compost the solids.

How to Make Vegetable Broth on the Stove

On the stovetop, boil a large pot of water with the vegetables, vegetable scraps, and herbs. Turn down the heat to a simmer and cook for an hour. Then let it cool, strain it, and discard or compost the solids. 

A lot of recipes include salt. I intentionally don’t add salt to broth in order to keep the sodium content low. Then I can add a little salt to the final recipe I am making as needed. 

Now you can use the broth or store it in small containers in the freezer for a few months. Just pull out what you need for a recipe. The broth will last for a few days in the refrigerator also.

Advantages of Homemade Vegetable Broth

This broth is so easy to make. It is a nice feeling to have broth cooking away on a weekend morning: the house smells great and you know you will be ready to do some meal prep too. You will also avoid the preservatives and high sodium content (500 – 900 mg per cup!) in store-bought vegetable stock.

Instead of paying $2 – 3 per quart, it is really inexpensive: maybe a dollar for the vegetables in a batch? With vegetable broth, you can easily add moisture and flavor to so many things you cook. If you cook vegetables in stock instead of oil, you can decrease the amount of fat and calories in your food as well.

Now that you know how to make vegetable broth, you will be ready to make some homemade soup, like this 3 ingredient broccoli soup.

More Recipes You May Enjoy

• Spicy Lentil Chili for the Instant Pot
• Arroz Colorido – Colorful Mexican Rice: A Meal Prep Solution
• How to Make Cheesy Vegan Pizza with 00 Flour
• Stuffed Peppers with Butternut Squash and Quinoa

Join my new Plant-Based, Vegan, and Vegetarian Cooking Community Facebook group!

Have you tried this broth? Please let me know in the comments below: