Question
Diane Kirschner
To make stock, what prep (wash+?) should you give to the peels or skins of veggies before you throw them into your scraps bag? I made stock w/scraps that turned out brown and one with fresh veggies that was a lovely, clear amber color and tastier.
Answer
I think like many of us, we are really busy filling those freezer bags up with vegetable scraps with everything from onion skins to zucchini tops to tomato, Coors. At least I say everything. And, uh, di Diane's observation is that the, uh, recipe that we have for making stock comes out beautifully. It's that beautiful amber color that probably comes from carrots. Whereas perhaps in your freezer collection you may have potato peels or you may have, uh, the bottom of a beet or the ends of a sweet potato where your stock ingredients are lacking the vibrant colors. So I always try to add, uh, a bright orange carrot or a yellow carrot and maybe some tomatoes just to add a little bit more color. And the other trick is when you are making a stock, the smaller that you cut a vegetable, so you would want a small dice on a carrot, for example, it will ooze out, permeate more color for you. So you might want to try that. The other thing I recommend is, um, I don't use any special solutions when I clean my vegetables, but I do have this really useful vegetable brush and I scrub my vegetables really, really well to get off any surface dirt or little teeny roots that still might be trapping around or something like that. So a good vegetable scrub brush is really, really helpful. Um, the other thing I do, I do this specifically with fruit, is I will, uh, take some steaming piping hot water, and I will hold, let's say grapes. I will hold them with forceps and hold them over a bowl and then pour the water off, uh, over them rather, rather. And you will see all of this dirt and sludge and everything else come out of the grapes and that you'll have pristine looking grapes. So you might wanna do that with some of your fresh vegetables before you use them as well, so that anything that's not visible to the eye will come off when you make your stock. But keep using those scraps because that's a really important thing.
