— Mitch Miglis

There are definitely veggies you want to, don't want to put in stock. One of those is beets, like I just mentioned. Unless you're making something specifically that you want everything to be red in, or something like the borscht, I would definitely not use beets in it. Other things that I usually try to keep away from stocks are things like a lot of big flavor kind of things as far as herbs and things go. You wouldn't use garlic, for an example. I wouldn't use garlic in a stock, especially if you're boiling it down like that. If you're cooking it a lot, it can turn bitter a lot. I usually don't put any kind of herbs into my stock unless I'm doing a specific kind of a stock. Like pho is one of those stocks that's very unique in its own, and that has things like garlic, and it has acids like lemon or lime into it, but you have to be very careful of those because they can turn kind of quickly if you don't follow the directions on making those stocks exactly the way it says. So, I'll usually leave herbs and different spices out of my stock, and I'll add those in as I'm kind of using the stock for all kinds of other things. What I'll usually do is make two big jars of stock, and keep those in the refrigerator as I need them. I'm not always going to make the stock right into a soup. I'll use it for multiple things. So because of that, I don't add herbs in them, and I don't do other flavor profiles. So if I'm doing something like a khao soi or a tom kha, I'm not going to add lemongrass to my stock until I'm actually making the actual dish itself. So just keep that in mind. If you want to have it very neutral, you just kind of keep neutral ingredients into it. Other vegetables, again, things like beets, eggplant. I'm trying to think of some other ones. I've done zucchinis and stuff like that into them as well, but things that are just kind of throw that flavor profile off a little bit , I'm usually not going to put into those.