Vegan or Bone Broth

In the cold winter months when we want a quick warming and super nutritious meal, it's great to reach for "the broth". I make the organic vegan vegetable broth as well as organic beef marrow bone broth every month and keep the freezer stocked up with both, using the broth as either the base for food preparation (cooking quinoa or rice in the broth/stock) or as a meal in itself.

A quick broth meal: Heat up broth and poach an egg in it until cooked. Take off the heat and add fresh spinach, microgreens, spring onions, nutritional yeast and/or herbs and spices to taste for a filling, nutritious, low calorie meal.

Vegan option: add plain or marinated tofu to the vegan broth instead of egg.

We source our organic beef and lamb bones from the infamous Cotswolds "Kite's Nest Farm".  Click here to download the Kite's Nest 2023 price list and view order details.

Recipe

Instructions

  1. Use big chunks of veg OR the juicing pith from root vegetables (carrot, beetroot), sweet potato, squash, and celery. We don’t use the pith from greens as it makes the broth bitter.

  2. Add veg to a large pot or slow cooker with a proportion of 1⁄3-1⁄2 pith to water. It’s important not to overfill the pot so that there is plenty of liquid to strain out. We also like to add a couple of chaga mushroom chunks to the broth for nutritional fortification.

  3. Add bay leaves, peppercorns, whole red onions cut in half WITH the skins on/roots off (adding colour and flavour), garlic cloves cut in half (also with skins on) and bring to the boil until onions are soft.

  4. Turn the heat down and simmer for a minimum of 3 hours to extract all the goodness from the vegetables. We simmer the TMD broth for about 6 hours in the warming oven of the Aga!

  5. Strain well using a sieve, discarding the pulp.

  6. We add Halen Môn’s roasted garlic salt for flavour after it’s been strained.

  7. Serve warm with microgreens such as alfalfa sprouts, rambo radish sprouts etc. and a mixture of spices, nutritional yeast, shelled hemp seeds.

  8. To make bone broth, simply add an organic bone(s) to step 2. For marrow bones, I repeat the procedure getting two pots of broth from one bone.

Please note this stock is very mineral rich and is sometimes called a Potassium Broth. It can be used as the base for soups and also to cook pulses and grains in, adding extra flavour and nutrition.

Jonathan Smithies