It’s Grocery Month at Epicurious, and we’re thinking about super-fast checkout lines, alternative mylks (not a typo), and the cheapest bottles of olive oil (and wine). Check out the complete series here.
It will come as no surprise when I tell you that as a (mostly) vegetarian cook, I rely heavily on vegetable broth. Water doesn't cut it for me when I'm adding liquid to my beans to sauces—I prefer a liquid with more flavor, like broth, stock (yes, there is a difference), wine, or even vegetable juice.
But what might surprise you is that when I need said broth, I use Better Than Bouillon.
This started a few years ago, while cooking a big pot of minestrone soup with my sister. I asked for the vegetable broth, she handed me a jar of "food base" instead. As she scooped out a few spoonfuls of the stuff into our pot, she explained that it was a broth concentrate, a paste of carrot, onion, celery, tomato, potato, garlic, salt, and spices that can be added to water to create an instant broth.
Once I tasted the resulting soup—rich and hearty and packed with umami—there was no turning back. I started using Better Than Bouillon all the time.
Unlike bouillon cubes and powder, which are made from primarily from salt (lots of it), sugar, and hydrolyzed protein, BTB vegetable base is made from, well, vegetables. (Note that there's a Better Than Bouillon variety to suit every cooking need: the base comes in beef, chicken, mushroom, and roasted garlic, as well as low-sodium and organic versions.) Plus, it keeps forever, unlike a box of vegetable broth, which will go bad after just a few days sitting around in the fridge.
So now I keep a jar of BTB in my fridge—and a back-up jar in the pantry—at all times. And because it's so big in flavor, I shamelessly add a spoonful of it to anything. I put it in stir fries, soups, grains bowls, ragouts—anything that calls for a boost of umami. I even use it for—surprise, surprise—soups.
