Instant Pot Broth

You won’t believe how easy it is to make your own broth at home. It used to be that you’d simmer a pot of veggies and chicken bones on the stove for hours, but not anymore. Now we have Instant Pot broth! You can make chicken broth, vegetable broth, or even beef broth with this recipe.

Soup season is the perfect time to learn how to make this incredibly easy staple at home. Once you’ve made homemade broth, you won’t want to go back to paying for it and it will help reduce food waste in your kitchen.

How to Make Instant Pot Broth or Stock

To make broth or stock in your Instant Pot, all you need are some vegetable scraps, bones from a turkey, chicken or beef, and water. You can also add seasonings like peppercorns, kosher salt, and bay leaves, if you’d like. I keep a bag of vegetable scraps in my freezer and as soon as it’s full, I know it’s time to make some Instant Pot broth!

Ingredients

Vegetables: You can throw in some whole carrots, onion, celery and garlic, or you can keep a bag for your scraps in the freezer. Any time I chop an onion, trim some celery, peel some carrots, or have some tomatoes that are getting a little too ripe, I throw them in the bag. The papers and ends of garlic and onions are perfectly fine here, too.

Other great items for the vegetable bag: stems from your herbs, mushrooms, kale stems, or bits and bobs from cabbage, broccoli, and more. The only thing I’d avoid is potato skins and beets. Potato skins don’t lend a very good flavor to your broth and beet scraps will make your broth pink. You also don’t want too much of any one thing or your broth will taste like that vegetable. Go heavy on vegetables like onion, celery, garlic and carrots and a bit lighter on anything else. You’ll need at least 3 cups of vegetables.

Bones: You can use chicken bones, turkey bones, or even beef bones. If you have some leftover chicken wings or the bones from your Thanksgiving turkey or rotisserie chicken, just throw them in the freezer and use them when you want to make some broth. You could also include other pieces of the meat that you don’t want to use in a recipe, such as chicken skin.

Seasonings: Bay leaves, black peppercorns or ground black pepper, and a teaspoon or two of kosher salt are all great additions, but they are optional. I sometimes like to keep my broth unsalted, so I can salt it to taste when I use it in a recipe.