# Why bother with vegetable broth?

**URL:** <https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-bother-with-vegetable-broth/741132>\
**Category:** Cafe Society\
**Created:** [December 22, 2015, 10:48pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-bother-with-vegetable-broth/741132 "2015-12-22T22:48:06Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 4\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![What\_the](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/w/f4b2a3/32.png) [@What\_the](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/What_the)\
**Post date:** [December 22, 2015, 10:48pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-bother-with-vegetable-broth/741132/1 "2015-12-22T22:48:06Z")

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I’m making lentil soup but I don’t want to make an extra trip to the store. Why not just increase the vegetables the recipe calls for and use water and seasoning?

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**Author:** ![Scumpup](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/ce73a5/32.png) [@Scumpup](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Scumpup)\
**Post date:** [December 22, 2015, 11:00pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-bother-with-vegetable-broth/741132/2 "2015-12-22T23:00:53Z")

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No reason. You can produce a perfectly acceptable product using the method you described. The boxed vegetable broths I’ve tried are just celery and onion water anyway.

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**Author:** ![elbows](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/e/b3f665/32.png) [@elbows](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/elbows)\
**Post date:** [December 22, 2015, 11:23pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-bother-with-vegetable-broth/741132/3 "2015-12-22T23:23:47Z")

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Well, when I boil noodles, usually to make Asian food, I boil them in Vegetable broth. It just adds a lovely extra layer of flavour to the dish. But I’m not boiling veggies, in the production of these dishes, so making my own vegetable broth would add a very labourius and time consuming step!

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**Author:** ![Athena](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/35a633/32.png) [@Athena](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Athena)\
**Post date:** [December 24, 2015, 2:14pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-bother-with-vegetable-broth/741132/4 "2015-12-24T14:14:26Z")

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The OPs technique would work.

However, you’d get more flavor if you actually made a broth. The idea of a broth is that you get the goodness out of the vegetables, resulting in overly-cooked, mushy, tasteless vegetables.

It’s pretty easy to make veggy broth, not laborious at all. [Here’s](http://markbittman.com/very-flavorful-vegetable-stock-in-1-hour/) a decent recipe, but really, you can put just about any combo of onion/leek/parsley/potato/mushroom/celery/carrot/etc in a pot, simmer it for an hour or so, and you’ll have decent stock.