Vegetable stock paste in the Thermomix® TM7, with the Peeler and Cutter doing the prep
I had never made a vegetable stock paste, and it was never the recipe that stopped me. It was the prep. A stock paste means a decent pile of vegetables need to be peeled and cut, and every time I thought about starting I pictured myself at the board with a peeler in one hand and a growing heap of carrot ends in the other. The stock cubes in the cupboard won every time.
This week I handed that part over to the Thermomix® and finally made it properly.
First I made the pile bigger
Here is the part that still amuses me. When a job is the thing putting you off, the sensible move is to make that job smaller. I did the opposite. There was a sweet potato and a parsnip in the fridge that needed using up, so in they both went on top of everything the recipe asks for. Sweet potato is my favourite vegetable and it was never going to last much longer in there anyway.
The sweet potato brought a peeling job with it, which is exactly the sort of thing I would have talked myself out of before.
The peeling happened without me
The sweet potato went into the mixing bowl with the Peeler on top, and I set it running for four minutes. When it stopped it was peeled, and there was not a single skin on my board.
The Cutter did the slicing
Then the Cutter went on. It is the slicing and grating attachment that sits over the mixing bowl, so you choose your setting on the screen, feed the vegetables into the chute, and the slices drop straight down into the bowl underneath. I went with the thicker slice.
Celery is usually the fiddly one, and a whole bunch of it took about forty seconds, one stick after another. What I liked most was how even everything came out. Vegetables cut to the same size cook at the same rate, which is one of those small things you only really notice later, when the whole lot has softened properly instead of half of it going to mush.
Then Thermie took over
The tomato, the onion and a good handful of fresh herbs went in on top of the sliced vegetables, then the rock salt and a spoonful of oil. The lid went on and the guided cooking on Cookidoo® picked it up from there.
Step 5 is where the real work happens. Twenty minutes at 120°C on speed 1, with the timer counting down on the screen and nothing needed from me at all.
The bit I actually want you to see
There is a stretch in the middle of the video where nothing happens in the kitchen at all. The lid is on, the light ring has turned red, and the camera simply sits there watching the machine work.
Look past it, out through the window. That is me in the yard playing with the dogs while the stock paste carries on without me.
Anyone can tell you a Thermomix® saves you time. Showing you what that time actually looks like is the harder part, and in this case it looked like twenty minutes in the sun with my dogs, and a jar of stock paste waiting for me when I came in.
Why a stock paste earns its place
A homemade stock paste is a small thing that quietly improves a lot of other meals. It goes into soups, risottos, sauces and braises, so the flavour base for a weeknight dinner is already sitting in the fridge before you have even decided what you are cooking. You also know exactly what went into it, because you watched every vegetable go in.
I never avoided this recipe because it was difficult. I avoided it because of the prep. That is true of a great deal of cooking, and it is worth saying plainly. The recipe is usually fine. The prep is what stops you.
What I did not expect was the other half of that. Once the prep stopped costing me anything, I stopped quietly trimming recipes down to what I could face, and started adding to them instead. That is how a sweet potato and a parsnip ended up in a stock paste that never asked for either.
If you would like to try it
The recipe is Vegetable stock paste on Cookidoo®, listed at thirty minutes start to finish, and it runs as guided cooking on the TM7, so the screen walks you through each step as you go. The Peeler and the Cutter are both separate accessories rather than something that comes in the box, which is worth knowing before you plan an afternoon around them.
If you would like to see either of them working in person, message me. I run in-person cooking experiences around the Western Downs and Toowoomba, and virtual consults anywhere in Australia. It is a relaxed look at what the machine can actually do, with no pressure attached.