Give Your Veggie Broth A Beef-Like Flavor With This Umami Ingredient

Veggie broth is a kitchen staple, providing the ideal purpose for using up all of your scraps and adding flavor to anything from rice to sauces, soups, and stews. Substituted in anything you'd usually add chicken or beef broth to, it is also a key ingredient for vegan and vegetarian-izing any recipe that typically calls for its animal-derived counterpart. But while it does deliver functionally at as a substitute in any recipe, there is one flavor element that beef and chicken broths contain that most veggie broths do not — and that's the infamous fifth taste known as umami.

Savory, earthy, rich, deep, and otherwise described as "meaty," umami is most associated with animal proteins due to the natural glutamate content within them. However, it can also be found in fermented foods such as miso paste and soy sauce, seaweeds such as kombu and dulse, and certain vegetables. Any of these ingredients can be added to your veggie broth, giving a distinguishable dimension of umami flavor. But if you want to get the most umami, beef-like flavor out of your veggie broth, you really only need to reach for one ingredient: mushrooms.

Like animal proteins, mushrooms contain a high amount of natural glutamate — the compound responsible for umami flavors in foods. This fact alone makes mushrooms a go-to substitute for everything from the steak in your carne asada tacos to the beef in your meatloaf. That goes for your veggie broth, too.

Mushrooms contain lots of glutamate in general, but some varieties contain more than others. Just like there are certain mushrooms that work better as a meat substitute in certain instances than others, some mushrooms are better for your veggie broth. Since you're making a broth and, therefore, only need to lean on the mushroom's flavor, that mushroom would simply be the variety and form with the high glutamate content: dried shiitakes or porcinis.  

Shiitakes are known for having a particularly high glutamate content and, therefore, umami flavor. The same thing is true about porcinis. And that flavor only gets more concentrated when the mushrooms are dried — raising the naturally occurring glutamate levels from 70 mg fresh to 1060 mg dried in the case of shiitakes. You can purchase them dried in-store, or you can dry them yourself at home by throwing them in your oven at a low level or by using an at-home dehydrator. 

Whether using dried porcinis or shiitakes, you can toss them directly into your veggie broth recipe to simmer along with the rest of your ingredients — you can even save the stems or other scraps left after cutting them for your other mushrooms recipes and use those too. Either way, you only need about an ounce of them, and once strained along with the rest of the vegetable scraps in your recipe, you'll find that they give your broth a deeper, earthier flavor.