Ingredients
- 47 cups water
- 1.6 kg chopped onion
- 12 celery stalks, sliced
- 47 garlic cloves, peeled
- 24 fresh capsicums (green and red), cut in half, seeded
- 1 handful parsley, chopped
- 12 twigs fresh rosemary
- 1/4 cup fresh tarragon, chopped
- 3/4 cup cornflour
- Salt, to taste
- 1 tablespoon ground black pepper
Instructions
- Chop the onion, celery, garlic and peppers roughly. Nothing here is going to be eaten as a piece, so a fine dice is wasted work.
- Hold the parsley, rosemary and tarragon back from the long boil and add them in the last few minutes. Herbs simmered for an hour taste of hay, and the fresh green notes are what separate this from a stock cube.
- Simmer the vegetables in the water until they are completely soft and the liquid has reduced to about a quarter of what you started with. That reduction is the point — you are removing water on the stove where it costs nothing, rather than on the trays where it costs a day.
- Blend the lot smooth with a stick blender, skins and all. Anything you strain out is flavour you paid for.
- Whisk the cornflour through and simmer it a few minutes more until it visibly thickens. A thin puree runs to the edges of the drying sheet and pools there.
- Spread it on lined trays in a thin, even layer with the back of a spoon. Thick patches skin over and stay wet underneath, and you cannot tell by looking.
- Dehydrate for 10 hours at 52 °C, breaking the sheet up and turning the pieces over once it is firm enough to lift. The underside is always the last part to finish.
- It is dry when a cooled shard snaps cleanly and nothing is tacky between your fingers. A piece that bends will turn the whole jar of powder into a solid brick within a month.
- Grind the cold shards to a powder and store it in an airtight jar in the dark with a desiccant sachet. Give it a year rather than the five it is sometimes credited with: it stays safe far longer than that, but the herbs and the peppers fade and what is left tastes mostly of salt and onion.
