Your homemade vegetable stock will taste better than these 6 store brands

This taste test is the first in a series presented by Muir Glen organic tomatoes. Find the olive oil taste test here.

A first-rate soup is easy to make with a good stock. But can a stock you buy at the grocery store equal -- or even surpass -- homemade stock?

To find out, I blind tasted six store-bought vegetable stocks. Managing Producer Sally Swift warmed each stock in the microwave, poured it into a clear plastic cup and labeled it with a letter. I ranked each on a 5-point scale, with 1 being the worst and 5 being the best.

The Blind Taste Test

Stock A: Imagine Organic Vegetable Broth ($3.49)
Score: 2

Lynne tastes a vegetable stock Photo: Micah Taylor

This is mustard orange in color and tastes like carrot and celery. I don’t want carrot stock, I want vegetable stock.

Stock B: 365 Everyday Value Organic Vegetable Broth ($2.29)
Score: 3

It has salt, it has decent flavor, it’s rather delicate. It's rather light and rather nice. It's not bad, but it's just ordinary.

Stock C: Swanson 100% Natural Vegetable Broth ($2.99)
Score: 3

Remember the color of Tang? This is it. This really has a nice vegetable flavor. It’s not overly salted. But this bright orange stock just doesn’t do it for me -- it’s a wimp.

Stock D: Pacific Organic Vegetable Broth ($3)
Score: 3

It’s a cloudy, orangey color. It smells of celery seed and is a little salty for my taste. Not bad, but it’s not neutral enough.

It's trying to be clear and is a brownish color. It smells sweet. This is a saltless stock. I know this brand, I know what it is. If it had salt in it, I think that it would have a very nice flavor. Even with salt it’s going to be too weak-kneed. It's close; I'll give it a score of 4 out of 5.

[Ed. note: Sally then revealed the brand of stock, including that it contains salt.]

I was wrong. It’s not what I thought it was -- it does have salt in it. OK, that does it. This is like dishwater. This gets a big fat zero.

This is really brown. It's very delicate; it's not as salty as the others at all, and really nice and full bodied. I’d give it a little salt, believe it or not, and I’d boil it down a bit. 

[Ed. note: Sally then revealed the brand, including that it is unsalted.]

This is actually unsalted. This is sweet; it tastes of vegetables. I have got to give that the top score. I'm going to change the score to 4. That's our winner.

Lynne scores the vegetable stocks Photo: Micah Taylor

'There’s really no champ here'

Kitchen Basics Unsalted Vegetable Stock is our winner, even though there’s really no champ here. Not one of these stocks is a standout compared to what you can do with a homemade stock. None of these match what you can do with 90 minutes of simmering at home -- none of them, they’re not within a country mile. None of them are as cheap, either.

Photo: Micah Taylor

How to judge a store-bought vegetable stock

To judge a store-bought vegetable stock, first read the label. Vegetables should dominate the list of ingredients, with salt and any ingredients with more than two syllables at the end.

Next, taste the stock. It should taste good enough to sip on its own. I don't like broths that have heavy salting, wishy-washy flavors, chemical tastes or one dominant ingredient. You always want a stock to be neutral so that you can salt it if you want -- or if you want to boil it down, it’s not going to end up being like a salt lick. That’s the great thing about an unsalted stock.

While Muir Glen is an underwriting partner, neither their brand nor the brands of their parent company are involved in the reviewing process, and their employees have no editorial input or oversight on the results.