This morning, after breakfast, I decided to make the morning a little productive and get a stew in the oven. While stews are renowned as an easy meal to throw together - simple ingredients, minimal preparation, then just allow time to cook for a few hours - I never used to find them so easy. This is because I would try too hard: multiple fresh herbs, pancetta, several types of vegetable, slicing everything uniformly. My stews were still relatively simple, but they were not the 'throw everything in and forget about it' type of dish I had hoped for.
Fast forward a few years, and I have chilled out a little. I now know that if I use the absolute basic ingredients - beef, onions, carrots, potatoes, celery, tinned tomato, some stock (or not), some wine (or not) - my stew will still be absolutely delicious. While it is fine, of course, to add elements such as fresh herbs, bacon, button mushrooms, cognac, and to dice everything in perfect cubes, it is still completely, 100 per cent worth making a stew with bare basic elements.
A stew at its most basic can be put together, first thing in the morning, without really concentrating. Some mindless chopping, a little browning, some peeling and stirring. This barely-there effort will reward you, a few hours later, with the most beautifully fragrant kitchen, and enough delicious beef stew for several meals - on it's own, with mashed potato or rice, or in a simple pie.
This morning, I made my stew while The Daddy played his guitar with Tabitha in the living room. I stood in the kitchen, slicing and chopping, gazing out the window into the foggy garden, watching the cats wrestle, listening to Tabby 'singing' along to the guitar. I sipped some tea. It was a thoroughly relaxing morning, not at all arduous, and I now have enough stew to serve roughly twelve generous serves - all for under $25, or less than $2 a serve.
So I will share with you this basic stew tutorial - a 'Stewtorial' - in case you are not yet a convert to stew cookery...
You will need:
- 2kg of stewing beef - I like Gravy Beef, AKA Shin Beef, which is basically the Osso Bucco cut without the bone. Chuck Steak, from the shoulder, is also excellent.
- 2 large or three smallish potatoes
- 3 carrots
- 3 stalks of celery
- 2 onions
- A can of whole or crushed tomatoes
- 2 glasses of red wine
- Around 500ml beef stock, water, or a combination
- 1/4 cup plain flour, a tablespoon or so of paprika, salt and pepper
- 2 bay leaves
Peel the potatoes, and chop into roughly 1-inch cubes:
Peel the carrots, and cut into roughly 2cm slices:
Chop the celery stalks into 1-2cm pieces:
Peel and quarter the onions. Now, this may be my favourite part of stew - I absolutely despise chopping onions. I have incredibly sensitive eyes, and find that onions always make my eyes sting, stream and burn. So any recipe requiring quartered onions instead of chopped or sliced onions is tops in my book! Otherwise, I tend to chop my onions in the food processor.
This is an excellent recipe if the worms in your worm farm are a little peckish - a mountain of scraps from carrot, celery and potatoes. It is not a bad idea to blitz all of your veggie scraps in the food processor, if you happen to have it out, because the worms find it much easier, and it will turn into worm compost much quicker, with less chance of mould, if it's in a fine chop, instead of large pieces. But it's fine to just dump it in to the worm farm - or compost heap - as is, of course:
Back to the stew. Combine the flour, paprika, salt and pepper in a large bowl:
Many butchers will sell you stewing beef already cubed. Even if you want a different cut - for example, my butcher sells cubed chuck, but I generally prefer gravy/shin - most butchers will happily cube it up while you wait. Their knives are much heavier and sharper then most of ours, so it makes sense to let them do the hard work.
Last night, however, I got stuck buying my meat at the supermarket (long story), so my gravy beef came in slices of shin. No matter - each slice of shin needs to get cut into around 4 pieces, each piece roughly 1 - 2 inches square.
Here is the chopped beef - all meat for stewing has plenty of fat and sinew. Fat and sinew melt away during the slow cooking process, turning the meat into the tender, slightly gelatinous beef that makes stew so delicious:
Toss each of the pieces of beef in the flour mixture, coating well, then shaking off the excess. Just like when I make schnitzel and end up with fat crumbed fingers, I always used to get gummy, floury hands from this, so now I always use tongs. A simple thing, but saves time and annoyance:
2kg of gravy beef, coated in flour/paprika/salt/pepper:
Coat the bottom of a heavy saucepan or enamel casserole (I use a 26cm round Le Creuset, roughly 5.3 litres, though ideally this would be done in a slightly larger pot) with a generous amount of olive oil, and heat to medium-high heat.
Brown the beef, in batches, so that the pieces to not touch in the pan - it is important to do this in small enough batches, as you want the high heat to seal and brown the meat quickly. If you overcrowd the pan, the meat will take longer to brown, and will start to toughen.
Once the bottom of each piece is well browned, turn the pieces over and brown the other sides.
For me, 2kg of beef requires roughly 4 - 5 batches in the 26cm pot. You may need to add a dash more olive oil as you go, and you may need to adjust the heat a little as you go. When each batch is well browned, remove and set aside in a large bowl:
By the time all of the beef is browned, the bottom of your pot will be pretty nasty! Lots of almost-burnt flour and meat remnants firmly stuck to the bottom. This is good, this is what you want. Now you need to tip your two glasses of wine into the pan and, over high heat, scrape vigorously with your wooden spoon (do not use metal in an enamel pan). As the wine comes to a boil (cooking off the alcohol), the stuck-on bits at the bottom will easily come away, deglazing from the pot, until you have a basically clean bottom:
Now, tip into the pot with the wine all of the beef, its juices, and all of the vegetables:
Add the tomatoes and the stock / water:
Give it all a brief mix - you can see that my 5.3 litre pot just barely fits all of this in!
Add your bay leaves, and poke them down into the mixture. I never used to see the point of bay leaves - I'd only smelt supermarket bay, from a jar, and it never had any discernible smell. Then one day I bought a large bunch of freshly dried bay leaves from the farmers' market - wow, what a beautiful aroma! Now I am biding my time until I have room to grow my own bay tree. Apparently, it grows very well in a large pot.
Bring the stew to a gentle simmer on the stove, and then transfer into a preheated 180 degree oven OR a preheated 130 degree oven. In a 180 degree oven, the stew will need 2 - 3 hours. In a 130 degree oven, the stew can happily cook for 5+ hours.
If you are cooking at 180 degrees, it is worth checking on the stew every hour - give it a stir, make sure there is still plenty of liquid (if it is starting to look dry, add a little more water or stock), and check that it is gently bubbling - if it is boiling, or bubbling too rapidly, turn down the heat a little.
The stew is done when the meat is so tender that it can be easily pulled apart with a fork or spoon. It should be melting, and require almost no chewing.
Stews improve with age, so it is worth letting this cool, then keeping it in your fridge for a couple of days - you can remove any solidified fat that comes to the surface, if you prefer. You can then reheat some of the stew, then freeze the rest in appropriately sized portions - it will happily keep in the freezer for a few months or so.
In fact, you can use one or more of the servings to make a pie, just to mix things up a little. At its simplest, you simply pile the stew into a pie dish (or a few smaller ramekins) and then cover the top with a layer of defrosted puff pastry (all butter puff, which is easy to find and tastes a million times better). Cut a few slits in the top, for the steam to escape, brush lightly with milk or melted butter, and bake at 220 degrees Celsius for as long as it takes for the top to get crispy and golden (25 or so minutes, generally). You could also first line your pie dish with some shortcrust pastry, if you'd like.
This dish would work well in a pressure cooker - the entire cooking time would be well under an hour. Sadly, I do not yet own a pressure cooker (not enough kitchen space for any new pots), but if I did, I would certainly have used it. If you would like a pressure cooker, I recommend this Australian website -
http://www.pressurecooker.com.au/ They have an excellent range, all for hugely discounted prices, and are really helpful over the phone or email. You can only ever fill the pressure cooker up 2/3 full, so for this stew (which is a truly enormous quantity) you would need something of 9 litres or more. My choice would probably be the
Tefal Clipso Control Plus 10 Litre, or the
Fissler Vitavit Comfort 10 Litre.
You can also cook stew over very low heat on the stove for a couple of hours - you want it to be barely simmering. A 'simmering mat' from a cooking store can help you achieve a very low heat, if your stove won't go low enough.
Once you've cooked the basic stew once or twice, you might want to try some other variations - you could add button mushrooms (just for the last hour or so), shallots, some sliced garlic, some cubed speck, bacon or pancetta (I'd brown it first, personally), some fresh thyme, oregano or rosemary, a few slivers of lemon rind, some olives, or some roasted eggplant/capsicum/zucchini (roast it and then add to the stew for the last hour).
It is worth remembering that, per kilogram of beef, you'll generally need around 3 cups / 750ml of liquid. I tend to use a mixture of tinned tomatoes, wine and beef or veal stock. As long as you have this ratio right, you can pretty much do whatever you want - even adding no vegetables, just stewing the meat in some stock, wine and tomato, with some herbs, for a lovely pie filling, or to shred as a sort of ragu for pasta.
We didn't end up eating this tonight - we had dinner at my parents', and I like to leave a stew to sit for at least a day in the fridge - so I will post a photo of the finished product tomorrow night. I had a sneaky taste, though, and it is delicious.
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