Basic Beef Stew Recipe New York Times
Mastering the Fine art of Beef Stew
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The quest for a perfect beefiness stew is, of form, a lifelong one.
Information technology takes even longer after you realize that in that location isn't 1 perfect beef stew, but constellations of them. The dish is practically universal.
Then far, I accept mastered two styles, the basic American and the European archetype. The big deviation between our beef stew, and French boeuf bourguignon, Provençal daube and Tuscan peposo, is the loud presence of ruby vino. Traditional American beef stews are lubricated with water and onions; later versions, with beefiness goop or tomato sauce. Real wine was simply not bachelor to most American cooks until well into the 20th century. (Cooking vino, which is salted and shelf stable, was invented for American grocery stores.)
But blood-red wine and beef are such an elemental combination that a stew of the two together is worth studying.
Stews with vino must be cooked slowly. The booze, acidity and fruitiness that make wine lovely in the drinking glass are not then dainty in the serving bowl; they have to exist tamed past cooking. But the tangy, syrupy taste they leave behind is an ideal counterpoint to crimson meat.
Similar red wine, red meat benefits from deadening, low cooking. You can read endless treatises by food scientific discipline wonks nigh precisely how depression-temperature cooking takes meat from tough to tender and back again, not to mention the roles played past plasma, muscle fibrils and collagen in how it tastes. But y'all don't need to know any of that — just as your grandparents didn't — to master a beefiness stew.
What you lot do need to know is how to cook on low heat, which, in a modern kitchen, isn't as easy as you would recall. Preindustrial recipes assume that you lot are cooking on a wood-fired or coal-fed stove; for a habitation melt, simmering a stew to tenderness could take hours or even days.
For about of my life as a cook, whether making a stew, a braise, a daube or a ragù, I found it incommunicable to sustain "gentle" cooking on my gas burners. All those delicious French words for simmering: mijoter, to murmur; frémir, to shiver; mitonner, to cook quietly, were out of my attain. All I could do was bouillir (boil).
I'd tiptoe abroad from a barely simmering stew — as from a babe who has finally gone to slumber — and be summoned dorsum five minutes later on to find a heaving, splattering mass. While some cooks are on an eternal quest for more B.T.U.s, hotter surfaces and bigger flames, I wish for the stovetop equivalent of a Sterno can.
And so the showtime fourth dimension I baked a stew in the oven, I felt equally if someone had reinvented the bike for me.
When I made a Roman-fashion oxtail stew, baked in a tightly covered pot, I was bowled over past its taste and texture, not to mention by how much easier it was to manage the estrus. After that, there was no looking back.
Nigh of us rarely gear up our ovens below 325 degrees, but baking a stew at 300, or even 275, is platonic. The meat softens, simply never collapses or becomes stringy. The liquid and aromatics are fused into the kind of rich, complex sauce that professional person chefs used to spend decades learning to achieve.
My favorite recipe has hints of rosemary, thyme, orange skin and juniper berries, uses a whole bottle of vino, and is thickened simply past crushing the long-cooked potatoes and carrots into the sauce at the end. (Information technology has been cobbled together from recipes past several South-of-France-loving food writers, like Richard Olney, Mireille Johnston and Patricia Wells.) Any herbs, vegetables and spices of your liking are equally feasible.
It does take a good 3 to five hours to cook a big batch of stew this way. I am quite comfy leaving my house with the oven on low; many people are not. But beef stew is a movable feast: Y'all can cook it at nighttime or over the weekend; or melt it for one-half the time, so air-condition (or, in cold weather, leave it in the turned-off oven overnight). The cooking process tin can be completed the side by side evening, or beyond, and the finished stew tin expect days (in the refrigerator) before being served. (Like gingerbread, dark chocolate brownies and other dishes with powerfully flavored ingredients, cerise-wine beef stew benefits from a residual earlier serving.)
In the oven, heat comes from all directions, not just from below, so there is no need to stir. All yous need to capture it is a heavy pot with a heavy lid, like a Dutch oven or a cocotte. Because of the tight seal between pot and chapeau, the pressure in the pot seems to help the liquid penetrate the meat.
All of which brings us to the elephant on the page: using electric pressure cookers to speed upward or simplify the stew-making process. Watchers of this space will not be surprised that I take been a holdout on the electric pressure cooker. The last new appliance I adopted was a miniature microwave, in 2002. (I still utilise it.)
My kitchen work surface is the size of a two-page spread of The New York Times, and neither a rice cooker nor a slow cooker always made it through the counter-space examination. Just when trusted friends and colleagues like Melissa Clark fall difficult for a new technology, somewhen the FOMO becomes overwhelming.
And then I got one.
It is true that (dissimilar the Crock-Pots of yore), these machines can sauté but as well as near skillets; possibly better. Instead of having to enhance and lower the heat as ingredients are added, a good sauté part adjusts it for yous.
For a long-cooked stew, "slow cookers have the low-rut thing downwardly," said the Georgia-based chef Hugh Acheson, who recently defended a book to them, "The Chef and the Dull Cooker" (Clarkson Potter, 2017). In most, as long as the chapeau is not locked, you lot can become the deadening evaporation that cooks and reduces the liquid. As long as the ingredients are well browned beforehand (Mr. Acheson says there's merely no way effectually that step), you lot tin brand a good, wine-infused beef stew that is a blank slate for bright, brilliant garnishes.
But, he acknowledged, only the intense, circulating rut of a traditional oven produces the kind of caramelized, varied texture in the meat that makes a stew truly great.
For a weeknight, high-pressure cooking does tenderize chuck meat in 45 minutes, instead of four to five hours, equally proved by the nutrient writer and researcher J. Kenji López-Alt in his beauteous have on the dish.
And yet. To achieve his simulacrum of a boring-cooked, wine-infused stew, Mr. López-Alt adds a slurry of Worcestershire sauce, soy sauce, anchovies and powdered gelatin to the cooking liquid. I have nothing against these ingredients, but I did not want to employ them as a back channel to the perfect beef stew.
Eating it was rather like wearing a perfect knockoff of an expensive bag: It may await and feel the same, and you may receive only as many compliments. But you know it'southward not the same, and that cognition, if not the stew itself, leaves an odd palatableness. It'southward worth saving up for the real thing.
Recipe: Slow-Cooked Red Wine Beef Stew
And to drinkable ...
Conventional wisdom would suggest that you drink the same vino used to marinate the beef. But a modest bottle would exist best for the marinade, and this stew offers an opportunity to drink an excellent cherry-red. The ideal accessory would be dry, intense and structured enough to stand up to the rich beef, only not powerfully fruity or oaky. I think showtime of a red from the Northern Rhône Valley, like a Cornas or a Hermitage, both with the depth to match the stew. Y'all could try an aged Barolo or Brunello di Montalcino, or perhaps fifty-fifty an older Bandol. A good cabernet sauvignon from the Santa Cruz Mountains would be delicious, as would a restrained Napa cabernet. If you're not a fan of scarlet wine, good stout might be your all-time selection. ERIC ASIMOV
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Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/03/dining/beef-stew-recipe.html
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