Proving that beef stew can be yummy
Nov. 12th, 2012 12:36 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jducoeurLast night was our monthly Dinner Club, a small gathering that I've wound up involved with via Kate -- basically, each month, one of her group of friends invites a few folks over for some sort of meal. Since this month is Kate's birthday, she claimed it in order to do something she's been wanting for a while: a formal dinner party. The "formal" got nipped and tucked here and there, but it was an excuse to pull out the good china and sip martinis in our best fancywear.
I spent ages dithering about what to make for the main course, but we opted for "stew" as the category (to minimize the last-minute in-tux cooking). Since it was her party, I pressed her to develop an opinion on exactly what -- she dug through a few volumes of Cook's Illustrated, eventually opting for the "Catalan-Style Beef Stew with Mushrooms" from the Jan/Feb 2012 issue of CI. Despite a few problems, it was super-tasty, so here are a few notes.
(Tangent: when you're developing a hammer, everything looks like a nail. The latest app I want in Querki isn't the Cookbook per se, it's the Cookbook *Notes* app -- something to keep track of which recipes I've tried, what I thought about them, and notes on what to do differently next time. Soon. Anyway...)
Note #1: Short Ribs -- The recipe calls for 2.5 lbs of Boneless Beef Short Ribs (and I was shooting for twice that, since we were a good-sized group) -- CI has basically decided that short ribs are the ideal stew meat, because they have the right sort of layering of fat, and come out quite well after a few hours of cooking. So we went down to McKinnon's (the local butcher in Davis Square) yesterday morning, found the bone-in ribs, asked about boneless and got told flatly "we don't have that". Humph. Well, I knew that a different issue of CI had notes on how to bone the ribs, so I went for the bone-in. That proved a mistake.
The ribs from McKinnon's were incredibly irregular, clearly not intended for this purpose. In particular, the amount of meat varied wildly. This recipe was looking for 2" cubes of meat, but many of the ribs had barely half an inch of meat on them. And I had forgotten just how much I dislike peeling silverskin off of beef, especially the stubborn stuff around the ribs.
In the end, I only got about 3.5 lbs of usable meat, out of about 8 lbs of ribs -- just enough for 10 diners, but less than I'd wanted. I suspect that next time, I go to Whole Foods and suck up the much-higher price per pound to get the cut I want. (On the plus side, I realized a third of the way through that the scraps still have lots of good stuff on them. So today, I'm going to make beef stock with the leftover meat.)
Note #2: Cooking Down -- This recipe is unusually dry, quite intentionally. One of CI's other current tricks is that you don't need to sear the beef if you keep the gravy light, because the meat that sticks out from it will brown nicely in the oven. So you basically make a sofrito -- caramelized onions and some tomato and spices -- add a *bit* of white wine and water, and stick it in the oven for 2.5 - 3 hours, stirring once.
As it happens, I think the stew was actually in the oven for about 3.5 hours, and this stew is *not* forgiving of that. By the time we were ready to serve, I discovered that all liquid had completely cooked away; indeed, the batch in my good Creuset had half-burned to the bottom. I was quite worried about that, but I combined both batches, and added another cup or two of wine to rehydrate everything, and that seems to have been enough to rescue it. (I needed some liquid to soak up the picada.)
Note #3: Check Your Tools -- The picada is a chopped mix of bread, almonds and garlic, added at the end to provide a little extra flavor and body to the stew. It is exactly what a food processor is for, but of course I've already moved my Cuisinart to Somerville. So I figured I'd just use my little KitchenAid mini-prep; for something this small, it ought to be fine. Except of course, I haven't turned it on in about two years -- and when I did so, nothing happened.
Fortunately, a blender can kinda-sorta fill in for a food processor in a pinch. The almonds didn't get as well-ground as I'd like, but it was good enough that nobody noticed the difference.
Conclusion -- All of the above aside, the "stew" was pretty great. There was no gravy at all, but the meat was tender and extraordinarily savory, and moist enough to make up for the lack of sauce. The recipe is a big win, and while it's an all-day affair, it's well worth the effort for a good dinner...
I spent ages dithering about what to make for the main course, but we opted for "stew" as the category (to minimize the last-minute in-tux cooking). Since it was her party, I pressed her to develop an opinion on exactly what -- she dug through a few volumes of Cook's Illustrated, eventually opting for the "Catalan-Style Beef Stew with Mushrooms" from the Jan/Feb 2012 issue of CI. Despite a few problems, it was super-tasty, so here are a few notes.
(Tangent: when you're developing a hammer, everything looks like a nail. The latest app I want in Querki isn't the Cookbook per se, it's the Cookbook *Notes* app -- something to keep track of which recipes I've tried, what I thought about them, and notes on what to do differently next time. Soon. Anyway...)
Note #1: Short Ribs -- The recipe calls for 2.5 lbs of Boneless Beef Short Ribs (and I was shooting for twice that, since we were a good-sized group) -- CI has basically decided that short ribs are the ideal stew meat, because they have the right sort of layering of fat, and come out quite well after a few hours of cooking. So we went down to McKinnon's (the local butcher in Davis Square) yesterday morning, found the bone-in ribs, asked about boneless and got told flatly "we don't have that". Humph. Well, I knew that a different issue of CI had notes on how to bone the ribs, so I went for the bone-in. That proved a mistake.
The ribs from McKinnon's were incredibly irregular, clearly not intended for this purpose. In particular, the amount of meat varied wildly. This recipe was looking for 2" cubes of meat, but many of the ribs had barely half an inch of meat on them. And I had forgotten just how much I dislike peeling silverskin off of beef, especially the stubborn stuff around the ribs.
In the end, I only got about 3.5 lbs of usable meat, out of about 8 lbs of ribs -- just enough for 10 diners, but less than I'd wanted. I suspect that next time, I go to Whole Foods and suck up the much-higher price per pound to get the cut I want. (On the plus side, I realized a third of the way through that the scraps still have lots of good stuff on them. So today, I'm going to make beef stock with the leftover meat.)
Note #2: Cooking Down -- This recipe is unusually dry, quite intentionally. One of CI's other current tricks is that you don't need to sear the beef if you keep the gravy light, because the meat that sticks out from it will brown nicely in the oven. So you basically make a sofrito -- caramelized onions and some tomato and spices -- add a *bit* of white wine and water, and stick it in the oven for 2.5 - 3 hours, stirring once.
As it happens, I think the stew was actually in the oven for about 3.5 hours, and this stew is *not* forgiving of that. By the time we were ready to serve, I discovered that all liquid had completely cooked away; indeed, the batch in my good Creuset had half-burned to the bottom. I was quite worried about that, but I combined both batches, and added another cup or two of wine to rehydrate everything, and that seems to have been enough to rescue it. (I needed some liquid to soak up the picada.)
Note #3: Check Your Tools -- The picada is a chopped mix of bread, almonds and garlic, added at the end to provide a little extra flavor and body to the stew. It is exactly what a food processor is for, but of course I've already moved my Cuisinart to Somerville. So I figured I'd just use my little KitchenAid mini-prep; for something this small, it ought to be fine. Except of course, I haven't turned it on in about two years -- and when I did so, nothing happened.
Fortunately, a blender can kinda-sorta fill in for a food processor in a pinch. The almonds didn't get as well-ground as I'd like, but it was good enough that nobody noticed the difference.
Conclusion -- All of the above aside, the "stew" was pretty great. There was no gravy at all, but the meat was tender and extraordinarily savory, and moist enough to make up for the lack of sauce. The recipe is a big win, and while it's an all-day affair, it's well worth the effort for a good dinner...
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Date: 2012-11-12 11:25 pm (UTC)The Snooty Food Party is nice, but it only comes once a year.
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Date: 2012-11-13 01:23 pm (UTC)