Corduroy Orange

I went to a vegetarian potluck dinner the other day and as my contribution took a pot of vegan chili. The host of the event told me as I was leaving that he’d like to have the recipe. I assured him that there was no recipe for it–it’s more of a method, and he said he understood but would like a description of the method just the same.

My secret for making a successful stew begins with potatoes. If you begin by cooking the spuds, you can get a very nice caramelization going on in the bottom of the pan that’s a fantastic flavor base to build from. Also, the starch from the potatoes will thicken the stew as it cooks, so you don’t have to worry about adding a starchy flavor in the form of a cornstarch slurry or a flour-based whitewash to thicken it at the end. Also, the lack of flour makes it a great dish for persons unable to digest wheat gluten.

Stew Method

Get a big pot hot. Add oil enough to generously coat the bottom of it. Sprinkle in your spices (not your herbs!) according to taste. For my chili, I used black, white, and cayenne pepper; cumin; ginger; galangal; and chili powder. Then, add enough small-diced potatoes to cover the bottom of the pan. Sprinkle with salt to taste. Maintain a high flame as you cook the potatoes and stir them occasionally. Ideally, they’ll crisp up on the outside and not stick to the bottom of the pan, but if they start to stick, it’s really not a big deal. Just keep an eye on the situation to make certain that your spuds are caramelizing to a golden brown and not burning to a black. Scrape the bottom of the pan with a wooden spoon as necessary to keep the fond in circulation and preventing anything from burning. Regulate the heat as necessary, adjusting down if things are getting too dark to quickly or up if they’re not caramelizing, not sizzling loudly enough, etc.
Once you have everything caramelized to an attractive point, or you’re worried that if you let them go too much longer things will start to burn, add a generous portion of small diced onions and turn the heat down to extremely low. Add a pinch of salt to the onions and stir them in with the spuds. Cover and ignore for a good 10-20 minutes. Assuming you’ve dropped the heat down to pretty much as low as it will go, nothing will burn–rather the water will sweat out from the onions and in effect deglaze the fond from the bottom of the pan. Check on them eventually and stir/ scrape with your wooden spoon to lift everything from the bottom of the pan.

Turn the heat up again and let the onions caramelize. Add in some brunoise-cut carrots and some finely chopped garlic. Pay attention to the fond that will develop and don’t let it get too dark.

I like to add tomatoes at this point. for the batch of stew I most recently made, I used tomatoes that I froze whole and raw from this summer. I thawed them in the toaster oven in a single layer, and once they were heated up and were starting to cook a bit, I removed them. The skins came off with almost no effort at all: I picked up the skin of each tomato with my fingertips and the fruit fell out of it. I added the tomatoes and accumulated liquid to the bottom of the pan. You could also use a can of tomatoes just as easily.

Add at this same time a large can of rinsed kidney beans and enough water to cover everything.

If I were making a meat stew, this is also where I would add the meat. Most authorities advise you to brown the outside of your meat pieces for a stew. I disagree with them heartily. The net effect of browning the outside of the meat is intended to get a nice caramelized flavor to the stew, but it also has the consequence of toughening up the meat. If instead you let the potatoes, onions, and garlic do the caramelizing, the meat can just simmer–it’ll wind up with a much more pleasurable texture to it, with no loss of flavor.

Let the one pan simmer for a while while you cut up the rest of the vegetables that you’ll be using. Then, get out a saute pan and cook them separately. This will help you to develop the caramelized flavor to the extra veggies that would develop if you added them in at the very beginning of the cooking process, but also allow you to avoid the mushiness and bitterness that can develop if you cook peppers, broccoli, asparagus, etc. too long.

Add enough oil to coat the bottom of the hot saute pan. Season the oil with the same spices you used to start the stew. Use a high heat as you add the vegetables and stir them constantly—you;re looking to develop a good, caramelized flavor to these vegetables, the same as you did for the potatoes. Again, regulate the heat as necessary to keep them sizzling but not burning.

You can saute each vegetable separately or time them so that they all finish in the same pan, but be certain not to overcrowd the pan because that will lead to your vegetables steaming in their own juices instead of sauteeing in a small amount of oil. If your pan gets to be too crowded, finish that batch off and add it in with the stew, wipe out the pan and move on to the next veggie.

As each batch of veggies gets to be tender and show some golden brown color, deglaze the pan with red wine and let it reduce until it is almost dry, then pour the pan into the stew. The red wine reduction will help to round out the flavor of the stew.

Keep in mind that if you’re doing a meat stew, you may need to wait longer before starting the saute portion of this method than you would if you’re just making a veggie stew. Once you add the vegetables, you should only need to simmer them briefly with everything else to allow all of the flavors to mingle.

Stews, as a general rule, make great leftovers because the flavors continue to mingle in the refrigerator overnight. This one is no exception to that rule.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 5th, 2008 at 2:09 pm and is filed under Cooking Tips, Recipes. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.