According to Wikipedia, stew is a combination of solid food ingredients that have been cooked in liquid and served in the resultant gravy. This is a cross-culture thing that you can find stew in many countries’ cuisines.
Ingredient Choices
The common ingredients for stew are tough solid food. Stewing is a good way to cook tough meat or to make a one-pot dish. They can be:
- Root Vegetables: potatoes, carrots, celery, Daikon, radishes, onions, beetroots, beans, parsnips, turnips, sweet potatoes.
- Tough Meat
- Beef: flank
- Pork: rib
- Lamb
Liquid Choices
We add liquid to stew. The liquid can be:
- Water
- Beer
- Cooking wine
- Red wine
- White wine.
- Rice wine,
- Stock: it could be from the pre-cooking of the meat if that liquid is clean enough. Otherwise, you can use the store-bought stock or make your own stock.
Prepare
The preparation for stew is cut and pre-cook the meat.
Cut the ingredients into bite chunks or pieces. For the meat contains bones, use a bone cleaver. Sometimes you can ask the butcher to do this for you.
In general practice, although the meat and vegetables listed above are all tough solids, the meat is still tougher than the vegetables. It usually takes hours to cook the meat while the vegetables definitely need less than half an hour. That’s why we have to pre-cook the meat. Another reason is to remove the blood and the smell of the meat.
Pre-cook the meat by boiling it in water. Add necessary spices for helping remove the smell. Using pressure cooker can save a lot of time. The liquid can be saved as the one for stewing if it’s clean enough.
Stew
The general process to stew is to put the pre-cooked meat and the cut vegetables into the pot, add the liquid, other seasonings, and then stew them.
You could add some oil and fry the ingredients a bit to stimulate the aroma.
The timing needs to be taken care of. The meat and vegetables are ideally fully cooked at the same time. Calculate the pre-cook time and the stew time carefully depending on the choices of both.
Classic Dishes
Chinese
- Braised Beef with Potatoes (土豆烧牛肉): a common Chinese dish. Use spring onion, ginger, Chinese spices, Chinese cooking wine to remove the smell in meat pre-cooking. Liquid can be water but beer is better. Seasonings are soybean paste, soy sauce, white pepper, etc.