- Stew that stew, stew that stew! I was imagining a dystopian game show where somebody gets killed
if they don't stew a stew. (lively music) Welcome to Cook Food Good, the show where I teach
you how to cook food good and do other things good too except really only the cooking part, so today we are making beef stew, it is a classic winter dish. It's warm and comforting, we're taking this nice big
old hunk of chuck roast. For me it's the best cut of stew beef. It's got a lot of kind of
intramuscular fat running through it and if you're
doing a long cook preparation like a stew I like to
have all that fat in there because it will actually
kind of melt out of the beef and make it nice and tender. If you use too lean of a cut, it might get kind of stringy and it's gonna be a little
too lean to actually give you that unctuousness this is
the unctuousness hand motion that you really want from it. We got some parsnips going there, some cipollini some nice red wine, it's gonna be really nice and good. But also, good. Let's hack up this beef, huh? (upbeat music) I'm gonna take the chuck roast, I'm gonna cut it into one inch cubes and then I'm just gonna
put it in a bowl for later. I like to get all of my
mise en place together, mise en place is French for put in place. Uh-huh, (speaks in foreign language) I didn't learn that much apparently. When you're layering
stews and thinking about the vegetables that are going in there, to me there's like two
kinds of vegetables, there's the base aromatic vegetable and then there's the
actual eatin' vegetables if that makes sense, so
I'm gonna use carrots as kind of a finer chop along with onions to create the base of that stock and then I'm gonna use the
parsnips and cipollinis cipollini onions is one
of my favorite things to put in stew because they
soak up so much of that delicious flavor all right
so now I'm gonna take one of that base veg,
I'm gonna take my onion, you can really just rough
chop it 'cause these onions are actually going to cook
for so long that it's gonna almost be like imperceptible, they're kinda just gonna
melt in your mouth. All right onions down,
you see we're building the building blocks to our stew, it's like a set of kinects
except I never had those and I didn't like the kids who did, I thought they thought
they were better then me. So now garlic, garlics
always a great thing. Some people might mince
their garlic to put it in with the beef as it's sauteeing
and I do love when garlic toasts the beef fat but I'm
actually gonna leave the garlic cloves whole 'cause I
love that little like gem of just whole cooked
garlic that you get when you take a nice big
old spoonful of that stew and it's like surprise mother (light music) The garlic was saying the F word, not me. So I'm just gonna take three cloves, do four cloves if they're
smaller but this is three, and then just gonna take
it, palm heel strike, uh-oh. That one got away from me. And gentle palm heel strike. There's different power
levels to palm heel strikes to open your garlic, all right
so we got our garlic peeled, that's going in a bowl. All right, parsnips, why
parsnips and not potatoes? I really like 'em, I love it, like if you ever wanna
experiment with a new vegetable, a stew is a really great way to do that. Since this is an eating vegetable and not a base vegetables,
what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna cut it into slightly larger hunks so whenever it gets like extra thick here, I cut it in half, go
ahead and remove the stem and then with this, I'm not
gonna cut it down the middle, just gonna leave it in
nice large chunks like that and then for this bad boy, why'd
I call a parsnip a bad boy? This is like the least
bad boy food of all time. I'm gonna cut it right down the middle and then cut it into chunks
that way we have somewhat even cooking you don't wanna
get like a mushy parsnip and an extra mushy parsnip. Well now carrots, the
key for chopping carrots is you want the sharp edge
of the knife to really run through the carrot flesh,
was that helpful to you? Do you feel like you
can cook food good now? Thank you, I love you! All right, carrots go into the bowl. That's all done, now the
only thing left we got to do is the most annoying
task in all of cooking and that is peeling cipollini onions, I'm gonna, that didn't work at all. Do you think I could put
them in a bowl and shake 'em? And they'll peel themselves? I can't hear, you're not saying anything. You speak up. I just, no okay now you're
screaming, I don't like that. Gonna trim up the tip
here, gonna score it, and now it should be easily
peelable, yeah there we go. All right we got all of
our mise en place in place and now it's time to
actually stew that stew. Stew that stew, stew that stew! I was imagining a dystopian game show where someone gets killed
if they don't stew a stew. (light music) All right so we've got
our beef chuck roast that's cut into one inch cubes. We got our carrots and our onions, we got our parsnips and
our cipollini onions, we got some frozen peas,
all gonna go in the stew, we're starting everything off
in this cast iron dutch oven, this is one of my favorite pans to have, super cheap, costs like 30 bucks, it's great for stewing
'cause it's what is called a heavy bottom pan if you
ever see that in a recipe, they're talking about
something like cast iron or just a very heavy stainless steel. So we're gonna go ahead and
we're gonna put these two tablespoons of oil in
there and you want the pan to be screaming hot 'cause
what we're doing right now is searing off the beef
that's gonna get some nice maillard reaction it's
the technical term for it, the laymens term is
brown food tastes good. And so we're gonna go ahead
and get that beef seared off in there and we're gonna salt
it and try and really bring some of that moisture to the forefront. And you wanna place the beef parts about a centimeter apart,
you don't want them to touch because you don't want
any steam to create, steam is the enemy of stews, just like turtles are the
enemy of Mario inexplicably. Sear it for about two
minutes on each side, oh it's gonna get real smoky in your home, sorry about that, if you got a fire alarm, just take the batteries
out, put a hairnet over it, it's what we did freshman
year of college for no reason. Just gonna take a little pinch of salt, get that all over the beef, gonna sear off the beef,
then I'm gonna pull it, and you're gonna get a lot
of these brown crusty bits on the bottom of your
pan, that's called a fahn, when you're talking about
it in terms of paella, the Spanish call it socarat, which literally means soul of the pan, that's where all your
flavors gonna be trapped so we're gonna saute
the vegetables in that, and then deglaze it but for right now, you're searing your beef. There we go, don't be
afraid of your smoke. You know what they say, when
there's smoke, there's flavor. Write that down! All right so this beef is nice and seared, the pan is still screaming hot. We're not trying to get
a ton of caramelization on it necessarily, but
we do want that high heat to get a little bit of
color and browning on there. I'm just gonna take the onion,
the carrots, the garlic, and we're gonna get that
sauteing right in that beef fat. I like salting all the different layers because when you add
salt to vegetables while they're sauteing it's
actually drawing out moisture so it's gonna get them to be
kind of translucent quicker. If you see any sort of
actual blackening happening on the vegetables just
pull the pan off the heat for a second then get it back on. But I would rather that happen, then you get all that vegetables sweat on the bottom of your pan. So now what I like to
do, is I take a little bit of tomato paste, little
bit of Dijon mustard, I'm just gonna add that to the pan. 'Cause I actually want
these flavors to caramelize a little bit if you don't like mustard, you certainly don't
have to add the mustard so I'm actually gonna
take that pasty mixture and I'm gonna put a well in the middle and I'm gonna saute around them. I'm trying to get a little bit
of caramelization happening on that tomato paste, now
there's an important step in the stew making process,
we are going to take red wine and we are going to deglaze the pan, that means you're using alcohol, I'm talking quick 'cause this is burning. You're gonna use alcohol
to pick up all those little crusty bits on the bottom of the pan and so you're just gonna
pour in about a cup. All right so we wanna cook
some of that alcohol out, this is getting nice and pasty, all those red wine flavors
that really concentrated at the bottom of the pan,
gonna three cups of low sodium beef stock you could really also use water and then as you cook this the
stock is gonna kind of create itself with the beef
flavoring all that water with everything else, but
for me it's like you know they made premade beef stock,
might as well just add that for a little bit of extra flavor. And now I'm going to add that beef along with those kind of juices
that have kind of leaked out and as this meat actually cooks, it's gonna release some of the moisture that's inside of its meat flesh, that seems to be the
term I'm working with. I'm gonna also add pepper. All right so now that we have
all of our aromatic vegetables in there and we have the beef in there, we're also going to take thyme, this is what the French
call a bouquet garne, technically that has like bay leaves and some other stuff in it but I just take thyme and I
use another piece of thyme to tie it as a string and look it, now you got a little bundle of thyme. All right so now that the
stew has come to a boil, you just need to go ahead and grab a lid, I lost the actual lid but you
can use lid-erally anything as a lid as long as it's food safe. So we're just gonna let that
cook for an hour and a half on low heat and then we're gonna add the rest of our ingredients later and I'm gonna finish that bottle of wine. I'm not, I don't drink at work, anymore. (kitchen timer) All right so the stews been simmering away for about an hour and a
half and look at that, that's looking nice and stewy, I don't know why I was surprised like I would just open
it up and there'd be a whole chicken in there. So now, we have to finish it off, we're gonna add some green peas, this is one of my favorite
ingredients to add to stew, something that I grew up eating, then we're also gonna add the parsnips, again I didn't add these earlier 'cause I don't want the
parsnips to overcook and any time you stir it it's
gonna kind of break apart I want them to be nice
and whole and untouched. Nice versional parsnips
and then we're gonna put in our cipollini onions, those
to me are the real star, soak up so much of that beef fat. Give this a nice little stir, cook it for another
hour and all we gotta do is thicken it up with a
little bit of corn starch and then we gotta lop
it into our bread bowls. (kitchen timer) So then we have to cut our bread bowl. I'm using a sourdough and rosemary bowl, uch, yum-o, am I right? Uh just pick this up
from any grocery store in their bakery section, I feel like everyone
has this type of thing. So what I'm gonna do is
I'm gonna kind of trim off the top I'm gonna go about
a quarter of the way down and then we have to do
surgery on the bread. Done surgery on a grape, done surgery on a poptart, now we gotta do surgery on a bread. Great, definitely keep this, this to me is a star, this can
actually add to your spoon, that's what I do, I just curl it, and go. So now we have to actually
hollow our our bread bowl so I'm gonna take a small pearing knife and I'm just gonna run
a large incision around and just spin your cutting board, always a good sign when your cutting board can spin freely on your table. Then you can just reach in with your hands and just rip out the bread flesh. Save your bread flesh for a rainy day. You know, dehydrate it,
turn it into bread crumbs. Oh, make a nice bread pudding
out of the sourdough bowl. So now we have our bread hollowed out and I just wanna toast this a little bit just to give it a little
bit more structure to it so we don't wanna get it extra soggy. The great thing when
you're using a baking sheet as a lid is that you can just toast your bread right on that sheet. (kitchen timer) All right so now our
stew is completely done. I'm gonna take out that
little bunch of thyme and this is something
that I really enjoy doing every time I make a stew is I
check the seasoning by going. Oh that's good stew. And now, the last step, you
see there's a little bit of fat that has risen to the top of the stew, that is totally normal. What we're gonna do to kind of
incorporate that fat in there and also thicken up our
stew is we're gonna make a little bit of a cornstarch slurry. So all that is is a couple
teaspoons of cornstarch and a little bit of
water, get out of there, get out of there you silly starch. And then we're just
gonna whisk that together and then keeping the stew on the heat, dump in that corn starch, so all the starch in
there is actually going to absorb the fat and sort
of emulsify everything in. You can already see this is
thickening up immediately, it's kind of getting some
of that fat off there. We're gonna let this come back to a boil, finish it, just to cook
that corn starch in there while our bread bowl is
toasting for about five minutes, then we're gonna fill 'er up! Fill 'er up Scotty, so Star Trek. (light music) Hey good news, our stew is stew now! Now all I'm gonna do,
we got that bread bowl nice and toasted, I'm gonna
take some of that stew and just shlop it in there, I already spilled some on the
plate and I didn't want to. Make sure you get a nice
amount of liquid in there. Oh yeah, get some of those parsnips, to me the star of the show. When you think of delicious
autumnal vegetables from now on I want you
to think of parsnips. Before you might've been
like rutabaga, salsa feed, winter black radish? Nah nah nah, parsnips,
brought to you by parsnips. Can we get that parnsips sponsorship? All right, there we have
it, this is your beef stew bread bowl this is super comforting, it's super easy to make and
only took me about a long time to do it (laughs) but
honestly once you have the bones of the recipe
down it's super easy to kind of follow along
and you can start tinkering with it once you have a good base, for me this is like the
platonic ideal of just a nice comforting wintery beef stew, so I'm gonna go in and take a bite. All right, first bite of my bread bowl, I always take the top little muffiny part and I like to get it
just soakin' in there. All right, so this to
me is the ideal first bite of a bread bowl, you
got your little bread chip soaked in there this is gonna be hot and I'm gonna destroy
my mouth but whatever. Mmm, if it was not 83 degrees
in this kitchen right now, this would be the warmest most comforting thing on the planet. Honestly super good, you're
getting all of that acid from the red wine that we cooked
down with the tomato paste and Dijon mustard and to me
that's where all the complexity in this dish is coming from
because anyone can kind of sweat out some beef and get
some vegetables in there but it's the little tricks to me that really get the extra
flavor in your stew. Hold on, I gotta do, I gotta do this now. You gotta take the soaked
bread flesh and rip out just enough so the stew
doesn't spill out of the levys. Why did I not think that was gonna be hot? What is wrong with me? I really hope you make this beef stew, I hope you learn something
from today's video. Thank you so much for stopping
by The Mythical Kitchen, checking out Cook Food Food, tell us what other foods
you wanna learn how to cook down in the comments, you
got new recipes out for you every week and new episodes of our podcast every Wednesday wherever
you get your podcast. Hit us up on Instagram @MythicalKitchen with pictures of your food good dishes under #DreamsBecomeFood,
I'll see ya next time. I'm gonna just eat this
whole bowl of stew, to myself and then I'm going
to ring out the bread bowl into a glass and drink
the resulting liquid. Get as messy as you want in your kitchen when you have the Mythical Kitchen towel, available now at Mythical.com.
I shouted "Stew that stew!" by myself and it felt good.