Simmer these stews. They are comfortable and cozy.
The days may be getting longer, but winter still has a few last gasps, providing ample excuse to enjoy a lazy day at home with a pot on the stove bubbling quietly, filling the house with warmth and wonderful aromas.
Stews are the flannel pajamas of food: comforting and cozy but not particularly sexy, so they’re pretty easy to overlook. The line between stews and soups is a blurry one. Where soups are slurpable, stews tend to be more succulent and hearty.
It’s really just semantics, says Kathy Gunst, the author of “Soup Swap” (Chronicle Books, $25), which, despite the name, also includes stews such as posole and a Tomales Bay oyster stew.
“I don’t think it matters what you call it,” Gunst says. “It just matters what it tastes like, the integrity with which you cook it and the ingredients that you use — and, without sounding too new-agey, possibly the love you put into it.”
In general, stews are any combination of vegetables, legumes and meat simmered slowly until tender. Stews typically have less broth or a more thickened liquid base than a soup. For those, like myself, who grew up with a singleminded version of stew — chunks of beef, potatoes and carrots — a broader interpretation of the dish makes stews suddenly worth a second look.
Curry, chili and cassoulet can all be considered stews. And no matter how farflung their origins, there’s something about any stew that tastes like home.
“It reminds me of simpler times, being around family in a rowdy house,” says Janice Dulce, whose menu at F.O.B Kitchen in San Francisco’s Mission district includes Filipino stews. Before starting her pop-up restaurant, the U.S.-born Dulce traveled to the Philippines and spent a month cooking with her grandmother, learning her style and secrets for mechado, a beef stew, and kare kare, a stew made with oxtails and vegetables in a beef broth enriched with ground peanuts.
While stew is often seen as a humble, frugal dish, for Dulce’s family, kare kare was a celebratory dish reserved for special occasions. “Oxtail was kind of expensive,” she says, “so it was usually only served at a family party or (for) someone coming home.”
At Belmont’s Iberia Restaurant, a large pot of the fantastic wild boar stew simmered as chef and owner Jose-Luis Relinque talked about his Spanish interpretation of a Moroccan tagine that incorporates chickpeas, almonds and apricots, as well as meat.
Relinque teaches small classes, including one on stews and braises, at the restaurant. Keep the meat chunks a little bigger than bite-size, he says, and don’t go crazy with the amount of liquid. Use less at the beginning, and you can add more as you go to achieve the right texture and thickness.
“I always tell people to use 1 ½inch dice for the meat to retain its integrity,” Relinque says. “Otherwise it disappears, and you have a soup.”
That wild boar recipe, by the way, can easily be made at home using pork or lamb.
Even tried-andtrue stew recipes can be easily tweaked to make them feel new and improved. Gunst suggests adding things like ginger and soy sauce or lemongrass to “wake up flavors you think of as ho-hum.” Try roasting vegetables in the oven first, she says, before adding them to the pot: “You get this beautiful caramelization and color, and all of a sudden, your stew has a whole new roasted dimension to it, without a whole lot of extra work.”
The initial work put into making a big pot of stew on a wintry weekend will pay dividends for days. It’s the ultimate one-pot, do-ahead dish that can actually get better with time as the flavors develop.
Stews are a good vehicle for using up leftovers, too. Gunst uses leftover roast lamb in one of her stews, along with farro and spring vegetables, or she grinds the meat to make lamb meatballs. Brown the meatballs, then simmer them in lentil soup for what she calls a “hearty soup/stew.”
One of the best things about
“I don’t think it matters what you call it. It just matters what it tastes like, the integrity with which you cook it and the ingredients that you use — and, without sounding too new-agey, possibly the love you put into it.” — Kathy Gunst
stew is that while it bubbles away on the stove largely unattended, it leaves the cook time to do other things — file paperwork, fold laundry or better yet, make a garnish that goes beyond chopped parsley.
“One of the forgotten things in soups and stews is texture,” Gunst says. “They tend to be very soft, so a topping or a garnish can add a great deal of texture, not to mention flavor and color.”
Garnishes don’t have to be difficult or time consuming. Dulce uses crisp fried onions or shoestring potatoes as a topping for her mechado. And Gunst’s book includes a sizable and inspiring list of garnish option that require no more than a handful of ingredients and a few minutes to make, including polenta croutons, avocado crema and quick-pickled radishes, which are perfect for adding crunch and brightness to her recipe for chicken posole.
These final flourishes combined with a stellar stew can take a humble dish from comforting to comehither.