Results tagged “stew”

This hearty stew hails from Asturias, in northern Spain, where they grow the best white beans.  The beans are dried and then used in this dish year-round. It really is the beans that make the dish - they are large, white and uniquely creamy and should be the most expensive ingredient in your stew since true fabas Asturianas sell for a small fortune.  This dish does not take much effort, but do give it time - five or so hours if possible.  There is probably nothing better on a dark, chilly evening than a steaming bowl of smoky fabada accompanied by a glass of deep red Rioja.

For most British tourists, Greece is essentially a succession of islands and beaches.  For us, it was mostly a succession of pies.  We'd had börek in Turkey, heard talk of burek in Bulgaria; but it was in Greece that the bourek really came into its own.

For one thing, we generally avoided the islands (making an exception for Crete), and spent most of our time on the mainland, where most of the food (and wine) is - and discovering quite a different Greece from the one we'd seen before.  But for another, we quickly found that Greeks don't really go for big breakfasts.  After our twenty-three-jam feasts in Turkey, this left us with big breakfast-shaped holes, for which there was only one solution: pies.

OK, and cheese.  And spinach.  And quite a lot of weeds.  But if you try hard enough, you can get all those into pies too.  And we did ...

This has to be the easiest stew recipe I know.  The laziest cook in the world could make this, and produce something as delicious to eat as it is effortless to make.  I swiped it from Susanna Spiliopoulos of Hotel Pelops in Olympia, Greece, when we stayed with her this spring.
 

Susanna has her own (very highly regarded) catering business and kindly shared some of her numerous culinary tips with us during our two day cooking spree in her squeaky clean professional kitchen.  For Susanna, good cooking is all about good oil, by which she of course means good Greek extra virgin olive oil, which in her case is pressed from her family’s very own olive grove up the road.

It has been brought to my attention that Spring has not yet arrived in the UK, so any fancy ideas I have for using the Bay Area's new array of fruits and vegetables will largely fall on deaf ears over there for the next few weeks.  So, a hearty stew.  I keep making this in enormous batches and reheating some whenever it's chilly in the flat, which is most nights.  My very knowledgeable friend Victoria recommends drinking a Chilean carmenere with goulash, as it smells a little like red peppers and paprika.  Let me know if you try it out...

This recipe is an adaptation of one by Bruce Aidells, a formidable Bay Area sausage-maker and cookbook writer who knows more than a thing or two about meat.  He came into school to demonstrate cutting up a pig, which we then cooked in various ways, trotters and all.

One of the changes I made to his recipe is the use of a whole bottle of wine rather than a combination of a little beer or wine and stock.  This was purely for practical reasons - I’m more likely to have wine in the house than stock - and works beautifully.  Hungarians are very proud of their wine-making tradition, so it also seems appropriate.  I also added the fennel and lemon.  Like all good stews, this one tastes even better the next day, and freezes well.

Many goulash recipes out there call for beef instead of pork, which I simply can’t understand - the porkiness seems essential to me.  However, as we were to discover when travelling in Hungary, beef IS more traditional, and this recipe is perhaps more of a pörkölt or paprikás than a true gulyás - Hungarian stew classification is rather complicated to the outsider.