Weapons of Mass Beefiness

My first subscription issue of Cook's Illustrated barely had time to rest on the counter before I used it to generate, first, a pot of minestrone, and then a pot of beef stew. You'll notice a "hot liquid" theme here, because the temperatures have plunged past the fifty degree mark, something known in other places as "autumn".

 

Now, I was missing a fair number of ingredients for the Cook's Illustrated "Best Beef Stew", but even with substitutions it made really darn tootin good stew.

 

I'm thinking of it right now, in fact, prompting me to consider writing a letter: "Dear Cook's Illustrated, Thank you for another wonderful issue. Absolutely delicious! I, however, would like to ask that your next issue include a training schedule to compete in the Boston Marathon, because, thanks to last issue, none of my clothes fit anymore, and the dog is physically unable to leave the apartment . ."

 

3-4 pounds beef chuck

2 thick slices bacon

1 onion

2-5 cloves garlic

2 tbsp tomato paste

2 tbsp fish sauce (standing in for 4 anchovies)

1 potato + 10 oz chopped up frozen sweet potato fries (standing in for 1 lb Russet potatoes and 2 medium carrots)

2 cups red wine

1 cup beef stock

1 cup water

3 bay leaves

4 thyme springs

.5 cup instant or "quick-cook" barley (wife's request)

.25 cup flour

1 packet unflavored gelatin

 

Take your chuck and cut into 1" chunks. Salt it and let rest for an hour. Heat 1 tbsp oil in the chamber of your pressure cooker, then brown the chunks in batches, reserving the browned meat as you go until you are out of raw beef.

 

Put the bacon in the pot and fry until crisp and rendered of its fat. Remove the bacon crispies. Fry the onions and garlic in the fat until softened. Add the tomato paste and the fish sauce. Faugh! Yes, it smells terrible. Yes, the smell goes away while cooking. CI had a really interesting little sciency sidebar about how various chemicals in bacon, fish, and tomato work together to augment the taste of beef, by a factor of fifteen. The recipe may well be regulated for fear of WMB proliferation. Weapons of Mass Beefiness.

 

Chop up the bacon.

 

Put the browned beef back into the pot along with any fluids that have dripped out while they sat, then add the flour, stirring until you see no lumpy bits of white flour. This takes a bit of stirring.

 

Add the red wine, the beef stock, and the water. Keep stirring. Add the herbage and the barley. Add the potatoes and cooked bacon crumblies. Lid the vessel and set to high pressure for 45 minutes. If you're using a dutch oven, that's an hour and a half in a 350 degree oven.

 

In a separate container, add the gelatin to .25 cup cold water. It'll turn into a floopy little disk. This floopsinating process is called "blooming".

 

Once the cooking time is up, unlid and stir. Gauge how much free liquid is in there. If it's too liquid, add some more barley.

 

Once everything is soft, finish by adding the bloomed gelatin disk to the liquid, stirring to dissolve. The unflavored gelatin plays the part of the calf ear or cow hoof in classic French cooking, but without the endless rolling boiling of carcass bits. I don't like boiling carcass bits, and thankfully neither do the editors of Cook's Illustrated.

 

Once the gelatin is dissolved you are ready to eat.