Stews

Next to soup, stew is a comfort dish in the cold of wintertime and rainy days. Best helped steaming hot in a bowl, the stew is a long, slow simmered dish that nurtures both soul and stomach. Mothers and grandmothers make it as a main dish for lunch or dinner, their stews sometimes never requiring a written recipe for it’s filed away in their culinary memories and developed out of elements on hand. A pot of stew simmering away and enwrapping the kitchen with its savory, meaty vapors gets the home a gratifying place to come home to.

Apart from beef, chicken and fish may also be used in making stews. Stew cooking videos online on the site include beef stew with peas, catfish stew, chicken peanut butter stew, classic lamb stew, pork stew with squash and Mexican chicken stew recipe videos.

A stew is “a dish of meat and veggies prepared easy in liquid in a closed dish or pan,” as specified by the Oxford English Dictionary. Cooks since the early times have been making several varieties of stew. In “A History of Stew” in the Food Reference web site, various recipes had been published in old cookbooks—from the Roman Apicius’ cooking book to the French chef Taillevent and Herodotus. The creating of cooking pots comforted the preparing of stews.

To the French, the stew is called ragout came from the word
ragoûter, which means "to revive the taste,” as described by its Wikipedia entry. Stews vary according to the meat used and its accompanying components. Examples listed by the Food Reference website include the paprika-inflected Hungarian goulash, the coq au vin, beef stroganoff, and Boeuf Bourguignonne, the stew that chef and author Julia Child generalized in her book and show.

The constituents of stew involve the meat, veggies and cooking liquid. Some of the meat cuts utilized in stewing includes round steak, chuck, chuck roast, bottom round roast, top round, pot roast and those labelled “stew meat.” You can buy the meats already pre-cut into blocks or you can do the slicing yourself.

Stewing is also suitable for the least tender cuts of meat that become tender and juicy with the slow moist heat method. Usually, stew formulas call for dredging the meat in flour and browning it in a frying pan before it’s prepared in the pot with the vegetables, spices, and the cooking liquid of choice—water, wine, stock or broth.