Legourmet TV
Flemish Stew part 1
Hi everyone. Welcome to Legourmet TV. Today, we’re going to make a Flemish Stew-- or my take on a Flemish Stew. Very simple ingredient list; beef onions, a little bit of butter to fry everything in, bay leaf, thyme, some really good beef stalk, bottle of Belgian beer, very important to use it, a good Belgian beer or if you can’t get a Belgian beer, just use a really good quality beer. And I like to put carrots in, but mostly because it’s late November here and two hours ago, these were still in the ground of my garden. So I thought I’d throw them in.
You can play with it in that manner. Don’t get caught up in the dogma of recipes. If you like something, try it. See if it works out. If it doesn’t work out, then don’t do it again, but don’t be afraid to try something new. I’m calling this Flemish Stew, but really, it’s just an interpretation. Take it from there, learn from the video, go out and try something yourself. Maybe you want to add some different ingredients, that’s great. So, I guess the first step in all of these is to prep our ingredients.
So, that’s it for the prep, really nothing to it. Slice some onions, dice some beef, some carrots if you want them, maybe some other vegetables or root vegetables if you want them, not a whole lot to it. So now we move on to the actual cooking part. I’m going to use a Dutch oven and do it on the stove top. You could do this in a heavy bottom skillet and then transfer it to a crock pot or slow cooker if you really wanted to. Instead of doing this on a stove-- once everything is prepared, you could put it in the oven and cook it slowly and let it simmer all day. So, let’s get over to the stove and start cooking.
So we’ve got our Dutch oven on the stove top. We’re going to turn on the heat and we’re going to get this as hot as we possibly can. We want to brown the beef. We don’t want to steam it, we don’t want to cook it slowly. At this point, we want to brown it, we want to caramelize the outside and we want to get as much flavor as we can on the outside of this beef. Now at this point, some people would dredge with some flour. That is an option. Certainly, if you wish to do that. Personally, I don’t do it. I’m not really all that interested in having flour in the rest of the mixture.
I don’t like my stew quite as thick as other people do. I get it a little bit more thin, kind of halfway to a soup almost. So, I don’t put any flour on the outside. This is the point where you would salt and pepper the meat as well, so I’ve done that. And, we’re going to do it in batches so that the temperature in the pot never really goes down. You want to do it-- you want to be able to really sear this meat and lock in the flavor and create that kind of brown caramel feeling on the outside of it. So, a little bit of butter and be careful that the butter doesn’t get so hot that it burns. I guess that’s the point where you kind of want to meet it halfway.
Now, this is a cast iron Dutch oven. It holds its heat really well and it’s really important that if you want to get this flavor to have a heavy bottomed pan. And we’ll just fry up this beef in batches a little bit at a time. Don’t over stir it. I know that your first tendency is going to be the one to get in there with the spoon, stir it up, keep it moving. Just let it brown, let it really sit there for a little while. You’re almost going to think that it’s burning but keep an eye on it and don’t let it get that far. Eventually, you’re going to figure out what that point is. So, just let it brown, don’t over stir it.
So, the first step is done, we’ll just carry on and take this out and reserve them in another container. We’ll put the next bit in. Now in the bottom of this pan already is a really nice pond. We’re really building up some flavor in the bottom of this pan.
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