Speaker: One of the all time Irish classics. It's really, really hearty. You can make it one pot. It's absolutely packed full of flavor. It's an incredible traditional Irish stew. So to start off, we have a little bit of butter in our nice big pot and that's basically on a low to medium heat as you can see. Now, what we are going to do is we are going to sweat all four nice aromatic vegetables.
So, we are going to start off with our onions, some nice carrot and celery. But the beauty of Irish stew is because of sweating all the vegetables in that one pot. We are also going to cook our meat in there. All the nice meat juices are going to same part of the meat, and it's all going to be withheld in that nice liquid. So, you are going to really flavorsome dish all cooked in one pot.
When I am going to sweat those, I am going to come across and prepare my nice leeks. With leeks, it's very important that we wash them thoroughly. So we are just going straight down to the middle of a leek like that, and what will happen is I will just take that center piece because that's a little bit woody. So we get rid of that. All these little layers. There might be little bits of grit or sand in there. So we are going to give it a good wash on to the top. We just make sure the water goes in and we will add those into those lovely vegetables that are sweating off already.
So, the leeks show in there, and I am also going to add a couple of cloves of nicely chopped garlic. So they are sweating really nicely and slowly, and there are some great flavors coming off that. The next thing that I am going to add in are couple of herbs. These are strong woody herbs that will be able to stand up to the cooking. I, basically, got some rosemary. So as always to prep it you just basically run your hands along like that. Along with the left wrist add the nice little leaves in the stocky bit we can lose. So, we are going to do exactly the same thing with the thyme. Just run your hand along. We just want those little thyme leaves. So we are just going to run our knife through those. More stuff for the rosemary really because that can be a little bit woody and you don't want those whole stock in the finished product.
Then that's ready to go in with all our nice vegetables. Now, I have got some nice lamb for this stew and Irish stew is always with lamb. You can certainly have a beef and get it for different types of stew, but Irish traditional stew is with lamb. So, just in your supermarkets are butchers look for a nice bit of stewing lamb. That will take it a little bit longer for us to tenderized it in this nice stew but it’s getting more of the fantastic flavor and it's been if you use a prime cut of lamb.
So, in goes the lamb. We are going to sweat that up to brown it along with our vegetables for three or four minutes. What I am going to do at this stage is just turn that heat up a tiny fraction to help with the coloration of the lamb. Certainly they are starting to take on some nice color on it and along with our vegetables. Really nice. A wholesome flavor is coming is out of that. So, now what I am going to do is if it's a thickening agent at the flour, we are going to put that in there and as our stew slowly simmers away over the next hour, it will just thick and nice, thanks to that flour.
So, at this stage, it’s very important that you stir the stew a lot because what will happen if you don't stir it the flour is going to stick to the bottom of your pan and you are going to end up with a burnt flavor all the way through your stew. So just keep stirring it for about 30-45 second, just until that flour cooks out ever so slightly.
Now, what I have got next is the liquid for our stew. Now, I am using a little bit of chicken stock. I made some fresh chicken stock this morning. If you want to see how to make that, you can always go to our tutorial on how to make a chicken noodle soup. We make a nice fresh stock on there. If you don't have time to make a stock, you can always just use a nice organic stock from the supermarket or worst case scenario a stock cube. I am going put my stocks in there. I am also going to add about two cups of water. The reason I don’t want too much stock in there is because the lovely lamb is going to create its own stock within that juice and it's going to be really flavorsome. So, we don't want to overpower it with too much chicken stock. Last thing to go in, some nice diced potatoes.
Now, the crucial part of the stew is that you cook it really, really slowly. The slower and the longer, the better. I recommend the optimum time will be two hours on a really, really tiny heat. It just throws out all those nice flavors. So I am just going to let that simmer very slowly on that lovely low heat.
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