Recipe #1: Best Beef Stew

This recipe is out of "All-Time Favorite Recipes". Just thumbing through the fat magazine, most of the recipes are complex, time-consuming and let's face it, slightly overwhelming. While the results promise to be fantastic, these recipes are best saved for a lazy, commitment-free weekend afternoon.

My first quest: a recipe simply titled, 'Best Beef Stew'. This is quite the claim, as beef stew is a recipe with literally thousands of iterations, and claiming this one is the 'best' seems quite presumptuous. I was excited for the possibilities, and fully prepared to be tasting the best beef stew of my life in a few hours.

The first adventure for any of these recipes starts at the grocery store. Things frequently pop up in the ingredient list that I have never used, and occasionally, never even heard of. This recipe calls for chuck-eye roast, well-marbled, because obviously, the pre-cut 'stew meat' at the grocery store will simply not do. Who knows what barbaric cut of meat those misshapen, uneven little meat cubes came from?? No, we must look for a cut that apparently does not exist at my local Stop & Shop. After scouring the meat department, we have found a slab of meat called 'eye roast' and another lump called 'chuck roast'. Neither looked very marbled, like the recipe demanded. I was wishing there was a diagram of cuts of meat hung over the meat counter to make my dilemma easier. We look at each other. Chuck roast? Eye roast? Can't we magically mash the two together? We ended up buying the one that looked the fattiest. I bet Wegman's would have the right cut. To prepare it, we were instructed to 'pull the meat apart at the seams'. Jared was tasked with this, as pulling apart meat is deemed a 'manly' task. Our meat apparently did not have any seams, and was also not fatty enough. The stirrings of recipe frustration were beginning...

Mmm Umami paste

The rest of the prep work involved mincing rinsed anchovy fillets (whoops, just realizing now I didn't rinse them) which I have never done and was just a tiny bit gross. Sure, little salty fish bodies, I will eat you bones and all. Why not? The anchovies are mixed with tomato paste and garlic cloves into a mush to add some 'glutamates' (the scientist in me knows this is an amino acid derivative) but what is it supposed to be doing in my stew? Why, adding that delicious, meaty umami flavor, of course. But of course!

Meat and potatoes

Other ingredients include the obvious players; onion, potato (Yukon gold, which won't get too mushy in a stew), carrots, red wine, chicken broth, and fairly normal seasonings. Another ingredient I hadn't used before was the aptly named 'salt pork'. Jared had heard of this (Boy Scouts or something?) and told me it was essentially bacon. More or less, I guess, but the recipe tells me to get a hunk that 'looks meaty and is about 75% lean'. Let me tell you, this is impossible. Our piece of salt pork was maybe 25% lean, if I'm exaggerating. Luckily, this just gets plopped into the stew whole to add flavor, and gets removed later on.
Once all the prep work was done, it was time to bury my nose in the magazine and follow the instructions verbatim. What I have learned from following these recipes is that if you do not follow their sometimes very explicit instructions EXACTLY, you are doomed. This is rule number one. Cooking often leaves a fair amount of wiggle room for adding some personal flair (or screwing up and playing it off as flair), but for these recipes, DON'T DO IT. You will regret you insubordination. Trust me. It's science.

Obey the salt pork

This recipe involved a lot of specific steps, browning beef in two batches (emphasis on don't crowd the meat, but I don't if they had a ginormously huge Dutch over because my meat even in two batches was a little too close for comfort), carmelizing onions and carrots, adding the umami mixture from earlier, adding wine, broth, seasonings, other good stuff. The recipe is written in very explicit increments of time, like 'do this for 30 seconds' or 'boil for exactly 2 minutes and 45 seconds' and if you refer to rule number one above, you do NOT want to toy with your timing. I'll often get the cell phone timer out and make Siri do my bidding. Sometimes she cooperates.
A interesting part of this stew recipe was adding the potatoes after an hour and a half of cooking, and then finishing the cooking time, to prevent them from getting too mushy. I was also instructed to add 2tsp of dissolved gelatin at the very end, to mimic the deliciousness off stewed bones from homemade stock. Nice touch.
It looked amazing, and was thick and hearty. The beef ended up being a tiny bit dry (remember my earlier complaint of our meat not being fatty enough), which I was warned about. The stew was rich and meaty, with enough bite left in the potatoes, a bit of a pop provided by the last minute peas and pearl onions, and a thick mouth coating from the genius gelatin. Overall, quite yummy. Was it the 'best' beef stew? Maybe. I think a second attempt to iron out the kinks, and it very well could be.
A successful recipe!

Let's see what's next...

I thought my Dutch oven was big enough...

America's Test Kitchen Challenge

We rather enjoy cooking. I like to turn on some music, then chop, prep, and saute until I zone out and burn myself with molten sugar. It's fun to do rather gross things like dice up the tiny bodies of delicious, salty anchovies, and discover things like salt pork and dark sesame oil. One of my favorite sources for recipes is anything from America's Test Kitchen. We get Cook's Illustrated magazine bimonthly, and I have several cookbooks published by them, including 30 Minute Meals and a fantastic slow-cooker book. The recipes are often detailed, seemingly complicated, and heavy on technique. We have never been disappointed by a recipe (yet). As weeknights tend to be far too busy to create complicated meals, we decided to pick recipes on the weekend that we've been wanting to try, and catalog our efforts.

Why I really love these recipes is because of the science behind the cooking. All cooking is chemistry, but America's Test Kitchen takes it to a new level. They will take 5 different types of potato and determine which one will hold up in a stew the best. They will take unusual ingredients to solve a common cooking dilemma, cook something 10 different times, temperatures, and techniques to achieve the most optimal result. The story behind each recipe is critical to proper execution of the dish, and it is the recounting of the experiments and testing that appeal to my scientific brain. I have many a post-it note in my cookbooks and magazines, and several recipes already achieved, so stay tuned for future adventures in cooking-meets-chemistry. Should be exciting!