I've looked at a couple of stew recipes with the aim of learning a general approach that can be applied to whatever I have on hand, but I can't see one. I was expecting something like:
- brown meat
- add hard vegetables after X minutes
- add soft vegetable after Y minutes
Is there a general approach like this?
Best Answer
You can't give a general approach the way you outlined it, as different cuts of meat (and different ages of the animal) demand different cooking times. So the timing of the vegetables would have to be "X minutes before the meat is done"... (and that leaves out the characteristics of your particular batch of vegetables)
Then there's the option of adding a vegetable in two batches, once to add flavour to the stew (added very early in the process) and once just in time to get the vegetable cooked to taste.
So there not really a standard approach, but more a few basic principles to be understood and then applied at will.
(As an aside, flouring the meat is done here in France sometimes. I don't quite agree with the reason given not to flour the meat, as the maillard reaction needs both protein, from the meat juices, and sugars, from the flour. Browning only the flour would be closer to a caramelisation process)