**Update:** The braising essay is back online.
One of my all-time favorite food essays is no longer online or available in any other form as far as I know. It’s by Steven Shaw, and it’s called “Matt and Steve’s Ultimate Braising Weekend.” Luckily, I have a printout. There is more good advice in this article than in any other three articles I know of. For example:
> Moreover, these “30-Minute Gourmet” recipes tend to be defective in several ways: First, they fail to grasp the fundamental premise of efficient cooking: Cook when you have time. The way you save time in the kitchen isn’t by using fast recipes. It’s by spending time, when you have time, making a whole lot of something you can reheat later.
Steven and his friend Chef Matt (Seeber, former Gramercy Tavern sous-chef) spend $30 on ingredients (plus People magazine) and make three braises: short ribs, lamb shanks, and beef stew.
There have been a couple of 35-degree days in Seattle already this year, which means braising season is upon us. I tend to braise on Sundays for Sunday and Monday dinner and occasionally a hash on Tuesday.
It’s really easy to fall into a rut, though. Another beef stew? Another pot roast? Another eight-pack of chicken thighs?
Luckily, the crowbar to lever me out of these doldrums is also found in Matt and Steve.
> It would be perfectly acceptable, at this point, to give up. You could take any of these braised meats, spoon some of the braising liquid over it and serve it with a baked potato. It would be delicious.
> But Chef Matt wouldn’t be happy stopping here. “If you’re cooking in a restaurant and you want people to pay twenty or thirty bucks for a lamb shank, you’d better have some damn good sauce and some damn good vegetables.” And if you want your guests to say (And really believe) “this is as good as in any restaurant,” you’re going to have press on.
Damn good sauce is easy to come by when you’ve made a braise. I often reduce the braising liquid–I generally prefer having less of a good, concentrated sauce than more of a weak sauce, but how far to take it is a matter of personal taste. But what Matt is saying about the damn good vegetables is a point easy to miss.
Here’s the point: as much as it sounds like extra work and extra waste, it is almost always worthwhile to cook vegetables separately and garnish the braise with them at the end than to throw all the vegetables into the pot at the beginning. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t cook any vegetables with the stew–but it does mean that sometimes it’s best to strain out those vegetables and throw them away. Beef bourguignon, for example, is made this way: you remove the aromatics and prepare a garnish of mushrooms and pearl onions.
In his essay “The Reviewer and the Recipe,” John Thorne works his way through a Russ Parsons recipe for mushroom pot roast, annotating all the way. Russ says:
> Transfer the meat to a plate and cover it with aluminum foil to keep warm. Pour the liquid and vegetables into a strainer or a bowl, pressing on the vegetables to get as much liquid as possible; discard the vegetables.
John replies:
> Discard the vegetables?! I’d almost as soon discard the meat!
I know the feeling. But when I saute some nice carrots and parsnips and add them to the finished stew, I get over it.
Incidentally, Cook’s Illustrated discovered and then largely abandoned this idea. In the January/February 1996 issue there’s a basic beef stew recipe with a sidebar: “The Very Best Beef Stew: The Vegetables Last.”
> When you want the very best-tasting stew, though…do not add the carrots and peas to the stew pot raw. Instead, just before serving, bring one inch of water to a boil in a steamer pot. Place the carrots in a steamer basket, lower them into the pot, and steam them until just tender, about six minutes. Then add the peas and steamed carrots, cover the kettle, and let the stew stand for approximately five minutes in order to blend all the flavors.
