Flemish Stew Recipe Video part 1

Hi everyone. Welcome to Le Gourmet 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 flavour 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 flavour 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 flavour 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 flavour in the bottom of this pan.

Flemish Stew recipe video part 2

So, once the meat is brown and it’s thickened, you want to turn your pan down because you want to sweat these onions down and you want to caramelize that. But just like the French Onion Soup, you do not want to burn them because that just changes the flavour. It ruins the flavour completely. So turn the pan down, let it cool down a little bit before you put the onions in. You might want to put just a touch of more butter in just to keep everything moving at the beginning. But once these onions start to sweat down, they’re going to release a lot of liquid. You’re going to build a lot of flavours with these onions.

So, in with the onions. They can all go in one go and put the lid on, on low. Let them go for about five minutes before you even to think about stirring them. So, we’ve got about 20 minutes with the onions in the Dutch Oven and they’re just absolutely incredible. They’ve sweated down to almost nothing. They’re deep, deep brown mahogany colour. The sweet aroma is just absolutely incredible. So at this point, we’re going to put the beef back into the pot. Put all the juice back in there as well. We are going to add the beef stock. There is about two cups there. We’re going to bring the temperature back up to kind of a medium low on this stove, it is a gas stove so I am going to put it to about four. And then, we’re going to add the beer.

Now, this is a Chemay. This is a Trappist Beer. It actually can be called the Trappist Beer because it’s brewed at the monastery under the supervision of monks and the proceeds go to their good works around the world. So, it is a little bit different than an Abbey Beer. An Abbey Beer in Belgium is the beer where the abbey has license to her name to another brewery and then they bottle the beer. It’s got a cork. It is re-fermented in the bottle. That was not supposed to happened but obviously it did, so be careful with that.

So we put the beer into the cast iron pot into the Dutch oven. Now, this is a very dark ale. I’m sure there are people out there who are saying, “Oh! I can’t serve that to kids because it’s got beer in it.” Well, any alcohol that’s in this beer is going to burn off long before this makes it to the table. All it’s going to bring to this is an incredible flavour. It is really going to kind of tie the whole dish together. So, about three quarters of this bottle just to cover everything that is in the pot. I’m going to add two bay leaves and a couple of sprigs of thyme. And at this point, I’m going to add carrots. You don’t have to add carrots. I kind of like them in there. Give it a little bit of a stir just to kind of mix everything together. Now, you put the lid on this and you leave it on the stove just to simmer for about 1 ½ to 2 hours. You could put this in the oven at anywhere between 225 and 325 depending on how long you want it to cook. A little bit longer in the oven just to develop the flavours. So, we’ll come back to this in about 1 ½ hour, we’ll take a look at it. You might want to stir it every once in a while just to kind of make sure that it is doing what it is supposed to do. But if you’ve got the temperature on the stove right, you really don’t have to do a lot to it. You can just kind of put it on there and walk away.

So here it is. It’s been simmering now for about two hours. It’s a beautiful, beautiful brown colour. It smells absolutely fabulous. I’m just going to bring some of these out in a bowl so that you can see it. Now, you would serve this over mashed potatoes, you could put it over rice, you could put it over noodles. And while this will taste great now, it will taste even better tomorrow. You know, you can put this in the fridge and not serve it on the first day, serve it on the second day. It also works really well. You can freeze it, and then two weeks when you come home from work in a real rush and you need something hearty to eat, you can pull this out, microwave it, just put it over a little rice. It’s absolutely fantastic.

Thanks for stopping by today. We’ll see you again soon.