As the days are getting shorter it also means there is less to do in the garden, and more of that time to send in the kitchen stewing the stuff that takes time. This time on the menu: Greek Stifado!
I hear you all thinking, 'Stifado, I have never heard of this', but it is delicious and that is why I am trying to also bring this to your attention. This stuff is lovely and actually not that difficult to make. You just need the time!
As a base for this dish I have used the recipe from Allrecipes beause these have really nice and accessable recipes with images. Yes...images, when in doubt, just go for the visuals.
Now I am not always the one to follow all recipes, especially the amounts of stuff I give a little bit of own swing to it. But it gives you a decent idea of what to do.
When everything is said and done, and your whole house smells delicious, this is your end result. A bit of feta on top and some parsley for the visuals, and you are good to go!
On to the ingredients
So the main ingredient in this dish is beef and and onions. And I mean a LOT of onions in there, sjalots to be specific. So many that you can hardly imagine that this will be good for you. But think of it as onion soup, everyone loves onion soup right? Well, this is that in stew edition.
And what about the rest of the ingredients. Well for 2 people we took:
- Beef shoulder (it doesnt have to be the most tender since it will cook tender in the stew)
- A tremendous amount of sjalots in their whole (no cutting indeed!)
- pepper, salt, olive oil
- A diced normal onion as well
- A decent amount of minced garlic
- Tomato paste (strong but deep of taste)
- Red wine vinegar
- White wine (doesnt have to be the best bottle, but you need a decent amount of it. So don't take the one that is already turned into vinegar)
- sugar
- Ground cinnamon
- Ground allspice
- Ground cloves
- Dried oregano (I also took fresh, because why not)
- Large bay leaves (Because you kind them back easier)
- Fresh rosemary (Still in the garden!)
- Beef broth
Look around in the recipe for the actual measuring, but I take this with a pinch of salt. Get it ;))
What to doooo
It all starts with cutting the beef in big chunks and seasoning those with salt and pepper a while beforehand. This can be the day before or a couple of hours before. I did it all on the same day and left it out to get to room temperature.
I started with searing these with some oil in the pan for a bit and also taking them out again and leaving them on the side.
After you have taken the beef pieces out, in the same pan you took in all of these awesome sjalots. That takes a couple of minutes and you take these out of the pan after as well. The sjalots will look like this then.
Again in the same pan you toss in the diced onion with the garlic and tomato paste. That is the base of the sauce you have over there.
Then it is time to actually toss in all of the other ingredients except for the broth. Your mix will look like this then. Warm and deep autumn colours.
I just like using rosemary in everything. It smells so awesome and mixes perfectly with stews and meat dishes.
Stew time!
Then it is time to make the actual brewing. In the red mixture you add the beef broth, and the rosemary as well. Toss the beef pieces and the onions back in as well. Everything looks super nice and glazy
And then simmer time starts! Let every flavour sink in there. Put on a lid so the moist stays in for a bit and after an hour of simmering your remove the lid again. That water the mix reduces and it starts to get thicker. That will take at least an hour more.
The recipe says that dish is ready when the meat starts to fall apart. For me that took an additional half hour and that was fine.
I had some time in there to make some sweet and sour onion (pickeled onion others will call it) and also a bit of a Greek salad, since we stifado stays in the Greek theme.
Three hours later ....the stifado was ready. The interesting part about this is that the sjalots nearly totally disolve. So the idea of eating whole onions, it just isn't the case. It blends in with the stewed beef and half of the time you don't even know if you are eating fallen apart beef or fallen apart onion.
Yeah! I love these endless cooking projects. It's gonna be a winter full of food!