Meal of the Autumn: Europe’s five most iconic and belly-warming soups
Meal of the Autumn: Europe’s five most iconic and belly-warming soups
Euronews Culture is taking a look at some of Europe’s most iconic and tummy-warming soups, perfect for autumn meals.
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More of a stew I guess, but it was a big miss to not include stoofvlees (Flemish Beef Stew). That stuff for me is the perfect fall/winter meal.
Pair that with a nice dark Belgian ale and some thick fries or small roasted potatoes... So good.
https://en.m.wikibooks.org/wiki/Cookbook:Stoofvlees_(Flemish_Beef_Stew)
That sounds pretty good! As a non- beer drinker, I never have beer to hand for recipes. Maybe I can bum a bottle off of a neighbor.
When we make it we usually just grab one of those tall cans (around ~500ml / 1 pint) of something like Guiness at the grocery store when we're getting the other ingredients. Just anything decently dark works fine.
Highly recommended though. You can just brown the beef and then throw everything in a crockpot for 8 hours and it's good to go. Such a satisfying fall meal.
I'll certainly try it - thanks!
That looks delicious 🤤 I will definitely have to try making it this winter!
Do you have a particular recipe you'd mind sharing? I'd love to try it!!
This is roughly how we cook it, but we usually use a 500ml can of Guiness instead of Hertog Jan.
https://www.keukenliefde.nl/stoofvlees-in-biersaus-uit-de-slowcooker/
It's in Dutch so you'll need to run it through google translate.
Amazing, thank you! Just checking Google translates work, does this look right? (specifically about 'squeezing the baking butter' lol) Sorry for the 20 questions:
-750 g ribs, cut into medium pieces
-3 red onions, peeled and in half rings
-1 clove garlic, squeezed
-1 bottle of Hertog Jan Bockbier
-1 tbsp dark brown caster sugar
-2 cloves
-2 dried bay leaves
-2 slices of white casino bread, crusts cut off
-2 tbsp Dijon mustard
-Liquid baking butter
Preheat the slow cooker to 'high' mode.
Heat the frying pan with a large squeeze of liquid baking butter and let it heat up. Divide the meat into a single layer in the frying pan – you will probably have to fry the meat several times – and sprinkle with salt and pepper from the grinder. Fry the meat briefly on both sides until it starts to color. Spoon the meat into the slow cooker. Divide the cloves and bay leaves over the meat.
If necessary, put some extra butter in the frying pan and add the onions. Bake while stirring over medium heat until soft. Add the garlic and fry briefly. Deglaze the onions with the beer and add the sugar. Bring to a boil and simmer gently for 1 minute. Pour the onions and beer over the stew.
Spread the bread with the mustard and place with the mustard side down on the meat. Put the lid on the pan and stew the meat on 'high' position in about 5 hours, or until the meat easily falls apart when pressed with a fork. Shorter or longer than 5 hours is also possible! We served the stew with homemade fries and of course drank a nice Bock beer with it. Enjoy!
Here's a better translation
Preheat the slow cooker on setting "high.
Heat the skillet with a generous squeeze of liquid cooking butter and let get hot. Spread the meat in a single layer in the skillet - you will probably need to fry the meat in several batches - and sprinkle with salt and pepper from the mill. Fry the meat briefly on both sides until it begins to color. Spoon the meat into the slow-cooker. Distribute the cloves and bay leaves over the meat.
If necessary, put some extra butter in the skillet and add the onions. Fry, stirring, over medium-high heat until soft. Add the garlic and sauté briefly. Deglaze the onions with the beer and add the sugar. Bring to a boil and simmer gently for 1 minute. Pour the onions and beer over the stew.
Spread the bread with the mustard and place mustard side down on the meat. Put the lid on the pan and stew the meat on setting "high" for about 5 hours, or until the meat falls apart easily when you press on it with a fork. So shorter or longer than 5 hours is also possible!
I would just use any cheap boneless stew beef available at the store. As far as cooking butter is concerned I think they mean liquid ghee basically but you can use regular butter to brown or any old high smoke point cooking oil. I also checked with my girlfriend who is sorta the keeper of our recipe and she says she will typically put the following in:
- Cinnamon sticks
- Bay leaves
- Nutmeg
- Cloves
- Garlic
- Paprika
- Pepper
- Worcestershire sauce
- Guinness
- Onions
- Little bit of brown sugar
- Salt or a beef bouillon cube or two
If you have a way to keep the cloves in something like a tea strainer or some other way of not losing them in the mix, that's a good way to go as you wanna remove to cloves, bay leaves, and cinnamon sticks before eating ideally.
We also don't do that bread/mustard thing but will sometimes thicken it a bit with a cornstarch slurry if it's not quite as thick as we'd like. And apparently we usually cook it on the crockpot's low setting for closer to 8 hours.
It's one of those recipes where as long as you don't over salt it, you can get a fairly passable example of it with a decent amount of variance.
This is an awesome sounding recipe, thank you to you and your girlfriend for taking the time to provide this info. I think we're going to try this tomorrow night; we've never had Dutch cuisine before (besides the occasional stroopwafel), so we're excited to make it :) Amazing tip about the tea strainer for the cloves
No problem, hope you enjoy it!
It's actually a Flemish recipe so that's the Dutch speaking region of Belgium called Flanders. It's right next door though and the recipe is fairly popular here in the Netherlands as well. My favorite beer bar in Amsterdam serves it.
Traditional Netherlands cuisine is hearty and satisfying, but nothing to write home about. The national dish is called stamppot and is basically mashed potatoes smashed up with another vegetable (commonly carrots, sauerkraut, kale, or endive) and usually something like sauteed onion and maybe little bits of bacon. Then you top it with a smoked sausage and a dollop of beef gravy.
It's a style of cooking that feels like it was invented to make it through a particularly Dickensian winter a few hundred years ago and the country never really iterated much from there. That's probably why you rarely run into a place abroad serving "Dutch food" unless it's something like poffertjes or stroopwafels.