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Comment by tptacek | Hacker News Reader

Link to the best stew recipe you can find for a protein that is normally browned that doesn't have, as its first step, browning the protein in a hot pan. Obviously, the first Cooks Illustrated recipe you find will say "the key to a good stew is proper browning of the meat", but then, as someone from a mixed cultural household with a background in stew-making, I'm sure you'd jaundiced about America's Test Kitchen; presumably, you'll scoff at Julia Child too (dry the meat, brown well). When I get home, I'll see what CIA's New Pro Chef says as well and cite it here. I'm guessing: they brown the meat first.

Unfortunately, this is a topic that I do think I know something about.

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Boom. It is literally the first step in The New Pro Chef, which is The Textbook at the Culinary Institute of America: brown the protein in a hot pan. Not just for beef stew, but in the master technique description for all stew.

So here's how this is going to go. I'll post some of the thousands of recipes for stews that don't use braising, you'll snark back how they aren't good stews or some such and we'll be at an impasse.

Let's just say that tonight, as a point of fact, I ate a tremendous pork belly and cabbage stew that is never cooked by braising the pork. Tomorrow or over the weekend I'll probably eat a different one, where the protein (pork or beef) can be braised or not to taste -- but typically isn't. On Christmas I know that we'll be eating another bean and pork stew that has no tradition of braising.

The fact that you think stew meat must be braised shows the magnitude by which you simply don't have a clue.

Ready for something that'll blow your mind? Tens of millions of people eat incredible stews every day that don't even have a mammal as the protein!

I think you focus way too much on very specific stew traditions and really need to get away and try some other traditions.

Not every stew is Goulash.

I'm curious what it is you think "braising" means.

No you aren't. You and I both know very well what braising means. It's different than, but often confused with the technique of "stewing" meat.

But either method can be good techniques for starting many kinds of stews. It's just that there exist in the set of stews, stews for which the protein is not braised or stewed.

A braise is simply a long low slow cook of a protein in the presence of liquid; braised proteins are cooked to break down tough proteins rather than to a precise finished temperature. That's all a braise is.

A stew is a long slow cook of something with a large amount of liquid.

"You think all stew meat must be braised" doesn't even parse.

I feel confident that I've refuted your "you simply don't know what you're talking about" comment upthread, so we don't have to keep talking about this. Again, unfortunately, unlike typography, graphic design, con law, or functional programming, this is not one of the topics I have opinions about that I think I know little about.

Since your thesus was that stews are not possible without braising, and myself and several other helpful HNers have comfortably refuted you, your claim of victory and expertise is....odd to say the least. Enjoy your stew and have a great holiday.

This is a very Eurocentric discussion. Many Korean, Indonesian, and other Asian stews do not require browning.

Do you like curry? Chicken curry? Beef curry? Mutton curry?

Thai style, the various China styles? Indian?

Green red yellow?

Yes. Yes. Yes. No good source for mutton.

Yes. No, not familiar. Yes, of course.

Yes yes yes.

> No good source for mutton

Got a halal butcher near? They might have mutton. I was in the same boat as you until I found out that a muslim butcher a couple of suburbs away sells it. (Actually,it is what we call "two-tooth", hogget, instead of mutton, but better than nothing.)

Exactly. And everyone likes braising.

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