Christopher Kimball’s Milk Street Television

- This is so good.

And it's not heavy.

It's not one of those real muddy, murky beef stews, it's very light.

- For something that comes together so quickly, with such little effort, it has huge, bold flavors, and it's rich and hearty.

- Italian sausage and mushroom ragu, it is so earthy, delicious, lots of flavors, little hint of cinnamon, and it takes less than an hour.

I hope you'll try it.

- All of us have made the classic American beef stew, or maybe even the French boeuf bourguignon, but every culture has its own version.

Starting, today, with a rich and meaty Brazilian black bean stew with pork and beef.

And then we do a Spanish chorizo ham and white bean stew.

And finally, a ragu from Italy with sausage and mushrooms.

Please stay tuned.

- (in Portuguese): - I love bean stews.

And this one is from Brazil.

It's called feijoada.

It's black beans with different cuts of meat.

Now, those cuts used to be mostly from the pig, sort of the parts nobody wanted, and then it became a little more middle-class or high-class with better cuts.

So we're gonna do it with some sausage, we're gonna do it with some short ribs, do it with a ham hock.

But it's a wonderful way to take fairly inexpensive ingredients and turn them into a great stew.

So, we're gonna start with a little bit of bacon, which has been browning.

And now we're gonna start with some sofrito, some vegetables, as the base for the stew.

So, we have a celery, of course.

By the way, this dish sometimes is served deconstructed.

That is, if you go to a buffet, they have a big pot of beans, and then the meat is separate, so you can choose what you want to add to the beans.

We're gonna cook everything together for this recipe today.

Some cilantro.

Very often, in cooking, especially in Central and South America, you reserve the leaves, which I'll coarsely chop, But then we'll take the stems, which obviously are a little coarser, and they have a lot of flavor, though-- that's true, also, of parsley-- and we'll finely dice them.

And we can put them into the stew at the beginning.

So, let's add this to the bacon.

These are the stems.

We have the celery.

So one of the things we want to do here is get the balance right.

So the balance of, obviously, sofrito with the onions, the celery, the cilantro, some bay leaves, some garlic, of course, and a little cumin, and just a half a teaspoon of pepper.

So, we're gonna saut this until things nicely soften, just a few minutes.

Now, part of the secret of this dish, or the magic is, how do you take all this meat and beans and make something that doesn't feel too heavy?

Well, part of it is the balance between the beans and the meat.

The other issue is how do you lighten it up?

Traditionally, it's served with orange slices, which you can squeeze over the top.

We're actually gonna incorporate some orange juice.

There's a little bit of alcohol in here, too, and there's also tomatoes.

So nice sofrito, tomatoes, orange juice, a little bit of alcohol in it, and just the right balance of meat and beans, and you end up with a great dish that's not too heavy.

So, the vegetables, the sofrito, are soft.

And now let's add a couple of things that really make this special.

This is cachaa.

It's made from sugar cane.

It's a Brazilian liqueur or alcohol.

You can use rum, of course, if you don't have that.

And then this dish is usually served with slices of orange.

But we're gonna put orange directly into it, to lighten it up a little bit.

It's also good just to deglaze the pan, if there's any brown bits there.

So now we have our black beans.

Here at Milk Street, we often suggest soaking beans overnight in salted water.

That plumps them up.

You get a nice creamy texture.

It turns out, however, with black beans, you don't have to do that.

It'll take about 20 minutes or half an hour more to cook them.

But we're gonna cook these for a few hours in this, and they're gonna get nice and plump and soft.

And by the way, for those of you who sort of cook your beans, you really want beans fully cooked.

It's one of those things that's great when it's fully cooked, not so great when it's half-cooked.

So put the beans in.

And now three and a half quarts of water.

One of the other reasons we can cook the beans so long in this recipe, the orange juice has some acidity to it.

Acidity tends to slow down the cooking of beans, and they're gonna get really nice and soft and creamy and plump.

So we're up to a simmer with the beans and the sofrito.

Now, one of the things we did with this recipe is we did cut back on the amount of meat, because some of these recipes we found actually had a huge amount.

So we have beef short ribs put in.

And our secret ingredient, which are smoked ham hocks.

By the way, just in general, if you're making any kind of a meat stew, if you want to put in a ham hock or two, it adds a lot of flavor because they're smoked.

So we're gonna cook this for two hours, uncovered.

And the reason we do that is so this liquid, the three and a half quart, starts to reduce and concentrate flavor.

Eventually, this meat will be pulled out and shredded and put back in.

So, it's mostly a dish of beans with some meat, instead of being a heavy meat stew with a few beans.

So, it's been a couple hours now.

The meat is getting nice and soft.

There's a lot of bone in the short ribs, of course, and also in the ham hock, so there isn't all that much meat.

So we'll add a little more; some linguia sausage.

You could use a fresh chorizo, as well.

And we're gonna put that in.

Again, we're gonna let this cook uncovered, this time for about an hour and a half or so.

Meanwhile, this is often served with a simple salsa on top.

The same thing would be true when you have a bean dish in Mexico, for example.

So tomato, one onion, chopped, and the coarsely chopped cilantro, salt, half a teaspoon, little pepper as well.

The nice thing about some of these salsas, if you salt them a little bit and let them sit, they're really nice an hour or two later.

So, there's that fresh salsa.

We'll come back an hour and a half, the linguia should be cooked, uh, the rest of the meat should be cooked.

We can take it out, shred it, add it back, uh, and we're almost done.

Okay, cooking is over.

We've took the short ribs, uh, and the ham hocks out, and shredded.

And then linguia's also done.

And now the short ribs and the ham hocks.

And these beans, I'll just take one out.

They're really creamy, and they're fully cooked.

As I said, nothing worse than almost-cooked beans.

You really want to cook them through.

And there you have it: we have a great feijoada, a great black bean stew.

Some sausage, short ribs, ham hock.

Now, you can make the salsa just before serving, if you want; we made it earlier.

We kept it in the fridge to keep it nice.

I like lots of salsa.

A little bit of salt.

And pepper, as well.

And this is served with slices of orange, as I said before.

So, yeah, there's meat in here, and there are beans, but it has the orange juice, it has the cachaa or the rum, a nice salsa on top, and also tomatoes.

Mmm.

(chuckling): This is so good.

And it's not heavy.

It's not one of those real muddy, murky beef stews.

It's very light.

So, one other little note, other than the bacon, we didn't brown the beef or the ham hock or the sausages.

There's so much flavor in this, that adding that Maillard reaction, that browning, isn't really necessary.

That's a good way to make recipes much simpler.

So, Brazilian black bean stew, beans and meat, but a nice balance, not too heavy, a fair amount of liquid.

Nice bright salsa on the top.

Really a great dish.

- Today we are going to be making a Spanish chorizo, ham and white bean stew.

It's a 30-minute version of the Spanish tapa fabada asturiana, which is named for the beans that are typically in it.

However, we found that using canned white beans actually made this go a little bit quicker without impacting the taste.

So to start it off, I'm going to throw a little bit of oil into my pan, and heat it up until it's shimmering over medium.

Now that my oil's hot, I'm going to add in my onions, my garlic and my saffron.

You don't need a ton of saffron to impart a lot of beautiful flavor and color.

It's mild, but a little bit will go a very long way.

I'm also going to add about a quarter teaspoon of salt and about half a teaspoon of pepper.

The reason that I'm not adding so much salt is because I'm going to bring a lot of that seasoning in with my ham and my chorizo.

Gonna give this a stir and cook it for about five to eight minutes.

So, I'm using some dried chorizo, and it's a really high-impact ingredient that will add a lot of life and zest to a neutral ingredient like a white bean.

I want to add these to my onions, but I don't want them to sear.

If they sear, they're gonna end up a little bit chewy.

I went ahead and used the dried form of chorizo, with the casings removed, and sliced it up thin.

I'm going to add it to the pot with my ham, and I'm only going to let it cook for about a minute just so it can start to release those oils.

And you can see the color starting to leach out of the chorizo as the fat starts to render.

And it's mixing beautifully with the yellow of the saffron.

Looks like our chorizo is starting to render just a bit.

Before it cooks too much, I'm gonna add my beans, my bay leaves, and my chicken broth.

The chorizo and ham are gonna make a nice, porky, smoky base for my stew.

So, for this recipe, we are using cannellini beans for their creaminess and their texture.

But if you don't have any on hand, you can use any sort of white bean that you have in your pantry.

We made sure to use canned ones to speed up our cooking time.

We got our beans and our bay leaves in.

Now we can add our broth.

So now that everything's in the pot, I'm going to bring it all up to a simmer over medium high.

So now that my broth is simmering, I'm gonna drop my heat down to medium and let it continue to simmer for about ten to 15 minutes.

So it's been about 15 minutes.

My chorizo has let out a lot of fat, and it actually smells kind of incredible over here because of all the smoky, porky goodness going on in my broth.

So, now it's time to go ahead and pull my bay leaves out.

While they add a lot of flavor, they don't make for the best bite.

Got my bay leaves out, and I'm gonna stir in my scallions.

I'll give it a quick stir.

Now that my scallions are in, I'm going to give it a quick taste for seasoning.

The chorizo has imparted a lot of its saltiness into the broth, so it actually tastes pretty well-seasoned at the moment.

Let's serve some up.

Got some nice crusty bread to enjoy with my soup, but it's time to give it a taste.

For something that comes together so quickly, with such little effort, it has huge, bold flavors, and it's rich and hearty.

This is our Spanish chorizo, ham and white bean stew.

- This rich and hearty ragu is inspired by Vitaly Paley, a Portland chef.

We love the way he layers flavors, and that's what we've done here.

So I'm gonna get started with the mushrooms.

This ragu has so many flavors in it.

If you look up "umami," you will see that mushrooms are always mentioned, because they're so earthy and delicious.

When you use a portobello mushroom, it has these dark brown gills.

For something like a sauce, you don't want that, because it will end up making your sauce kind of muddy and brown.

So I'm gonna take those out, and this is how you do it, you just use a spoon, and we're just gonna scrape along the inside and take all those gills out.

So I've got most of those gills out, as you can see.

And now I'm just going to chop these finely.

This is a giant mushroom.

But portobellos are so flavorful.

They add so much richness to anything.

Okay, that looks pretty good.

I'm gonna add it to the rest of the mushrooms I have here.

And now we're gonna start the sauce.

So we have some butter and some minced garlic.

I'm gonna heat those together over medium in a 12-inch skillet until the butter's melted and the garlic starts to simmer.

And that's only gonna take a few minutes.

So we don't want to brown the garlic here.

We just want to infuse the butter with that garlic flavor.

Now that the butter is melted, and it's infused with our garlic, we're gonna add our mushrooms and our minced shallots.

We're gonna cook this together until the juices from the mushrooms have cooked out, and the shallots are soft.

That's gonna take about five minutes.

So, as you can see, most of the liquid is cooked out of the mushrooms.

But this smells amazing already.

So now I'm gonna add our sausage.

And this already has fennel, and maybe a little more garlic, so it really does add another great layer of flavor to this.

So when you're putting this in here, you really want to break it up as much as you can with your spatula.

Use the best sausage you can find, so you'll get all that extra flavor in there.

We're gonna cook this until the sausage is no longer pink, and that's gonna take about eight minutes.

So our sausage is cooked all the way through.

It's no longer pink, but it's not brown.

We want it to stay nice and tender.

So I'm going to turn this up to medium high and add our wine.

I'm using a cabernet sauvignon here because that's perfect with this, and it will hold up to all of those bold flavors.

So you want something that's dry and full-bodied, and a cabernet is a great wine for that.

So we're gonna let this cook down for five minutes until all of the wine is reduced, and then we'll add another layer of flavor.

It's been about five minutes, and most of our wine is cooked down.

So now we're gonna add some chicken stock, and we're gonna add something unusual.

We're adding cinnamon.

I know you usually think of cinnamon as a dessert spice, but there are a lot of cuisines around the world that use cinnamon in sweet and savory things, and it really tamps down the acidity of the tomatoes we're gonna add later and also adds a little bit of warmth to this.

And we're gonna add some black pepper.

Now, this is also gonna cook down for another five minutes until it's reduced by half.

Okay, so this is reduced by half.

We're gonna add our final layer of flavor here.

And these are crushed tomatoes.

I'm gonna add these, just stir them in, and we're gonna let this cook for about five minutes until it starts to thicken a little bit.

And while this is happening, I'm gonna boil my pasta.

We are using tagliatelle here.

You want to use a flat, wide pasta here because this is a really hearty sauce, and this will soak it up and stick to it.

It's a great pasta for this kind of stewy, thick sauce.

This is four quarts of water.

I'm gonna add one tablespoon of salt to that, and we're going to add our tagliatelle and cook it until it's al dente.

Okay, so this sauce has really thickened.

Look at how beautiful that looks.

So I'm gonna just taste it and see if it needs any salt and pepper.

I might add a little pepper.

So we boiled our pasta.

It's al dente.

I saved a little bit of the pasta water.

It's always nice to have some of this starchy water, if your sauce is a little thick, and you want to thin it out a little bit.

So, carefully, we're gonna take the sauce and add it to our tagliatelle.

Be careful, it can be a little messy, but it's pasta, it's okay.

So you want to toss this in this beautiful sauce so you can coat your noodles really well.

This is just so perfect with this kind of thick noodle.

So this looks like a sauce that has been sitting on your stove all day, but because of the way we layered all the flavors, it took less than an hour.

So I can't wait to try it.

It looks so good.

So, I'm gonna add one more layer of flavor, some nutty parmesan cheese to this; always good.

Now, let me give it a try.

There's so much flavor in this for something that took so little time.

I can taste the warm cinnamon, the sausage, the earthiness of the mushrooms, and then a little bit of that nutty cheese.

It's really delicious.

Italian sausage and mushroom ragu.

It is so earthy, delicious, lots of flavors, little hint of cinnamon, and it takes less than an hour.

I hope you'll try it.

You can get this recipe and all the recipes this season on MilkStreetTV.com.

- While we were in S�o Paulo, we also visited Restaurante and Rotisserie Halim.

It has no traditional storefront to speak of, just an open wall, and an understated sign above it.

It's a family-run bakery that opened 50 years ago when Nigat Sultan and her husband moved from Lebanon to Brazil.

- (in Portuguese): - Their most popular item is esfiha, a pizza-style flatbread with beef, za'atar, onion and allspice all topped with sumac and a drizzle of tahini.

This kind of flatbread has been around for centuries in the Levant, but recently they've become one of Brazil's most popular fast foods.

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