Stifado

A beef stew carrying as much weight in whole small onions as in meat, with the onions left whole and never stirred.

Beef. Not vegetarian — contains beef.

Ingredients

• 1 kg beef shin or chuck, in 4 cm cubes
• 1 kg small shallots or pickling onions, peeled whole
• 4 tablespoons olive oil
• 4 cloves garlic, whole
• 3 tablespoons red wine vinegar
• 200 ml red wine
• 400 g tinned tomatoes
• 2 tablespoons tomato purée
• 1 cinnamon stick
• 4 cloves
• 3 bay leaves
• 1 teaspoon ground allspice
• 1 tablespoon honey
• salt and pepper

Method

1. THE ONIONS GO IN WHOLE AND ARE NEVER STIRRED. A kilo of them, the same weight as the meat, and the dish is as much about them as about the beef. Stirred, they break apart into a sweet mush that thickens the sauce and leaves nothing to find; left alone they stay whole, go translucent, and collapse only when they are bitten. The pan is SHAKEN rather than stirred from the moment they go in.
2. PEELING A KILO OF SMALL ONIONS IS THE WORST PART AND THERE IS A WAY ROUND IT: cover them in boiling water for 2 minutes, drain, and the skins slip off between finger and thumb. Trim the root END ONLY JUST, because an onion cut into at the root falls apart in the pot.
3. Beef patted very dry and seasoned.
4. Half the oil in a heavy casserole over a high heat. Beef browned in three batches, 4 minutes a batch, and lifted out. Crowding steams it and nothing browns after that.
5. Rest of the oil, heat to medium, onions in whole with the garlic. Rolled around the pan 5 minutes until coloured on the outside. Rolled, not stirred.
6. Vinegar poured in and left to bubble hard 1 minute, scraping the base. The sharpness is what separates this from an ordinary beef stew and most of it cooks away.
7. Wine in, bubbled 2 minutes. Then tomatoes, purée, cinnamon, cloves, bay, allspice and honey.
8. Beef back in with its juices. Enough water to barely cover. Brought to a bare simmer.
9. LID ON, into a 150C oven for 2 hours 30 minutes. The oven rather than the hob because the heat comes from all sides and nothing sits on a hot base.
10. Not stirred at any point. Shaken twice during cooking if you must.
11. Out, and the lid off for the last 20 minutes on the hob at a bare simmer if the sauce is thin.
12. Rested 30 minutes before serving, and better the next day. The cinnamon and cloves fished out, or left in and pushed aside.

Our own recipe. This one was written for this site rather than taken from anywhere, so there is no source to point you at. The quantities and the order of the steps are choices, not the only way to do it.

Filed under Greece · All recipes