Lesson 17: How to Quick Stew

How to Quick Stew

A quick stew is a combination cooking method. Very simply, a quick stew occurs over medium to high heat any time you place a lid on a pot or pan. Specifically for our purposes, a quick stew occurs as soon as a lid is placed over a sauté pan.

The cooking action of a quick stew captures heat in 2 ways:
1. by the applied dry direct heat from the bottom of the pan
2. by capturing the inherent moisture that is escaping from the food as it is cooked and recycling the moisture as indirect moist heat

Because a quick stew can be utilized after any form of dry heat, you can build those delicious brown bits all over your food. Th en, simply place a lid over the sauté pan to create a softer texture with the moist heat. This is especially useful when you want to build big, bold flavors with soft, tender, fall apart chunks of meat. The other major benefit is that it can create tender chunks of meat that would take hours of slow cooking in a relatively quick amount of time. I personally use this technique when I am creating shredded chicken for my shredded chicken tacos.

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