Swedish · Main
Kalops
- Intermediate
- 35 min
- roughly 3 of 4 for cost
Leads with warm spice humming through the middle, richness that coats and comforts, settling low and earthy.
Ingredients
- 1 kg beef chuck, in 4 cm cubes
- 40 g butter
- 3 onions, thickly sliced
- 30 g plain flour
- 12 whole allspice berries
- 3 bay leaves
- 700 ml beef stock
- 8 g salt
- pickled beetroot and boiled potatoes, to serve
The skills inside
Skimming: foam, fat and a clear broth
Allergen screen
Found: gluten · dairy
Screened for: gluten, dairy, egg, nuts, peanuts, fish, shellfish, molluscs, soy, sesame, celery, mustard, lupin, alcohol. Not screened: sulphites.
Screened by keyword from the ingredient list, not reviewed by a person; check every label for what the list cannot show.
Method
- Blot the beef bone dry on paper, then brown it in the butter in uncrowded batches until each face carries a hard mahogany crust.
- Cook the onions in the same fat until slumped and catching gold at the edges, scatter over the flour and stir for two minutes to a sandy paste that smells of biscuit.
- Return the beef with the whole allspice and bay, pour in stock to barely cover and bring up until the surface only trembles.
- Lid on, into the oven at 150C (300F) until a fork pushed into a cube slides back out with no resistance, about two and a half hours.
- Skim the fat off the top, fish out the allspice and bay, correct the salt and serve with pickled beetroot.
How to tell it is going right
This dish has no standard of its own yet. It is judged on the technique it exercises: checked at the pan, while there is still something to be done about it.
Skimming: foam, fat and a clear broth 73 recipes
- It is held below a rolling boil for the whole time. Agitation drives fat and fine protein into the liquid as an emulsion, and nothing skimmed afterwards will take them back out.
- The grey foam that rises in the first minutes is lifted off and discarded rather than stirred back in.
- Fat is taken from the surface where it gathers, the pot moved off the centre of the heat if that is what it takes to collect it in one place.
- The liquid is visibly clearer at the end than it was at the start: it is possible to see down into it.
- Nothing lifted off goes back in. What was skimmed is discarded, not tipped back once the ladle is full.
Where it goes wrong The pot was allowed to boil, usually while something else was being attended to. Fat and protein emulsify into the liquid under agitation and cannot be lifted off afterwards, so the finished broth stays cloudy and greasy however patiently it is skimmed from then on.
At the Table
- The Pour
- Vermentino or Sauvignon Blanc
- Also Right
- Albariño
- From the Taps
- Witbier
- Zero-Proof
- Sparkling water with citrus
Lean fish, bright acid, done: coastal whites built beside the same boats; the fresher the fish, the leaner the pour.
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