The World Table

An interactive culinary compendium: recipes, lexicon and study

Haitian · Main

Legim

  • Advanced
  • 50 min
  • roughly 3 of 4 for cost

umami-deep · fiery Leads with savory depth stacked from the pantry’s bass notes, real fire that builds and stays.

Ingredients

  • 600g beef shank or chuck, in 4cm pieces
  • 60g epis
  • 45ml sour orange juice
  • 400g aubergine, peeled and cubed
  • 400g chayote, peeled and cubed
  • 300g white cabbage, shredded
  • 200g carrot, sliced
  • 200g spinach or watercress, chopped
  • 200g onion, sliced
  • 40g tomato paste
  • 60ml neutral oil
  • 1 scotch bonnet, whole and unpierced
  • 4 sprigs thyme
  • 700ml water
  • 12g salt

The skills inside

Searing: the hard crustFrying the paste until the oil splits

The words inside

Chayote

Allergen screen

None found among the 14 screened.

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

  1. Rub the beef with half the epis and the sour orange juice and leave it while you peel and cut the vegetables.
  2. Brown the beef hard in the oil in a heavy pot until crusted on two faces, then add the onion and cook until it slumps and lifts the fond off the base.
  3. Add the water, thyme, salt and the whole chilli, cover and simmer until the beef pulls apart under a fork, about 75 minutes. 75 min
  4. Add the chayote and carrot, then ten minutes later the aubergine and cabbage, and cook covered until every piece collapses when pressed against the side of the pot. Stir the spinach through at the end.
  5. Lift out the beef and the chilli. Crush the vegetables against the pot wall with a wooden spoon until nothing left is bigger than a pea, keeping some texture.
  6. Return the beef, stir in the remaining epis and the tomato paste and cook uncovered, stirring often, until the mass pulls away from the base in a clean sheet and oil beads back out on the surface.

How to tell it is going right

This dish has no standard of its own yet. It is judged on the techniques it exercises: checked at the pan, while there is still something to be done about it.

Frying the paste until the oil splits 95 recipes

  • It is being fried, not simmered: the paste is in fat over live heat and moving, holding a steady sizzle throughout rather than bubbling as a wet mass.
  • The colour has deepened and darkened from raw to cooked, and the volume has visibly reduced and tightened.
  • The split, the signal the whole technique is named for, is unmistakable when it comes: clear fat separates out and pools at the edges and on the surface, and the paste pulls away from the pan floor in one mass.
  • The smell has turned from sharp and raw to round and fragrant, with no raw bite left from any of the aromatics that went into it.
  • Nothing has caught: no black specks through the paste, no bitterness, and a pan floor that is browned but not burnt.

Where it goes wrong It was taken off as soon as it smelled good, before the fat separated; the raw edge of the aromatics is still in it, and the finished dish tastes thin and sharp no matter how long it simmers afterwards.

Searing: the hard crust 141 recipes

  • The pan keeps a hard, steady sizzle from the moment the food lands and does not fall quiet; silence within the first half minute means the pan lost its heat and the surface is now steaming rather than browning.
  • It releases itself when tested: slide a thin edge under and it lifts without tearing. Anything that grips the pan has not formed a crust yet and is not ready to be moved.
  • Deep even brown across the whole face, edge to edge, when it is turned under the light: no pale ring left around a browned centre, and no black patches that taste bitter on their own.
  • The pan floor carries a dry browned layer that dissolves and lifts the moment liquid hits it: not a wet grey film, and not black flecks that stay put and stay bitter.
  • Cut into it: the browned band is thin, a few millimetres at most, sitting straight on top of correctly cooked interior; a thick grey collar under the crust means the heat was too low for too long.

Where it goes wrong The pan was not hot enough, or too much went in at once, so the food released its water and sat in it: the surface goes grey and steams, it sticks when moved, and the crust that eventually forms arrives over an interior already cooked through.

At the Table

The Pour
Off-dry Riesling (Mosel Kabinett)
Also Right
Gewürztraminer or off-dry Chenin
From the Taps
Crisp lager or pilsner
Zero-Proof
Agua fresca or iced jasmine tea

Sugar, cold, and low alcohol are the fire code: sweetness tames capsaicin while acid resets the palate; tannin would fan the flames.

Saved on this device and kept across visits: export from My Menu to move them.

Film school

This dish, cooked on camera Search films of Legim The cuisine, deeper Technique films from the Haitian kitchen