A ‘hungry wife’ sized portion of Cholent, the King of Stews served  with large roast potatoes on a  large 12 inch plate.

Sometimes a person needs a break from all the horror and terror emanating from the Islamic world, so occasionally I like to put up something on here that is a bit different or is fun or even as in this case, a good thing to eat.

This I would call the ‘Beef stew to end all beef stews’ and it is my speciality. It works really well as a lunch or dinner and is served with large roast potatoes and dumplings. Even in the summer I can easily munch my way through this because it is so tasty, and in the winter it provides ballast against the cold.

Its name is Cholent (pronounced Holent or Cho-lent depending on where one’s family hails from) and is a Jewish dish designed to provide a Saturday lunchtime meal for a family at a time of the week when, because of Sabbath restrictions on what work can be done, no lighting of fires or stoves is allowed from sunset Friday to sunset Saturday. It is a slow-cooked beef stew and is put on the stove on a Friday afternoon and taken off the heat and served on a Saturday lunchtime.

There is no one standard recipe for Cholent as the content of it varies according to where a family lives and what types of meat and vegetables are available. A Spanish or Moroccan Cholent is very different in ingredients and flavour from a Cholent cooked by a family whose descendants were originally from Eastern Europe.

Here is my version of Cholent. It is primarily based on an Ashkenazi Jewish recipe and mostly uses non-fancy ingredients available from your local supermarket. If, like I do, you love stodge, then you’ll love this dish.

Here’s the ingredients and method. You should only need one item of special cooking equipment and that is a very large (at least 7 litres) oven proof cooking pot. One like this one in fact:

Ingredients

1 kg chopped stewing beef. Doesn’t have to be fancy cuts as the cheaper cuts do just as well in this dish.

450g celery, roughly chopped

400g chopped onions

450g mushrooms (big ones chopped into quarters, small button mushrooms left whole)

175g pearl barley

140 g tomato puree

800 g tinned tomatos

500 g carrots, roughly chopped

500ml beef stock

750 ml of vegetable stock (you can make it a total of 1.25 litres of beef stock and leave out the vegetable stock if you wish)

5 dessert spoons of sunflower oil for frying the onions.

Method for Cholent stew

Note: Halfway through the first ‘hob stage’ of this dish preheat the oven to gas mark 7

1. Chop the vegetables and measure and get ready your other ingredients.

2. Cook the onions until soft in the 5 dessert spoonfuls of sunflower oil.

3. Add the stewing beef and stir to brown the meat a little. When meat has browned, turn down the heat.

4. Add the stock to the pot along with the tins of tomatoes, the tomato puree and the chopped carrots and celery.

5. Add pearl barley and stir.

6. Add mushrooms and stir.

7. Bring to the boil and boil for five mins stirring occasionally.

8. Remove from the hob and place covered pan in oven preheated to gas mark 7.

9. Cook on Gas mark 7 for about ten mins and then reduce the heat to its final cooking temperature which is gas mark ½ or gas mark 1.

10. Cook in oven for at about 12 to 18 hours stirring occasionally and adding a small amount of fluid, such as stock, if it looks necessary.

What you should be left with after cooking and the adding of the dumplings is a thick rough meaty gloop with not too much loose fluid on the top. Care should be taken that this food doesn’t stick to the bottom or sides of the pot. This is really important to watch for in the latter stages when the dumplings are added. This cooking method does concentrate the flavours of the ingredients and if you do not like too much salt then you should check the salt levels in the stock that you are using and change them to taste.

Your finished Cholent should look a little like this when you remove it from the oven.

The Cholent after 18 hrs slow cooking but before dumplings are added.

For the dumplings (knaidlach)

Ingredients

200g of ‘Magic Dumpling Powder’ also known as Medium Matzo meal (available from many supermarkets). If you don’t know what a matzo is then it is a flat unleavened bread which is then ground up to make Matzo Meal. I’ve not come across anything better for making small dumplings.

2 eggs

drop of sunflower oil

some boiling water.

This stuff truly is ‘Magic Dumpling Powder’ it is ideal for making small dumplings for soups and stews.

Method.

Combine the eggs, matzo meal and drop of oil together, add enough boiling water to hydrate the ingredients and mix until it looks like a rough paste.

Form the paste into small balls, about the size of a golf ball, and drop them into the Cholent about 40 minutes to an hour before it finishes cooking and is ready to serve. Push them under the surface of the stew and pop it back in the oven or put it on a very low heat on the hob.

When the dumplings are cooked and have started to soak up some of the flavour of the stew remove from oven, and serve with jumbo roast spuds.

This is what the final dish should look like when the dumplings are cooked.

It’s a very filling dish and can be served in small, medium, large and ‘very hungry wife’ sized portions. It freezes well or can be used to supply several days meals. Left over Cholent also makes a great filling for a Cottage Pie.

The great thing about this dish is that it can be easily amended to accommodate different tastes.  Some may prefer to add more herbs and spices or may choose to make it with mutton or with different vegetables like turnips or parsnips or swedes.