Why do some stew recipes call for the meat to be coated in flour before searing? Doesn’t the flour get in the way of the Maillard reaction?
Richard, Toronto, Canada
The idea of dusting meat in seasoned flour before browning it is a throwback to old-school French peasant cookery, and you’ll still come across recipes recommending this approach, but, as Richard suspects, it’s really not necessary, nor even particularly beneficial. “Way back when, it was just the easiest way to start off meat and ensure that the gravy didn’t end up a thin broth,” says Richard Turner, executive chef of the Hawksmoor group of restaurants in London, Manchester and Edinburgh. “That’s not to say it’s right, though.”
Turner, who, before becoming Britain’s meat ninja, was a classically trained chef (he worked under two legends of the UK restaurant scene, Marco Pierre White and Pierre Koffmann), adds, “Your reader is spot on with his observation that the flour gets in the way of the Maillard reaction [put simply, the chemical process that occurs when proteins and sugars in a food are transformed by the application of heat, which in turn transforms the taste of the food. Or, put very simply, browning]. Caramelised blood intensifies the flavour of meat, while browning helps it cook out properly.”
That’s one reason it’s wise to buy the best meat you can afford: “Intensively farmed meat tends to boil no matter what, which is why you end up with grey rather than browned meat,” says Turner, who is also the driving force behind the annual Meatopia flesh fest. It also spaffs out a dodgy-looking, watery residue into the pan.
Neil Borthwick of The French House in London’s Soho agrees that flouring meat is antiquated, but admits that he still makes daube de boeuf the old-fashioned way. “It’s just how I’ve always done it, though you have to be careful, because flour burns much more quickly than meat.” With other braises, however, Borthwick, like most professionals these days, thickens the sauce towards the end. That could take the form of a classic thickener, brown roux (equal quantities of flour and butter, melted together into a biscuity paste) or beurre manié (an uncooked mix of flour and softened butter). However, Borthwick, who was trained in the traditional Gallic school and has worked with the likes of Michel Bras, Gordon Ramsay and Angela Hartnett (or Mrs Neil Borthwick, as she is now), advises never to chuck it straight in. “Whisk in a ladle of the sauce first, then stir into the stewpot.”
The French will argue about cooking until the cows come home, and in some quarters even the likes of beurre manié are seen as a bit cowboyish. Borthwick remembers one chef who kept “a five-litre tub of margarine mixed with flour under his work bench, which he’d then mix in a big stock pan with all the day’s leftover veg and trimmings to make a base sauce for just about everything. It was pure minging.”
These days, however, it’s “just common sense to have as many gluten-free dishes on your menu as possible”, so you could also thicken the sauce with cornflour, “although I find that a little gluey”, Borthwick adds. Instead, he prefers perhaps the simplest way of thickening a stew while at the same time keeping it gluten-free: “Take a couple of ladles of cooked veg out of the pot, blend smooth, then stir back in.” That’ll thicken up any sauce no end, and without altering its flavour in any way, either.
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