This video explains how to make cassoulet, a French meat and bean stew. Adam Ragusea emphasizes that it's more of a method than a strict recipe, encouraging improvisation with available ingredients. He details the process from preparing dried beans to cooking various meats and aromatics, finishing with an oven bake to achieve a desirable crust.
The French can call it something fancy like coule but it's just meat and bean stew. It's a slop but a Heavenly slop on a rainy day. As with most bean dishes, yeah, you can use canned, but dried are going to have a much nicer texture. I always soak them when I can. Soaking reduces cooking time and maybe improves texture. Lately, I've been salting my soak water like pasta water. I think it maybe makes the beans creamier inside. I don't know. Normally, I do overnight, but today I have to do a speed soak where you bring the beans to a boil, kill the heat, and let them soak for an hour. Cassoulet generally starts with salt pork or bacon or some fatty cured meat cut into big lardons. I'm using country ham today. And those go, melt some fat out of them, and then we just brown off all our meat however we want to. I'm just throwing in my sausages. There's often some fresh sausages. Since this ham isn't super fatty, I'm going to need some more fat to brown everything. You might use duck fat. I don't have duck fat, so butter. I don't have duck legs or duck confit or anything like that, but I do have chicken legs and they'll do just fine. I think the way you honor the concept of the dish is just by using whatever cheap scraps of meat you have, but make sure that you have something really rich in there like sausage. I think cassoulet should be fatty. Meanwhile, I can cut my aromatics. Lots of cassoulet recipes have you put in whole carrots, whole onions, and then you cook them with the beans and then you fish them out and discard them at the end. And that's the kind of pointlessly laborious and wasteful courtly French cooking that I think probably most of us should try to deprogram out of ourselves. I'm just going to leave my vegetables in my meat and bean stew. So that's why I'm cutting them into smallish pieces. I put the carrots in first because they're the hardest in with the celery and onion. And I'll use the water that comes out of those vegetables to deglaze everything from that meat. Cassoulet recipes generally have you cook the meat in stages and then take it out of the pan and add it back in again at strategic times. You can do that, but I'm treating this as the farmer stew that it is and I'm just leaving everything in the pot. A one-pot meal. Might as well peel and chop some garlic while I'm waiting. I can throw that in at any time I want to. Give my beans another moment to soak and I'm in no rush, so I'll just kill the heat and pause this for a moment. Maybe I'll make a delicious cup of coffee. With Trade, sponsor of this video, let's see how many people I can puzzle with my brewing methods this time. For someone like me who loves cool coffee, but I'm not cool enough to go out and find it myself, Trade is like hiring the cool kids to go out and find your cool coffee for you. Ooh, methodical from Greenville, South Carolina. Trade knows that I generally like light roasts, but they also know that I like to be surprised. So when they have a dark roast that they think I'll like, they send it, like this one. Yeah, you can make pourover coffee with normal kitchen gear. It is possible, anyway. However fast you go through coffee, Trade will have one of their independent roasters send a bag right to your door. And every bag ships within 48 hours of roasting, whether it's whole bean or pre-ground. Wow, that creamy smooth texture you get from a pourover brewing method. Nice. Get a bag for free with any Trade subscription purchase when you use my link, drinktrade.com/ragusea. That's drinktrade.com/ragusea for a free bag of coffee with any subscription. Thank you, Trade. Anyway, this would be a good time to sneak in a squeeze of tomato paste to round out the flavor. It's not that weird, lots of cassoulet recipes call for tomato in some form. My beans have doubled in size. Cassoulet is generally white kidney beans. These are Great Northerns. And I go back and forth on discarding the soak water. These beans were kind of dusty, so let's call this a rinsing stick step two and discard. And they go, speed soaked beans maybe aren't quite as good, but they're speedy. I'll just cover with water and I think I see something, a black bean. This is a white bean stew and that really matters for some reason. If you have a beautiful meat stock, absolutely use that, but today I'm just slipping a couple of bullion cubes in there. Bay leaves would be standard, some thyme and rosemary, fresh or dried, who cares. Maybe some cloves. No salt, because the meat is salty and we've got the stock cubes. At this point, you can make sure that the beans are just covered in water. Minimizing water preserves your options because you can always add later. And you can boil these on the stovetop to give them a little head start. The beans will soften faster here than they will in the oven where they're going, because you can really put the spurs to them here. You can stir them easily, make sure there's nothing sticking to the bottom, and you can make sure they have enough water. While I'm waiting, here's an old Kenji trick that works great. Get some unflavored gelatin. I'm using the whole box, which could be overkill. I don't know. Dissolve it and bloom it in just enough cold water. This is mostly to get the lumps out. Now that they're cooked and solid, I might snip my sausages into servable pieces. Did you hear that, boys? I'm snipping my sausage. I'll give you a minute to collect yourselves. Now would be a good time to collect and discard any inedible spices. Give this a taste and it doesn't need any more salt, but it does need some pepper. Once I've given the beans a good head start, I'll kill the heat. Gelatin thickens more when you cook it gently, and we'll melt in that gelatin. Per Kenji, this replicates some effects that you would get from using a great French restaurant stock. It'll give the stew a creamy texture and it will help us build the characteristic crust that cassoulet acquires in the oven. A gentle oven at like 300 Fahrenheit, 150 Celsius, uncovered for probably at least a couple hours. It's not quick. See this already has a protein skin on top of it. Tradition dictates that we break that skin periodically as these beans bake. We flood that skin with new juice, and theoretically, that builds a thicker laminated crust on top. I don't know if that's true, but I do think it's good to check the beans frequently and make sure that the top isn't burning and see if they're tender yet and see if they need more water. For the texture that you want, sometimes cassoulet is soupy, sometimes it's stewy, sometimes it's a solid casserole like mine came out as today, and all three options are good. When the beans are tender, you can sprinkle on some breadcrumbs if you want and let them get crispy for the last few minutes. And again, how set the final texture will be is chiefly determined by how much water you put in. You want it looser, you put in more water. There's that coveted crust that gelatin hack really helps you get. That pound of beans and a few bucks of cheap meat get you at least four big portions of hearty Frenchy meat and bean stew. What is stopping you?
