Autumn tempeh and winter vegetable stew
Fall is here, and parsnips and winter squash are finally in the stores again! I decided to celebrate by trying this recipe from the fall section of Peter Berley’s Fresh Food Fast.
In a medium dutch oven you melt together butter and oil, then add kombu, garlic, ginger, and rosemary or sage. On top of this seasoning layer you place 1 pound of tempeh cubes. The tempeh is then covered with a mixture of water, soy sauce, and maple syrup. Then come the remaining layers: onions, winter squash, parsnip, and carrots, all cut into thick slices or chunks. The casserole is covered, and the stew is brought to a boil, then transferred to a 400 degree oven where it bakes for 25 minutes. Once everything is cooked, the vegetables and tempeh are transferred to a serving bowl, and a mixture of arrowroot and water and soy sauce is mixed in with the juices remaining in the pan, to make a sort of gravy. The vegetables are topped with the sauce and some scallions, and served over a bulgur and buckwheat pilaf.
I didn’t have any kombu, so I just left it out. I cut the olive oil by half, the butter by 25%, and used less soy sauce. I didn’t make the pilaf since I felt like the dish had plenty of starchy vegetables already. I used rosemary for the herb, and hokaiido (red kuri) for the winter squash. I forgot the scallions. Otherwise I followed the recipe’s ingredients exactly.
The first mistake I made was using a 3 quart casserole pan. I only have a 6 quart dutch oven, and that seemed too large. But the 3 quart pan was not large enough. Once all the veggies were layered in the lid couldn’t quite close. I tried cooking it anyway, with the lid mostly closed, but after 25 minute the parsnips were still hard in spots, so I left it in the oven for a while longer, maybe another 15 minutes.
In the end the vegetables were definitely cooked, but they tasted more like boiled vegetables than roasted ones. The onions were particularly slimy and unappealing. The starchy vegetables weren’t overly soft, just bland and not very flavorful. The hokaiido was particularly unpleasant–overly dry and starchy tasting. Maybe I should have added more salt, but I don’t think that alone would have been transformed the vegetables from unappetizing to delicious. I can’t imagine that Berley intended the vegetables to come out as they did. They were just too gross. Could I have really screwed up the recipe somehow?
In conflict with the name, the dish really was not anything like a stew. There was only about 1.5 cups of sauce for almost 3 quarts of vegetables–not even close to a stew in my book.
The tempeh wasn’t bad. It had absorbed all the fat (the vegetables didn’t get any), and was sweet (from the maple syrup and veggie juices) and salty (from the soy sauce). Plus the garlic and ginger added lots of flavor. However, I couldn’t taste the rosemary.
Derek and I ended up eating all the tempeh out of the “stew”, and then I pureed the vegetables together to make a creamy soup. I added some spices and the soup tasted okay, but not great.
Stew: D
Tempeh: B-
peter berley said,
October 4, 2009 at 2:11 am
Hello Fellow cook,
as the author of this recipe I can only say that FAT MATTERS and is healthful. The dish sufferered for 2 reasons: 1. the amount of fat in the recipe is important, but so is the proper pan.
The dish will be transformed if the recipe is followed.
Cheers,
PB
captious said,
October 4, 2009 at 10:56 am
Thanks for your comment PB! Yes, I screwed up by using too small of a pan. I just couldn’t see my huge 6-quart dutch oven being considered a “medium” dutch oven. When I saw that my pan was too small, I did think about moving everything to a large pan. Normally I would have, but in this case just dumping the veggies into a large pot would destroy all the beautiful layers. I was simply too lazy to painstakingly deconstruct and reconstruct all the layers in a new pan. I thought that the vegetables would cook down and after 5 or 10 minutes the lid would close, and it wouldn’t be that big of a deal. After all, the pot wasn’t going to be on the stovetop, but in the oven, which is kind of like a closed pot
. Okay, no excuses. My error clearly screwed up the recipe. But it also would be great if cookbook authors would specify pan sizes in quarts as well as the more general small/medium/large, for error-prone cooks like me!
I agree that fat is healthful, but it is also extremely calorie-dense, and I am small and just don’t get that many calories per day! I find that I almost always like your recipes with about half as much fat and salt as called for, but clearly this is an unusual recipe where you simply cannot cut back on the fat. I don’t really understand, however, how another 1.5 Tbs. of fat would transform the dish. Especially since the vegetables won’t touch the extra oil, and so they’ll still just be steaming. I guess it would make the “gravy” richer.
I’ll have to try this recipe again, following the instructions more carefully. I will also hunt for kombu here in Germany. I haven’t seen it yet, but I haven’t searched carefully either. I’ll also use butternut instead of Hokkaido. Hokkaido (also called Red Kuri I believe) is extremely popular here in Germany and across the border in France. It’s actually the only winter squash I can get outside of Sept/October. I just don’t understand why it’s so popular. Every time I’ve tried it the texture comes out extremely dry and starchy. What am I doing wrong?