Cassoulet — Frenchy meat and bean stew

The French can call it something fancy, like cassoulet, 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 gonna 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. In 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 gonna 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 gonna 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's 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 wanna 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 Trey, 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. 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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 soaked water. These beans were kinda dusty, so let's call this a rinsing step, too, and discard. In 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 bouillon 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'll help us build the characteristic crust that cassoulet acquires in the oven. A gentle oven at like 300 F, 150 C, 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 bread crumbs 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. A 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?