Good Eats: Stew Romance

The stewpot is the most enduring and endearing symbol of hearth and home that Alton knows. So why does it so often produce a bland mush? Alton thinks he knows, so he sets out to change that, exploring the properties of collagen and never missing an opportunity to add flavor as he prepares his stew. Starting with a sear and moving to a braise, Alton prepares the meat and then... refrigerates it? Yes, refrigerates. For the refrigerator is part of the reason stews taste so good the second day, and Alton aims to capture that taste on the first day. All of these techniques, and yes, a little deliciously flavored beef fat and the right kind of potatoes, add up to Good Eats Beef Stew, a harmonious step up from the bland homogony most folks know.

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Episode Info

Episode number: 11x7
Production Number: EA1103
Airdate: Monday August 13th, 2007

Writer: Alton Brown

Uncredited

Ramon Engle
As Butcher

Recurring

Recap

The stewpot is the most enduring – and endearing – symbol of hearth and home that Alton knows. From the dawn of cookery and bits of mammoth and tap root all through the clay, bronze, iron and steel ages cooks have fed (and fed from) the stewpot. The problem is, all that time, heat, and water blur the individual notes of the ingredients into boring homogony. Alton feels a good stew should be like, well... a barbershop quartet. Opening the door, Alton reveals just such an ensemble, and as they strike a nice harmony, he explains that this kind of harmony is his goal in building a stew. Each part in sync with the whole, but each part individual, too. With the right ingredients, a little science and a few well-chosen tools, Alton intends to compose a harmonious stew...

Read the full recap

Episode Notes

Cards

In the game of bridge, “goulash” refers to the redealing of unshuffled cards tro produce some very strange hands.
Sofrito is Spain’s aromatic blend of onions, green peppers and garlic.
Throughout history, collagen has been used to make everything from glue to guitar strings to contact lenses.
As late as the 19th century, a stew referred to a sauna or brothel in England.

Locations: Whole Foods Market (Atlanta, Georgia); Autry’s Armory, Inc. (Fayetteville, Georgia)

The types of stew shown on Alton’s blackboard: birra, beef bourguignon, booya, Brunswick, burgoo, carbonnade, cassoulet, cawl, daube, eintopf, fabada asturiana, goulash, gaisburger marsh, ghoreh sabzi, hasenpfeffer, Lancashire hot pot, peperonata, pörkoft, puchero, sancocho, stroganoff, wat, waterzooi

Episode Quotes

Alton: Ah, the stewpot. If there’s a more enduring or endearing symbol of hearth and home I don’t know what it is.

Alton: Can we produce a stew that sings a nice C-major 7? Well, I imagine with the right ingredients, a little science and a couple of well-chosen tools, we might just be able to make a little music of our own on... (Good Eats theme plays)

Alton: We’ve dealt with the rib primal in two shows, the tenderloin - two shows, we’ve cooked short loin, sirloin, tail, skirt steak from the plate, ah, we’ve dealt with seven-bone steak from the check and we have cooked brisket. No wonder cows give me dirty looks as I drive by.

Alton: If you really want to see aluminum dissolve watch this. (Alton opens his refrigerator to reveal a pan covered with nasty aluminum foil.) If you cook or store something containing a lot of acid, say tomatoes in a steel, or better yet a cast iron vessel and cover it tightly with aluminum foil so that the foil is in contact with the acid, well, you’re making a battery, and in no time the aluminum will erode and pit wherever it is touching that acid.

Young French Chef: What right do you have to spit in the face of tradition?!
Alton: What right? They’re my groceries!

Alton: The unctuous body and lip-smacking goodness of braised meat is made possible by a curious chemical characteristic of a particular tissue type common to all mammals. In your body, right now, there are three major types of connective tissue holding you up and together. For instance, we have elastin. These fibers make up tough gristly stuff like cartilage. We’ll see a little bit of this later; not a lot of culinary use there. Another one is called reticulin, or reticular fibers. They’re very, very fine and form the outer skins of things like your lungs and kidneys and whatnot. They’re not good eats. Then there’s collagen.

Alton: Now here’s the strange and wonderful part. When exposed to water and long, low heat, collagen molecules break down and rearrange into another protein structure called gelatin which makes most glues possible as well as a host of classic deserts, not the least of which are these delicious little gummy... well, later.

Alton: Now that’s what we’re looking for. No, not that... (pushing aside a jar) ...that! That nice solidified disc of highly flavored beef fat which has settled on top!

Alton: This, for instance, is ballistic gelatin – about an eight to one ratio of water to gelatin. Crime labs use this to study the impact that bullets and other projectiles have on... well... us.

Alton: Once gelatin has reached the gel state, it takes more heat to redissolve it than it did to render it from collagen in the first place!

Alton: The meat is perfectly heated through but it’s not falling apart! That’s because we let it cool down before reheating, and that is why stews, braises, fricassees and blanquettes are always better the second day!

Alton: It’s a stew, it’s a science lesson, it’s a meal, it’s absatively... Good Eats!

Cultural References

The episode title is a rhyming pun on the phrase “True Romance” which is the name of a 1993 film penned by Quentin Tarantino – an “unconventional” romance. Tarantino was a year ahead of his breakout hit Pulp Fiction when he wrote this film.

Alton’s assistant Thing appears. As revealed in Behind the Eats, he is the “son” of the “Thing” who performed in The Addams Family (1964) and then fell on hard times.

The “spice of the day” that causes Thing to react by tooting a bicycle horn has many precedents in television. Among recent examples is the “secret word” from Pee-Wee's Playhouse, a children’s television show that ran from 1986 to 1990 and starred Paul Reubens, an actor/comedian who created the Pee Wee Herman character.

When he explains this history of paprika, Alton again goes to his cabinet full of Viewmasters. These devices originally used a paper disc containing fourteen small slides. The projector used pairs of slides to produce stereo images. More recent versions have sound tracks. Once immensely popular (and even used for military training) the Viewmaster is now sadly about to join the many other amusements outpaced by technology.

Alton counsels the viewer to have “patience, grasshopper.” He borrows this admonition from Master Po (Keye Luke), a character on the 1972 television series Kung Fu. The master frequently referred to his pupil Kwai Chang Caine (David Carradine) as “grasshopper.”

Alton removes a wedge of beef fat from the disc that forms atop the cooking liquid drained from the braising step. This leaves it notched. When Alton then moves the disc across the screen while making a “wocka, wocka” kind of noise, he is imitating the immensely popular video game character Pac-Man, who first appeared in Japan in 1979 and then took the world by storm in the early 1980s, spawning an entire new genre, the maze-chase. Pac-Man’s goal was to roam a maze eating little pellets; as he did this he made the same sound Alton makes, and he looked like a circle missing a wedge – just like Alton’s piece of flavored beef fat.

Episode References

Alton mentions previous shows covering beef (although not by name). These include Steak Your Claim (the very first episode!), A Chuck for Chuck, Celebrity Roast, Raising the Steaks, Hitting the Sauce, Tender is the Loin I, Tender is the Loin II and Cubing Around.

Alton notes that searing meat does not seal in juices. He actually scientifically debunked this commonly held myth on the Myth Smashers episode.

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