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Hello!
A warm welcome to the new Insiders who’ve joined us in the past couple of weeks. Quite a number of you signed up just before I closed the doors to new members, and I’m so pleased to have you here. I hope you’ll go through the newsletter archive to take a look at all the great topics we’ve covered so far, and submit any steam oven questions that have been stumping you!
By popular demand, today we’re going to talk about slow cooker dishes in your steam oven. Specifically, we’ll cover slow cooking with sauce or liquid; think casseroles, stews and curries rather than slow roasting (which we’ll go into in a separate future newsletter).
On the subject of slow cooker dishes, I’ve adapted my favorite beef and red wine casserole for the steam oven, and I’m sharing it with you for the first time. I know many of you will love it. If you’re not a meat eater, don’t worry, I have you covered with a couple of fabulous vegan recipes coming up in future issues.
Finally a reminder, and a heads-up to new Insiders, that there are some changes coming to the layout and functionality of Steam Oven Insiders. These updates will help with better searchability and navigation of all my content when you’re logged into your Insiders dashboard, so you’ll be able to cruise around between exclusive Insiders stuff and my free content more seamlessly. My wonderful developer is working hard on these changes right now, and I’ll keep you posted when there’s more to share. We expect (hope) to roll out the majority of the improvements during May.
Happy steam oven cooking, see you again in a couple of weeks,
Emily x
New To Learn: Slow Cooker Dishes in a Steam Oven
When I began using steam ovens, I would ‘straight swap’ slow cooker recipes for the steam oven to get a feel for what the oven could do. In most cases that worked pretty well, and in about half the time of the equivalent slow cooker dish.
Over the years, I’ve refined things, so today I’m sharing the tweaks I make to slow cooker dishes so they perform at their best in the steam oven. I hope this will encourage you to slow cook with your oven more often.
New to Cook: Beef and Red Wine Casserole
This is a classic, European style slow cooked beef, braised with vegetables and red wine. There are countless variations on the theme; this is mine.
Serve this dish with mashed potatoes, soft polenta, rice or risotto. Leftovers can be turned into a luxurious shredded meat pasta sauce, or used as a pie filling.
The Season Flip
We all know slow cooking comes into its own during cooler weather, but it can actually be great year-round! Here are a couple of favorites for milder weather days on both sides of the equator.
Southern Hemisphere
This is a rich and creamy chicken casserole loaded with mushrooms. I prefer it made with well-trimmed chicken thighs over breasts, but either will work. To tweak for the steam oven: preheat your oven using the steam setting, 185°F/85°C (100% humidity). Proceed with the recipe as written, but omit the chicken stock and instead add a crumbled stock/bouillon cube or ½ teaspoon fine salt. Cook for 2-2½ hours or until the chicken is very tender. If you don’t mind a thinner sauce you can skip the cornflour at the end, otherwise switch settings to convection heat (no steam) 350°F/180°C when it’s time to add the cornflour, and cook for a further 10 minutes to thicken.
Northern Hemisphere
I think of this as a kind of ‘fast slow cooker’ recipe. It makes use of the principles of using your steam oven as a cooktop that I’ve talked about in a previous newsletter. Preheat your oven to Combi Steam, 320°F/160°C, 30% (low) humidity, and do the first (saute) step in a large pan in the oven, rather than on your cooktop. Add the rest of the ingredients as written, but halve the coconut milk quantity. Return the pan to the oven and cook for 20-30 minutes instead of the 5-10 in the recipe. Finish as written with spinach and lemon.
A Thing I'm Loving
I did a mini-overhaul on my home kitchen cabinets a few months back, and after loving them in my studio kitchen, I’ve added a few of Ikea’s Uppdatera pegboards to my drawers and cupboards. If you haven’t seen these before, they’re such a great solution for organizing oddly-shaped and sized kitchen items, without taking up extra space in your cabinets. I highly recommend if you enjoy having a dedicated ‘place for everything’ in your kitchen.
Ask Me Anything (AMA)
Here’s your opportunity to ask me anything you like related to combi steam cooking!
I really encourage you to submit questions, and will do my best to answer as many as possible. Though I may not be able to get to every single question, I will carefully curate ones which are relevant and represent a variety of topics. We all learn from each other, and I often learn new things based on questions from all of you!
If you have an AMA question, please email it to [email protected]. Make sure you include the phrase INSIDERS AMA in the subject line so I can collate and read all your submissions.
From John
Q: Is it safe to assume that, for recipes that involve putting foil over something before roasting, that you could instead leave the foil off and add some steam?
For example, this recipe for porchetta uses a foil-covered dish in a 160C degree oven to trap steam (around 2-2.5 hours), and then increases the oven temperature to 260C for about 20-30 minutes. I assume that for the first step, I could just use 160C with around 30% steam to achieve similar results?
A: Yes, you’re spot on. Most recipes which ask you to cover something with foil are trying to achieve moisture retention or to minimize browning of the outside of a food. When it’s used to retain moisture, you can definitely skip the foil and add a low to moderate amount of steam to your combi steam oven instead.
One thing to be wary of is that the meat for your porchetta will likely cook a bit faster than the foil-covered-regular-oven version. You can drop the temp to 140C for a slower cook, or stick with 160 and check the meat after, say, an hour and a half to make sure it’s not overcooking and drying out.
From Helen
Q: I am planning to slow roast a 2.5 kilo leg of lamb (about 5.5 pounds) in my Gaggenau steam oven. How long would you recommend I cook it for and should I do it at 140 degrees/60% steam?
A: You are exactly right for temperature here, but I’d bump the steam level down to around 30%. Fattier meats like a lamb leg, especially when there’s a decent amount of internal fat, benefit from lower steam, so the meat doesn’t cook before the fat and connective tissues can soften and render out. For that weight of meat I’d go around the 3 hour mark, but with slow roasting you’ll find it’s pretty forgiving up to 4 or 5 hours as long as there’s enough exterior fat to stop it drying out.