Meat is a unique product that can be combined with almost any side dish, and therefore a large number of a wide variety of dishes can be prepared from it. However, special sympathy and love are always on the side of stew and baked meat.
Braising is a process that includes two stages of cooking meat: roasting and subsequent boiling. The bottom line is that when frying, the fibers are "sealed" and do not allow the juice to come out of the meat. This keeps it juicy. Then the meat is transferred from a frying pan to a saucepan and simmered with the addition of broth or water under a lid over low heat. This gives it softness.
A cast iron pan is best for frying, but you can use any pan.
Most often, meat is stewed along with one or more types of vegetables. And the most popular "companion" of meat in this matter is potatoes.
To prepare stew with potatoes, you need 700 g of beef pulp, 8 medium potatoes, 2 tomatoes, 1 onion and 1 carrot, 1 tbsp. l. high fat sour cream, bay leaf, ground black pepper, a few peas and salt to taste.
First you need to cut the meat into medium-sized pieces and brown in oil in a cast-iron skillet or saucepan. As soon as the meat acquires a slight golden hue, you should add chopped carrots and onions to it, and a little later tomatoes. After frying the mixture a little more, you need to add 3 glasses of water to the meat and vegetables and simmer everything, removing the lid for an hour over low heat. After the indicated time, add the chopped potatoes to the stewpan, stew it with the meat until half cooked and, seasoning with sour cream, add all the spices and salt. Next, the dish is stewed until fully cooked.
This recipe can be expanded by adding mushrooms to meat and vegetables, which should be placed in a saucepan next to carrots, or canned green peas.
As for roasting meat, it is also important to preserve its juiciness, and therefore it always needs to be "packed" in something, for example, in dough or foil.
To cook meat in the dough, you will need a ham of pork weighing about 1.3 kg, 350-400 g of flour, 130-150 g of butter, several sprigs of tarragon, which, if necessary, can be replaced with basil, 1 egg, 2-3 tbsp. l. mustard, black pepper and salt to taste.
The pork should be washed well, dried with a towel and tied with twine to give it its shape. A thin piece can be rolled up. The meat should be greased with butter, placed in a baking dish and sent to the oven preheated to 200 degrees for about half an hour, after which it must be turned over and kept in the oven for about 20 minutes. After a specified period of time, the meat should be removed, salt, pepper and left for an hour to cool.
While the meat is in the oven, prepare the dough. Dough is kneaded from flour, soft butter, salt and 150 g of water. It should be crumpled, adding flour until it stops sticking to your hands. Then it must be rolled into a sheet, the width of which should be twice the width of the piece of meat, and the length should be 20 cm longer than its length. The dough must be gently greased with mustard, leaving the edges clean, and herbs in the middle of the sheet. As soon as the meat has cooled down, it must be freed from the twine, put on the test and wrapped tightly. For air access, you need to make punctures on top of the "bag" with a fork. Next, the workpiece must be coated with egg yolk and sent to a greased form.
Roasting time for meat is 40 minutes at a temperature of about 200 degrees. The dish already cooked and taken out of the oven should be wrapped in foil - this will allow the dough to soften. After about half an hour, the meat can be served.
