Kitchen RO

Pork stew with peppers and paprika

Nearly half a kilo of meat for two portions. It looks after itself in the pot while the salmon is in the oven, and the next day it's better than the first.

50 min total 18 min hands-on 6.40 in totalhobporkcheap
Portions
Quantities and the shopping list are recalculated
2

One portion

1,265
kcal
32
protein g
116
fat g
18
carbs g
Sodium510 mg / 667
Potassium1,258 mg / 1,567
Phosphorus402 mg / 400
Fibre7 g / 7

Against one meal out of three, at your daily targets. For fibre a full bar is the good thing; for the rest it's the opposite.

Ingredients

Meat
  • 320 g Pork belly
  • 150 g Pork shoulder
Vegetables
  • 375 g Peppers
  • 150 g Onions
  • 3 pcs Garlic
  • 30 g Tomato purée
Fat and seasoning
  • 10 g Butter
  • 50 ml Double cream
  • 8 g Paprika
  • 1 g Bay
  • 2 g Salt · sodium
  • 1 g Black pepper

How it's made

8 steps

Big screen, one step at a time, with timers. The screen stays awake.

  1. Cut the pork belly into 2 cm cubes and the shoulder into 3 cm cubes. Pat everything dry. Cut the peppers into wide strips and slice the onion.
    6 min
  2. Pot on medium heat, no fat added. The pork belly on its own for 8 minutes, until it has given up enough lard to cover the base of the pot.
    8 min
    Medium heat, not high. The fat in the belly has to melt slowly; on high heat the outside browns while the inside stays raw.
  3. Turn the heat up and add the shoulder beside the belly, in a single layer. Four minutes without touching it, then three more once you've turned it.
    7 min
  4. Drop the heat to medium and add the onion. Three minutes, scraping the bottom of the pot with a wooden spoon.
    3 min
  5. Take the pot off the heat and only now add the paprika and garlic. Stir for 20 seconds in the hot fat, but with no flame underneath.
    Paprika burns in ten seconds over direct heat and turns irreversibly bitter. Off the heat it gives up its colour and aroma safely.
  6. Pot back on low heat, add the tomato purée, peppers, bay leaf, pepper and 120 ml of water. Stir well.
    A hundred and twenty millilitres, not two hundred. With no potatoes to soak up the liquid, the stew would stay a soup.
  7. Cover and leave 28 minutes on low heat, until the meat pulls apart with a spoon.
    28 min
  8. Heat off, pour in the cream, add the butter and salt, stir until melted. Fish out the bay leaf.
    Cream off the heat doesn't split, and it binds the sauce — doing the job the starch from the potato used to do.

The dish that looks after itself. You start it, put the lid on and go do something else.

Paprika goes in off the heat. It’s the most common mistake in Romanian home cooking: paprika thrown into boiling fat burns in under ten seconds and turns the whole pot bitter. Take the pot off the ring, stir the paprika into the still-hot fat, put it back. Simple, and irreversible if you get it wrong.

Red peppers, not green. Red ones are ripe, so they’re sweet, and that sweetness makes up for the missing salt. Green peppers are unripe and slightly bitter — the exact opposite of what you want here.

Cream binds the sauce instead of starch. The potato in the classic version broke down a little and thickened the liquid. Without it, the sauce stays thin no matter how long you simmer. Fifty millilitres of double cream, off the heat, does the same job.

Pork belly brings both the meat and the cooking fat. Three hundred and twenty grams leave behind all the lard this recipe needs, so not a gram of added fat goes in at the start. With the shoulder alongside, that’s 470 g of meat for two portions without raising the day’s protein — belly has half the protein of shoulder at twice the calories.

The next day it’s better. The fat settles, the paprika gives up all its colour and the peppers go completely soft. This is the dish in the plan that gains the most from a night in the fridge.

Photo: Pork goulash on Spätzle by WordRidden, licence BY 2.0.