There is no single recipe for traditional stew. Each cook adapts it to their liking and gives it their own touch, whether with the type of chickpeas, the noodles, certain vegetables, the added meat or the spices used. Madrid stew does not contain exactly the same ingredients as Galician, Andalusian or Catalan escudella. But they are all equally comforting and nutritious dishes, capable of warming your body in an instant on the coldest days.
In every home, a variety of chickpeas will be used: usually the smallest or peadrollis, or the milkiest and largest. And there will also be changes to the meats and sausages used to flavor the broth. Traditionally, the stew is a recipe loaded with ingredients of animal origin, the third change from the typical Madrid stew. The first is broth and noodles, and the second is chickpeas with vegetables.
Normally in the pot we find pork bones – like ham or spine -, bones and tacos from different parts of the beef, as well as chicken or hen, which gives it a lot of flavor . From pork, the star of the stew is white bacon or pancetta, blood sausage and chorizo or minced meatball. In some regions, lamb meat – which gives a very intense flavor -, lacón, lean meat or pig’s trotters are also used.
If you’re vegetarian or vegan, you may have considered going without a nutritious stew, but don’t worry. You don’t have to exclude this dish at all. There are versions without meat but with all the flavor and properties that can be claimed from a dish of vegetables and legumes, and much lighter than the version with pork, beef or chicken. We can look for similar flavors or innovate with new nuances.
Meat Alternatives
The main ingredients of our stew will be chickpeas and vegetables: we can use pumpkin, carrot, potato, celery, parsnip, leek, onion, cabbage and turnip. And to give it more flavor and supplement it nutritionally to obtain more proteins, you can opt for several alternatives:
- To give the cooked a more intense flavor we can use kombu seaweed, which also has infinite properties for our digestive system and a high content of proteins and certain minerals such as iodine, potassium, magnesium, iron and calcium, which makes it a very interesting ingredient. in diets that do without foods of animal origin.
- Vegan Chorizo: If you don’t want to do without the flavor of chorizo, we suggest adding one made from textured soy to your stew. What we’re going to do is soak it with water and a little soy sauce. We will let it soak for 10 minutes and after this time we drain and add the following spices: smoked paprika, garlic powder, cumin, oregano and red miso paste, as well as a little nutritional yeast, a little oil and wheat gluten. if we want to give it coherence. Once everything is integrated, we give it the desired consistency and we are ready to cook.
- Another option is to prepare red bean and rice puddings or chorizos made with pumpkin. We can find different recipes to prepare vegan sausages, the key will be the spices that we will use and that will give them a flavor similar to that of meat sausage. In many cases, they also combine legumes and grains with vegetables, making them more nutritionally complete by providing plant-based proteins to the dish.
- You can also use Heura bites or a similar product to replace the chicken.
The version we choose will depend on the time we have to cook or the desire to get complicated. If we prepare vegan sausages at home, the truth is that we will have to spend a lot of time in the kitchen and we cannot always do it; That’s why we recommend checking stores that have a section for people who follow a vegan diet to see if they sell sausages made from legumes, grains and vegetables. Nowadays it is quite easy to find companies where they are prepared by hand, which makes our task much easier.
A different recipe
We are going to give you a recipe for vegan stew, with kombu seaweed. Don’t exactly expect the typical taste of Madrid stew. But we assure you that it is delicious, it is super nutritious and filling and you will not have to regret a heavy digestion when you get up from the table.
The quantities we are going to give you are for two dishes but you can adjust them according to your needs. We will need the following ingredients: two potatoes, a turnip, a parsnip, two carrots, two sweet potatoes, a quarter of cabbage, a stalk of celery, a few stalks of thistle, two leeks and two cloves of garlic. About 120 grams of Pedrollisano chickpeas, which we will have soaked the day before preparing the recipe. We will also prepare a piece of kombu seaweed, about two centimeters will be enough. To spice it up, we will use black pepper, sweet smoked paprika, cumin and – if you wish – a teaspoon of turmeric, which has antioxidant and anti-inflammatory effects.
The positive side of this recipe, apart from the fact that it is delicious, is that it can be prepared very quickly if you prepare it in a pressure cooker. What we’re going to do is fill the pot halfway with cold water and add all the vegetables for the broth, along with the garlic and seaweed. Once we see that the water begins to boil, we will also add the chickpeas. If we do it in a slow cooker, once it boils we will only need about 15 or 20 minutes for our stew to be ready.
Once prepared we can separate the vegetables and chickpeas in a bowl and take the broth with some noodles. If you like oriental touches, it’s time to add a teaspoon of miso paste, a condiment that, in addition to its flavor, provides high quality protein.
