Solyanka with smoked brisket and dried cherries

Category: Culinary recipes

Ingredients
Meat
Brisket
Rast. oil	1 tbsp. l.
Onion
Carrot
Garlic	2-4 cloves
Dried cherry
Salt
Sauerkraut
Sweet pepper

Cooking method

First I do the frying.
I cut the meat and brisket as I like (in strips, slices, cubes), fry in a hot pan with butter, onions, carrots, crushed garlic.
I add spices for vegetables, salt, to taste.
You can add coarsely chopped sweet peppers. But I didn’t do it, because I have sauerkraut with pepper - that's enough.
I add dried cherries. Mix well. Be careful with salt, it is better to salt at the end, because we use salty foods in principle.
The result is such a frying.
Now I add sauerkraut, coarsely chopped fresh cabbage, mix everything. I get this picture. Raw vegetables.
Now I will tell you and show you how I cook stewed vegetables under a special conical lid and why I do it.
For quality stews, we first need to extract all the moisture from them, and then force the vegetables to stew in this liquid, their own juice. Until evaporation of the liquid, and then fried in oil. We will not add water to the pan, the taste will deteriorate. We will stew vegetables in our own juice.
Pay attention to the photo above - the vegetables are dry in the pan.
Now we cover the pan with such a lid. The photo shows that it has a conical shape, there is a hole on top, and a metal rim below, onto which condensate flows down during cooking.
We close the hole on top with a small homemade lid (new lids are already sold with lids). Now you need to create an atmosphere inside so that due to condensation in vegetables as much moisture as possible accumulates, they swell. Therefore, we close the lid and even the condensate that accumulates on the rim will not be drained, but, on the contrary, we will pour it back into the vegetables, it will come in handy. So we stand the vegetables for 15-20 minutes.
This is how the vegetables look now after the "steam bath"! They became watery, swollen, absorbed moisture and condensation. This is what we achieved!
Now we remove the top cap - we will evaporate the liquid from the vegetables so that the vegetables are cooked and stewed due to their own moisture.
What are we going to observe now?
The liquid to be evaporated will condense on the sides of the lid and drain onto the metal rim, and not drain to the bottom of the pan. Steam will escape through the hole in the lid.
Stir vegetables periodically. To do this, carefully remove the lid, and pour the liquid from the rim into the sink - we don't need it. Stir the vegetables, then close the lid again and collect all the condensed liquid on the rim again.
And so on until the liquid evaporates completely and the vegetables begin to fry in the same oil / fat that is in the meat and vegetables after they are fried.
This procedure will take a little time.
We try cabbage for readiness, taste, presence of salt, spices.
Stir and fry until tender. The cover can already be removed.
This is the kind of cabbage we end up with. Buttery in appearance, completely stewed in its own juice, fried in the oil that was originally in the meat.
Cabbage color depends on the ingredients of the hodgepodge. This time, I got a darker hodgepodge, from smoked ribs.
I added dried cherries to sauerkraut for the first time. I usually add a little brown sugar to soften the sour-salty taste, only 1-1.5 tsp.
But I liked the use of cherry more.
The taste of cherries is also felt, and a certain sweetness appeared in the cabbage. If possible, I will now always add dried cherries (or dried cranberries) to the hodgepodge.

Note

I went to clean up the "bins". I caught sight of smoked ribs, a little fresh pork belly meat with gristle, fresh and sauerkraut (with sweet pepper), half a bag of dried cherries. Let's put it all together!
And let's call it "Solyanka with sauerkraut, smoked brisket and dried cherries"
Bon appetit, everyone!