The Family Meal Stew
Chef Toni Olukiran’s recipe for a versatile stew with infinite variations, which she first made for staff with leftovers from a busy restaurant service. Images by Toni Olukiran and Georgia Rudd.
Welcome to Vittles Cooking! This week, chef Toni Olukiran takes us behind the scenes at the busy London restaurant where she works to describe the genesis of a simple-seeming dish that packs a huge punch of flavour and that can be easily adapted to whatever you have in the fridge.
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The Family Meal Stew
Chef Toni Olukiran’s recipe for an easy, versatile stew made for staff with leftovers from a busy restaurant service.
At the Soho restaurant where I work, in addition to running busy lunch and dinner services, the other chefs and I are tasked with cooking breakfast and lunch for the rest of the kitchen team, the maintenance team, and front-of-house staff. These meals are expected to be served at 11 o’clock and 4 o’clock each day. Although we rarely take the time to sit down together, instead scoffing the food quickly between tasks, there’s still something significant about everyone in the kitchen being able to change pace slightly and down tools, even if only for a few minutes.
There’s no rota and typically no plan for making staff food, and so turnaround is always quick and often haphazard – it’s not a real shift unless the clock has already struck 3 and someone is scrambling to get lunch started. But, amid the chaos, there’s a formula for how to approach the task. First, a whip round to everyone’s sections, from pastry to plancha, begging for any leftover mise en place that can be used in any way: celery slaw, roasted onions, suet pastry – anything goes, we’ll take it all. Next, a peek in the dry store to see if there’s a quick carb (rice, pasta, couscous, something) that can anchor the meal. Finally, a scan of the fridges for something (anything) to tie the dish together.
Prepping the staff food is the closest a restaurant kitchen gets to home cooking. It especially reminds me of making food at university – trying to scrounge a meal together before a big shop and being forced to think creatively to transform the sad, wilting bits of veg in the fridge and random ingredients at the back of the cupboard into something appetising. Although the fridges at the restaurant are flush with options, almost everything is earmarked for customers, so we’re often facing similar scarcity when it comes to cooking staff meals. Each day presents a MasterChef-esque challenge of turning, say, three tins of chickpeas, 200g of beef trim, and five carrots into a delicious and nourishing meal for thirty or forty people. While I’m (hopefully) a much better cook now than I was at university, I find myself relying on the same sense of innovation I did back then to create more from less.
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This warming stew is one I often fall back on when it’s my turn to make ‘family meal’ (not that we ever actually call it that), particularly in colder months. I conjured it up when we had a big tray of pork belly offcuts from a porchetta tonnata dish we had prepped that morning. I was chucking ingredients in the pot, seemingly directionless, wondering what the outcome was going to be. But once I added some boiled potatoes, cabbage, and a tin of chickpeas, along with the pork, it started to take shape. It ended up being one of my most complimented staff creations to date – perhaps because it was much heartier than anyone expected it to be (myself included). Receiving praise from fellow chefs for staff food is almost even better than glowing feedback from diners, because you know you made it in a pinch.
Although the pork version of this stew remains the most popular, this recipe is endlessly versatile. I’ve also made it with lamb, pheasant, and more – whatever pieces of cooked meat we have leftover – always with delicious results. The same goes for the vegetables: in the past I’ve thrown in everything from radicchio to Brussels sprouts, and they’ve all worked, so feel free to use whatever veg you have. I’ve made it enough by now that I know that, even if I’m missing certain seemingly essential ingredients, like lemons or celery, it still works – just a little differently.
This dish can be eaten on its own, or with the grain of your choice. I’m on a pearl barley kick right now, and its chewy texture works really well with the stew. Another great pairing that we discovered at work was the combination of the stew with polenta generously laden with parmesan – a cosy, rich bowl of food to get you through biting winter evenings.
The Family Meal Stew, v1
Serves 4–6
Time 1 hr