12 winter braise recipes Matt Preston swears by (2024)

Click here for the recipe to Matt’s classic ragu with polenta dumplings.

Ah, the comfort of the casserole, the beauty of the braise, the simplicity of a stew. Is there any meal more redolent of winter than something bubbling away merrily on the stovetop or slowly in the oven? The very act warms the kitchen and the whole house fills with the heart-warming aroma of home.

Strange, then, that casseroles and stews seem to have fallen out of favour as we cast admiring glances the way of tray bakes and all manner of ‘bowls’ instead. Oh, fickle us.

Casseroles and stews aren’t just something your grandma made when she lived in a bark hut in the bush. They’re beautifully simple, one-pot wonderous ways of cooking (with minimal washing-up) and we just need a little adventurousness to reinvent them for a new generation. Here are four great ideas that will get your family reassessing the humble stew.

Aquick cheat’s cassoulet

The French really are the masters of the braise with all their daubes and dishes like boeuf Bourguignon, chicken Normandy, cooked with cider and cream, and coq au vin. My favourite, however, are the bean-laden cassoulets of the country’s south-west. The trouble is that a good cassoulet takes an age to make properly; if you make it quickly you invariably fail to get the wonderful lip-stickiness that’s very much the delicious joy of this pork and bean dish.

At least that was until we perfected the cheat’s cassoulet. The recipe uses more familiar pork snags and chicken thighs rather than duck and esoteric sausages or salted pork belly, but it still achieves that delicious meaty stickiness with the cunning addition of a couple of teaspoons of powdered gelatine (see Matt’s recipe for a simple French cassoulet here)

Interestingly, coq au vin was originally made with white wine rather than the red we more usually use these days and that makes for a surprisingly good variation to this French classic.

Un-Italian lamb puttanesca

For all their off-handedness and relaxed outlook, Italians are pretty rigid when it comes to food and fashion. To test this, try wearing a yellow Pringle jumper tied round your shoulders at the wrong time of year, or order a latte after dinner. At the risk of offending them, however, I’ve always felt the classic Neapolitan puttanesca sauce was wasted served just on pasta. It seems to offer so much more given how tomatoes, capers, olives and anchovies love both fish and lamb so very much.

For fish with puttanesca, fill a warmed casserole to thumb-deep with hot puttanesca sauce and paddle firm white-fleshed fish in the hot sauce and roast in the oven. Click here for full recipes for my super-easy fish puttanesca, lamb puttanesca and puttanesca with mussels and orecchiette.

Ghanian peanut stew

There’s much stewin’-spiration to be found in the kitchens of sub-Saharan Africa, from Botswana’s pounded beef, or seswaa, to Nigeria’s egusi, but the African dish tipped by US hospitality pundits as a possible break-out braise for restaurants in 2018 is the gorgeous peanut curry (aka nkatenkwan) from Ghana. This stew of chicken seared off with ginger, garlic, hot chilli and sweet potato, and finished with peanut butter and tomatoes is tipped as being familiar enough in flavour, technique and ingredients that it won’t scare off US diners who still want a bit more adventure (but not too much) when they eat out. It’s a super-easy stew to make at home, with the peanut butteradding a lovely richness and velvet mouthfeel. The traditional carb served with it is fufu (typically made by pounding cassava and green plantain), but since the ingredients are hard to find unless you’re in, say, Accra, try brown rice. This West African classic has already made an early appearance in MasterChef this season, perhaps confirming that it’s time has come.

Beef rendang

Malaysians are obsessed with food to such a degree that Dr Mahathir Mohamad’s weighing into the recent ‘crisp rendang’ controversy to defend one of Malaysia’s national dishes during the recent election campaign could be seen as a play for the popular vote. If so, it certainly worked – he deposed one of the world’s longestserving political parties.

A good rendang should be fragrant, with a thick, cooked-down, sauce that is dry and dense rather than sloppy, and with a slight squeak from the toasted coconut. When choosing a recipe, the picture will tell you so much. Also, be sure to use kaffir lime leaves (they’re sold in supermarkets), both to cook in the sauce and to slice razor-fine and sprinkle over the top for garnish. Buy extra – they keep well in the freezer.

Indian dahl

Cook split peas or lentils in stock that’s flavoured with your favourite spices. Bring these alive by adding a great tadka or tempered spices. Just before serving, fry mustard seeds, onions, and curry leaves in hot oil and tip the mixture over the top of the dahl.

Sticky braised beef Aussie short ribs

My dowry was a braise recipe that artfully combines a mixture of pineapple juice, soy sauce, curry powder and malt vinegar with chopped cheap lamb forequarter. I think there might have been a message there, but I’ve tried not to think too deeply about this. What I have thought about is using this sauce to braise everything from pork shoulder to trendy beef short ribs – you’ll find this recipe here. The prep is minimal and the outcome is strangely magical, given the rather random selection of ingredients.

A superior tagine

This North African slow-cooked stew is usually built around a protein such as lamb or chicken partnered with the sweetness of fruit like dried apricots, prunes, currants or quince and warm spices like cinnamon, coriander seed and cumin. No matter what the tagine, it will always be lifted with garnishes of yoghurt, loads of parsley, mint, a little citrus zest and a nut such as toasted almond slivers. Serve tagines with couscous and, if you’ve never tried it before, be prepared to fall head-over-heels in love.

Barley and lamb shanks

The fattiness of braised lamb shanks goes so well with the honest nuttiness of barley whether the shanks are cooked with red wine, anchovies and the usual mix of diced carrot, onions, smoky bacon, celery and garlic, or cooked Italian style with loads of sliced red onions in a mix of garlic, red wine and balsamic along with some rosemary. When the lamb is almost falling off the bone, I like to pour in the barley and top the lot with finely shredded raw white cabbage to soften in the last 15 minutes of cooking.

Butter chicken

This is one of the simplest curries in the world, but to make it authentic cook tandoori paste-marinated chicken thighs on the BBQ at a high heat so they char and get a little smoky before they’re fully cooked through. Then finish cooking in a makhani or butter sauce of tomatoes, cumin, and chilli powder finished with a little cream and dressed with coriander leaves and sliced fresh green chilli. Serve the curry on basmati rice cooked with cardamom pods.

Something else Italian

Osso buco, chicken cacciatore (aka the hunter’s stew), trippa alla Romana, meatballs in tomato gravy, Sicilian caponata, and any number of ragùs – the frugal Italians are the other European masters of letting the oven do the work to create a great stew for dinner. You can find recipes for all of these classics online at delicious.com.au, but why not instead freestyle by frying up diced fennel, onions, crushed fennel seeds and garlic until soft, then deglaze the pan with a good slosh of white wine. Crush in a punnet of cherry tomatoes, then add a cup of tomato passata, a bay leaf and the zest and juice of half an orange. Simmer for 15 minutes and then add 350g of chunks of firm white fish. Cook for five minutes or so, then dress it with the reserved fronds from the fennel and the zest and juice from the other half of the orange. Or make a simple Italian beef ragu and top it with polenta dumplings to chase away the winter blues (see the recipe here).

Leek and cauliflower

This delicious vegetarian braise combines slow-cooked leeks with cauliflower and a baked gruyère crust. Add some torn silverbeet leaves, too, for body. You’ll find a full recipe here, but our food team uses cavolo nero because they’re way cooler than me.

The daggy braise reinvented

We live in a time when everyone wants to give retro dishes a retread, so why not rediscover classics like curried sausages, sweet and sour frankfurters, or apricot chicken? To bring things up to date, just remember to replace dried ingredients with fresh, use time on the flame rather than flour to thicken things, and reduce the amount of sugar used as well. Seasoning dishes with a little lemon juice or vinegar as well as salt also helps – so many of those old recipes used sugar with the sort of gay abandon usually seen in politicians with public money at election time. With this is mind, can I commend the idea of pork meatballs braised in a classic sweet and sour sauce loaded with capsicum and pineapple?

Click here for the recipe to Matt’s classic ragu with polenta dumplings.