♪ ♪ - It's got a little heat from the harissa, it's got the lemon juice in there, a little squeeze at the end, as well.

The fresh herbs, the potatoes and the chickpeas, the turmeric, and what I love is, there's balance here, but there's also contrast.

And the meat's there, but it's not overpowering.

- The miso makes this soup, for sure.

It adds so much complexity.

It has so many just pops of flavor to it.

And then you've got the texture from the mushrooms and the silken tofu.

And then that egg, when you crack that yolk in there, adds all of this richness.

It's just a perfect little bowl of soup.

- This seasoning technique is one of the most fundamental flavoring methods in Indian cooking.

So you learn this once, you can use it on lots of different things.

The onions hit great.

There's some heat from the chili, all that earthy spice from the toasted cumin seeds, of course, that little dash of lemon on top, and the turmeric binding it all together in a delicious creamy bowl.

♪ ♪ Let's get started.

♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ - You know, stews are a fabulous teaching tool, since almost every culture has stew recipes, but they approach them very differently.

So we start in Morocco with harira, which is a beef, tomato, and chickpea stew.

Then we go on to make a miso soup with shiitake and poached eggs, which is based on a simple miso broth.

And then finally, we do a lentil stew, obviously from India, called dal tarka.

Please stay tuned.

- Funding for this series was provided by the following.

- That meal.

You sautéed, you seared, and you served, cooking with All-Clad, bonded cookware designed, engineered, and assembled in the U.S.A. for over 50 years.

All-Clad: for all your kitchen adventures.

♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ - (speaking Arabic): ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ - (speaking Arabic): ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ - You know, what I love about traveling around the world is going into people's homes.

We tend to get cooking lessons from home cooks, less so in restaurants.

Because you find recipes that are very common, let's say in Morocco, like the harira we're about to make, which is a beef stew.

But, you know, most of us know tagine, but we don't know that.

So you find out how people cook, and what they cook, and it really opens up the possibilities for us here at Milk Street and you at home.

So this is a beef stew, which starts out with a typical sofrito, you know, carrots, onions, and celery.

But then it takes a few turns.

It has some more interesting flavorings in it, and some techniques.

So it's a way of thinking about how to expand your notion of what a beef stew is.

So we're going to start off with the typical sauté the sofrito, a couple of tablespoons of olive oil.

By the way, when you cook onions, for example, as a first step, you don't actually have to preheat the pan.

The oil is not going to get into the onions because the onions are full of water.

So you can put it in and then heat up the pan.

That's fine.

A little bit of salt, half a teaspoon.

So the next thing we're going to do is take cilantro, and take the stems-- put the leaves aside.

This is a great technique, by the way, for parsley stems or cilantro stems.

We very often use them in cooking for flavoring.

They have a lot of flavor.

(pan sizzling softly) Give it a stir.

(sizzling) And we'll cook that six or seven minutes, really, to sweat the vegetables and start to soften them.

We cooked this recipe with two people.

We went to Fez in Morocco, Houda Mehdi, who also taught us to make a great flatbread recipe, and Adi Bourachdi-- and both of them showed us how to do it at home.

And we learned so much, as I said, about flavors and textures.

So we'll be back in a few minutes.

We'll add some tomato paste, some spices, some grated tomato, and get on with our harira.

So we're going to add some tomato paste and some spices.

But first we're going to finish grating tomatoes.

Grated tomatoes is just a great way to cook them in a stew.

And the skin is obviously still on.

Okay.

This has been six or seven minutes.

We sweated the vegetables.

And here's a tip: very often, to add some depth of flavor, umami, tomato paste has a ton of it.

We put it in, and we're going to cook it for just a minute.

So browning tomato paste is a good way to add, you know, foundational flavor.

So, so far, this has been your typical beef stew.

You know, sofrito, do a sauté, soften the vegetables, add a little tomato paste.

That's not that unusual.

But now we're going to start to make it a harira, a Moroccan stew.

So we're going to add turmeric.

We're going to add harissa, which originally came from Tunisia.

It's dried chilies, spices, some olive oil, sometimes some vinegar.

Some recipes use peppers or sweeter ingredients.

Stir that in.

And then we have our four grated tomatoes.

(sizzling) Scrape up the bottom a little bit.

And we're going to cook this over sort of medium-high for just a few minutes, about five minutes.

We want to see this start to thicken up before we start adding the stock, and the meat, and the other ingredients.

So this is a nice base, but again, it's got the turmeric, it's got the harissa.

So it definitely has a Moroccan feel to it.

So let's just take a look at this.

It has that nice, rich color.

It's from the tomato paste that we briefly sautéed, and the harissa, as well.

I'm going to move on to the Yukon Golds go in.

This is a dish that's going to have, by the way, potatoes and beans, chickpeas, which is a common combination.

And a quart of low-sodium beef broth.

You know, a lot of places in the world just use water.

They don't use broth-- you could use water here.

We're going to turn up the heat a little bit, bring this up to a simmer, and then we'll add the meat.

And then we're going to cook this for about an hour and a half.

So this is at a simmer, obviously.

And now we're going to add short ribs, three-inch pieces of short ribs.

Now, notice that we haven't sautéed the meat.

And that's because, you know, I've traveled a lot.

I almost never found a culture outside of Northern Europe that sautés meat.

And there's a good reason for that.

The question is, in a stew, do you want meat on meat on meat?

And so by sautéing meat, you get more Maillard reaction, you get more depth of meat flavor.

What most people do, including this recipe from Morocco, is, they want to balance it.

They don't want any one ingredient to overpower the whole dish.

So by not sautéing the meat, meat's a component, but it's not just meat.

It has lots of other things going on, which is why we love getting these kinds of recipes from other countries.

So we'll bring this up to a simmer.

I'll cover, have it a nice low simmer, and cook it for about an hour and a half.

Now, in Morocco, as in many places in the world, they do use pressure cookers.

So this might well be made in a pressure cooker, which would take about half the time, which you can do, as well.

Just follow the recipe to this point and then set the pressure cooker.

Probably take about 40 minutes or so to cook.

And so we'll be right back.

♪ ♪ So the meat has come out.

It's been about an hour and a half.

It's obviously tender.

I just want to reiterate that this is a dish where the meat's almost a flavoring in the stew.

You know, we don't have a huge pile of meat, but it's just one of the ingredients.

So there are two ways to thicken this.

You could use flour.

Houda Mehdi, one of the people we cooked with, likes to mash the vegetables to, to thicken, which is great.

And you could do that right in the pot.

I think that's enough.

So it's plenty thick.

Now we have the meat, and we cooked the meat in three-inch pieces.

And we did that so it wouldn't dry out.

But obviously, they're a little bit too big for eating.

Okay, we're good.

We'll add that back.

Give that a stir.

Now, we're going to also add in the chickpeas at this time.

You don't have to rinse these.

You drain off the liquid, the aquafaba, but a little bit is still on the chickpeas, and that's also going to act a little bit as a thickener.

Now, the other thing you want to do is, you want to check for texture, and...

I think that's pretty good, but you know what?

We're just going to add a little bit of water.

And you can always do this with a soup or stew towards the end.

You can just adjust the amount of liquid.

I think that's good.

We're going to bring this up to a very low simmer for about 15 minutes, just to heat through the meat again and also to warm up the chickpeas.

So everything's warmed up.

Here's a tip I got from, actually, a Boston chef.

She said, "When you cook, listen," right?

So when you're listening to, let's say, a stew cook, you can hear it when it's at a nice low simmer, it's sort of gentle.

(chuckling): If it starts to sound angry, then you need to get back and look at the pot, and probably turn the heat down.

So hearing, you know, the audio part of cooking, is actually really important.

So this is done.

We're going to add a little lemon juice to brighten things up.

Which is another great tip.

You know, if you're making a soup or stew, at the end, you want to add some bright notes.

Cilantro-- the leaves.

And people often ask, you know, what are the two or three most important things in cooking?

First is to use enough salt, because it makes all the difference.

But then taste the food, especially a soup or a stew, just before you serve it, because inevitably, it's going to need something.

This definitely needs salt.

We haven't-- I think we've put half a teaspoon in so far, so...

I'm a big fan of salt.

And now we can go ahead and plate it.

♪ ♪ A little extra harissa is nice.

So that's it, that's the harira.

It's a Moroccan beef and tomato chickpea stew.

It's a great teaching recipe to take sort of an everyday beef stew and make it something really special.

Mm.

It's got a little heat from the harissa, got the lemon juice in there, a little squeeze at the end, as well.

The fresh herbs, the potatoes and the chickpeas, the turmeric.

And what I love is, there's balance here, but there's also contrast.

And the meat's there, but it's not overpowering.

So a Moroccan beef and tomato chickpea stew.

Not hard to make.

You can do it a pressure cooker, take about half as much time.

It's a great way to experience another culture-- in this case, Morocco.

♪ ♪ - Miso goes back millennia in Japan, and it's a true powerhouse ingredient.

It's the backbone in this quick and easy broth with just water, red miso, garlic, and tomato paste that we're going to use in our miso soup with shiitake mushrooms and poached eggs.

So we're going to start with some tomato paste.

And just smashed cloves of garlic.

And these are just going to cook together.

We're going to really get some concentrated flavor on these.

So we're calling this miso soup, but it's not true miso soup.

It's really more soup with a miso broth.

True miso soup would be made with a dashi, which is made with kombu and dried bonito flakes, which are fish flakes.

All right, so the tomato paste is stuck on the bottom, which means it's nicely caramelized.

So we can add the water.

And the red miso.

And we're using red miso here.

It's typically fermented longer.

It usually has more grain to mold, and it has a much more intense flavor, and that's really important here, so don't use white miso paste.

And you really want to whisk this up and scrape the bottom, because you want to make sure you get all of that tomato paste off the bottom of the pan.

I'm going to bring this to a simmer and then let that sit for about five minutes, and then I'll strain it and put it back in the pot.

We want to strain it because, A, we want to strain out those garlic cloves, but also, miso doesn't fully break down, so it might have a few clumps left in there.

That will remove those clumps.

♪ ♪ All right.

I strained the broth so you can see the solids here.

Just going to get rid of those and then we'll put this broth back into the pan.

Oh, that smells so good.

Just, miso has a smell that is like no other.

And now we can prep the mushrooms.

So these are fresh shiitake mushrooms.

You do not want to substitute with dried mushrooms here.

The whole purpose, really, of these mushrooms is for texture.

Obviously, they're going to add a lot of umami flavor, but we really want the texture of the mushroom in the soup.

So dried mushroom really doesn't add that great texture.

All right, and we can add these to the soup.

And we'll bring those to a simmer and let those cook for about ten minutes, just until they're nicely softened.

In the meantime, I'm going to poach the eggs.

So I've got a ten-inch skillet here.

You want to bring this up to a simmer.

You don't want a real vigorous boil, because when you add the eggs in, they're just going to completely fall apart.

We always recommend, when poaching eggs, adding the egg to a little cup first.

It makes it so much easier to put them into the water.

You can get really close to the water.

You don't lose as much of the white that way.

Then we turn the heat off.

And cover.

And you want to let that steam in there for about three to five minutes, depending on how runny you like your yolk.

I like mine on the very loose side, so I'm only going to go probably three minutes.

This is a time to really set your timer.

Okay, I think our eggs are poached.

It's the moment of truth to take them out.

All right, there's the last one.

Everything is together except for our last ingredient, and that's silken tofu, it's soft silken tofu, which is very delicate.

So when you cut it, you want to put it on a plate, and then just cut it into little cubes.

So I'm going to add this to the soup.

This soup smells so good.

That red miso is just amazingly intense, and we're going to bulk up our soup with a little bit of rice.

So I cooked some white rice.

And you want the rice to be warm when you add it to your bowl.

Otherwise, it's going to lower the temperature of the soup.

Those mushrooms look really good.

Okay, so now I can add the egg very carefully.

And then we'll garnish with some scallion.

And this is shichimi togarashi.

It's a Japanese spice blend.

It has a little bit of chili pepper, some citrus peel, nori, garlic, some seeds.

Adds a little bit of heat and definitely some more complex, umami flavor.

And then drizzle with a little bit of sesame oil.

All right, the first thing I'm going to do is crack open this egg and let that yolk run into the soup.

It's going to add a lot of richness.

♪ ♪ Oh, that's so good.

The miso makes this soup, for sure.

It adds so much complexity.

It has so many just pops of flavor to it.

And then you've got the texture from the mushrooms and the silken tofu.

And then that egg, when you crack that yolk in there, adds all of this richness.

It's just a perfect little bowl of soup.

This is miso soup with shiitake mushrooms and poached eggs, a great vegetarian weeknight meal.

♪ ♪ - Why eat boring old lentils when you can have dal tarka?

Today I'm going to show you a simple way to spice up your lentils.

It's a little more work and a lot more flavor.

Let's get started.

I'm using for this recipe red lentils.

They cook quite quickly, and they break down to become very, very creamy.

I'm going to put my lentils in.

Add to that some turmeric.

A generous pinch of salt.

A little extra for good measure.

And some water.

I'm going to bring this to a boil, turn it down, keep stirring it for about 20 minutes until the lentils are broken down and are creamy.

♪ ♪ So my lentils have finished cooking.

Look at this.

They've broken down into this lovely creamy texture that is perfect.

Now, to season them, I'm going to make the tarka.

This is the spice bloom in oil.

I'm going to heat some oil.

You can also use ghee if you prefer the flavor.

I'm going to heat this on medium-high.

When that's nice and hot, my spices go in.

Now, a tarka moves very fast, so it's important that you keep your ingredients ready on hand so your spices don't burn.

My oil is hot, and in go the cumin seeds.

You'll see them start to sizzle and crackle, and I want this just for a few seconds, until they get fragrant.

(pan sizzling softly) This is smelling great.

It's a lovely earthy flavor of cumin.

I'm going to add some shallot in here.

You can also use onion.

(pan sizzling) And some chopped chilies.

I'm going to stir this and cook it until the onions have just started browning.

This is super-fragrant, very aromatic, and it's going to add so much oomph and flavor to the dal.

This seasoning technique is one of the most fundamental flavoring methods in Indian cooking.

So you learn this once, you can use it on lots of different things.

Okay, I'm going to cut the heat and add some tomatoes.

In go some fresh chopped tomatoes.

And that's it.

Fresh and flavorful, my tarka is ready, and I am ready to serve my dal.

Okay, let's see how this turned out.

And topping it off with some tarka.

That is gorgeous.

I like to add a little bit of cilantro for color and flavor.

And I like to finish it with a generous squeeze of lemon.

And now my favorite part.

♪ ♪ So, here it is, our dal tarka.

So much better than plain boiled lentils.

The onions hit great.

There's some heat from the chili.

All that earthy spice from the toasted cumin seeds.

Of course, that little dash of lemon on top, and the turmeric binding it all together in a delicious creamy bowl.

And this recipe is a vegan recipe, so it is great for anybody you have coming over to visit.

You can get this recipe and all the recipes of this season at MilkStreeTV.com.

- All episodes and recipes from this season of Milk Street Television are available for free at our website, MilkStreetTV.com.

Please access our content, including our step-by-step recipe videos, from your smartphone, your tablet, or your computer.

- The new Milk Street Cookbook is now available and includes every recipe from our TV show, from fried shrimp tacos and Thai-style vegetable stir-fry to Mexican chicken soup and Swedish cardamom buns.

The Milk Street Cookbook offers bolder, fresher, simpler recipes.

Order your copy of the Milk Street Cookbook for $27, 40% less than the cover price, and receive a Milk Street tote with your order at no additional charge.

Call 855-MILK-177 or order online.

- Funding for this series was provided by the following: - That meal.

You sautéed, you seared, and you served, cooking with All-Clad, bonded cookware designed, engineered, and assembled in the U.S.A. for over 50 years.

All-Clad: for all your kitchen adventures.

♪ ♪