Ground Be’f Filling

01

Pre-Cooked Ingredients

There are two ingredients that I cooked before doing the main dish. This was because I wanted to have the fully cooked and I didn’t think that would be accomplished in a giant pan of “meat”. The first ingredient I cooked was the pine nuts. This was more a dry roasting to get some color on the nuts. They’re so pale! After they were perfect, I set them aside.

The next ingredient that gets some ahead of time cooking is the onion. For this, I diced the onion and then sautéed it in some of the sunflower oil.  I let them cook on low for a long time to give them a soft texture. I really wanted to make them soft and golden. After that, I transferred them into a heatproof dish as I wanted to reuse the big pan for doing some big cooking.

02

Throwing Everything into a Pot

I started by adding the remaining sunflower oil and putting all of the ground be’f into the pan. I had given the “meat” a decent amount of time to defrost but it looks like that still wasn’t enough! So, there was still a little icy water residue on the “meat”. I cooked it over a medium to high heat to get a good heat running through the dish. I wanted to get a light brown on it but it’s hard to see since the meat is effectively just frozen and not raw.

The next thing to get mixed in was the spices. Sometimes I follow the recipe. Sometimes I eyeball the ingredients and just assume it will go okay. This is very much the later situation. And I added way too much chili powder. In the original recipe, there was no cumin, but I needed it in order to cut the spice. I legit almost started crying (I know, I can’t handle spice. I’m a terrible Indian). I kind of loved the new taste because it felt like I was eating Keema (or Kheema, however you prefer to spell it). It’s a dish I haven’t been able to eat since I went vegetarian 17 years ago. It was weirdly nostalgic in a way.

The next thing to go into the pan was the tomato past and the cooked onion. I stirred everything in to get it nice and evenly distributed. At this point, I should mention that the meat substitute doesn’t act like meat in terms of moisture. The dish felt almost dry. So here is another are where I had to go off script. Instead of adding a ½ cup of stock, I ended up adding 2 cups. This was really to add some moisture back into the dish and help soften the “meat” to become nice and tender. I let the vegetable stock come to a boil before reducing the heat to low and allowing the dish to simmer. The “meat” really absorbed the stock during this process so much so that I didn’t really have much left to evaporate.

The final touch was stirring in the pine nuts! And it’s ready for eating. This dish could be used for many things, but I used it as my filling for a shortcrust savory pie.