I find most foods are best as soon as they are made, but some things seem to get better when the flavors have more time to meld. The only two I can think of right now are chili and hummus. What other dishes am I forgetting, or haven’t tried that you think get better with a little time?
Stews! Beef stew is great the next day.
I make chef John’s bigos recipe, I don’t eat it until the next day.
I’ve made bigos a couple times, my family is polish, but we’re a few generations removed from the old country, so it wasn’t exactly part of our regular diet growing up, just something we had once or twice at the local polish church’s feast.
The first time I made it, most of the recipes I found were ridiculously plain, mostly just cabbage, sauerkraut, pork, and kielbasa stewed together without much else, which don’t get me wrong, is a damn fine meal on its own, but I kind of knew deep down there had to be more to it.
So I just kind of took what I knew about polish food and threw it all in a pot, and what I came up something really close to that Chef John recipe. I don’t think I had allspice in mine, and I threw in a jar of pickled beets and every kind of mushroom I could get my hands on, but otherwise that’s almost exactly what I came up with. I’m kind of proud of that now that I’ve seen his recipe.
If anyone has ever been curious about the perpetual stews you tend to hear about in medieval fantasy books and such, bigos is probably about as close as you can get without actually keeping a pot simmering for weeks at a time (although if you want to keep it simmering and add to it as you go, more power to you.) Historically that’s pretty much exactly what it was, whatever the local hunters showed up with went into the pot, so it’s also a pretty hard thing to screw up, there’s not exactly a wrong way to make bigos.
I think I first saw it from Alton Brown, but he braises the beef the day before, then cools it down and uses any drippings from that the next day to cook the veggies/potatoes. Then when it’s ready to eat, you just toss in the beef and let it warm up.
It works because you need high temp (simmering/boiling) for the collagen to break down into gelatin. That’s when the beef gets really “shreddy” for lack of a better term. If you cool it down, though, the gelatin solidifies and holds the beef together in good bite sized pieces. When you warm it back up, you don’t warm back up to a boil (or at least not for long), so all that gelatin doesn’t completely dissolve, and you still get those good chunks.
That sounds amazing! I need to look up that recipe.