How do I get tender meat when cooking hamin or cholent?

From what I’ve had happen in the past, with meat in the crock pot, it can still come out tough if there isn’t enough liquid.

The meat needs to be submerged completely in the braising liquid, the heat should be very, very low, and the lid must be tight. You can improve the seal if necessary with a collar of crumpled foil. Nothing like Shabbat Cholent. Jewish Cassoulet.

All stew-like dishes taste dramatically better the day after cooking. But the meat should be tender by the end of the actual cooking. I do all cholent-like dishes on top of stove, using pdworkin’s method.

I hate my crock pot, and use it only for steel-cut oatmeal and have yet to get the proportion of water to oats correct.

@gailcalled Use milk, not water, 4¼ cups to 1 cup of steel cut oats. Add salt only. After cooking stir in a nice™ pat of butter, and some brown sugar.

I don’t know from Chamim,but my SO is a S’fard. I could ask her.

@pdworkin: I am off butter,salt and sugar; and wouldn’t the milk curdle in the slow cooker? The water is always bubbling and oozing up the sides and over the lid.

Once I manage to get the oatmeal cooked (I make five days worth), I add some ground flax seed, cinnamon, prunes, slivered almonds and sunflower seeds.

I never had milk do anything strange, but not have I ever made it in bulk like that. I would think you would need a 7 Qt. Slow Cooker.

@pdworkin : MIne is 3.5 QT. and serves as a doorstop most of the time. I will try 4½ c. water to one c oats tomorrow. I don’t dare run it when I am not around to observe.

We have hijacked @shilolo‘s thread.

You and I together had the solution. Cook slow and low and wait a day to eat.

Ob topic: Don’t use meat that is too lean. It should be nicely marbled; for flavor and texture.

I read the recipe for hamin that is linked in the question. It sounds wonderful (as do the stuffed aubergines linked from that page). I have never heard of this before. The recipe tells how to prepare the dish, but how in the world do you serve it? What happens to the wheat parcel? What do you have with it?

You could try hitting the meat with a meat hammer a little bit before cooking. My mother does that for steaks, but it should work for cholent as well.

@Jeruba Amongst Central Asian Jews, our cholent-like dish (called Oysavoh) is served in a large central platter and everyone scoops a little bit into their personal plates. In fact, most dishes in my family are served this way.

For those who are interested, Oysavoh is prepared by sauteeing cubed meat (beef, lamb and even chicken can be used), together with carrots cut julienne-style, diced tomatoes, slices of green apple and this fruit called Alcha in Farsi (don’t know the English name for it: it is small, brown and sour with a big seed in the middle. When cooked, the meat of the fruit just melts off the seed). After the sautee, white rice is added and plenty of water. The whole thing is cooked on a low-medium flame until the rice is super-cooked and mushy. Here’s the weird part: you add whole eggs, in the shell, right into the rice stew. Then the pot is placed on a super-low flame. My mother actually takes the metal brackets from all the other burners and stacks them on top of each other, with the pot on top of the whole thing. The pot is sealed in foil, covered and left on the really low flame for something like 12 hours. Even with the pot so far from the flame, the rice at the bottom burns into a blackened, crispy yumminess, called Tadigee. The hard-boiled eggs, instead of being white, are brown (don’t know if it’s from the rice and meat surrounding them or just the super-long cooking time).

Anyways, it’s a difficult dish to pull off; amongst the “super-chefs” in my family, it’s one of the few dishes they will concede that my mother does best.

So, the heat was very low, 200°F (as low as the oven can do) and we used plenty of liquid and sealed the casserole super tight with foil. Still, meat was dry. We don’t have this problem cooking brisket in our dutch oven, so I don’t get what the problem is.

Use the stovetop, not the oven.

There was a wonderful documentary on PBS several years ago called “The Gefilte Fish Chronicles.” It followed five elderly sisters during the six weeks they prepared for Passover, including 50 lbs of live fish in the bathtub.

Two of the sisters had an annual pissing contest over the way to prepare Cholent. One used the oven and the other the stovetop. The rest of the enormous clan had to then compare and contrast by eating copious amounts. Stovetop won.

http://www.gefiltefishchronicles.com/ (The cookbook alone is hilarious but you do need a supply of chicken fat at hand.)

@shilolo: I use a heat infuser and a very low gas flame under a heavy casserole or dutch over to cook for long periods of time on burner. But you still have to check, add fluids from time to time and stir the bottom. Dansk is terrific but too heavy for me to lift.

@pdworkin We actually cooked this in the oven while we went to work, so the oven seems safer than the stovetop, what with the gas flame and all. Maybe we should buy brisket meat the next time.

It really depends on the meat. And did you sear it on all sides first in a pan?