Ingredients for Ropa Vieja Cuban Stew

Video Transcript

Hi. My name is Brandon Sarkis on behalf of Expert Village. And today I'm going to show you how to make ropa vieja which is a traditional Cuban beef stew. Okay, to make ropa vieja we've got a lot of ingredients. So lets go through the list really quickly and we'll get started. We're going to need some olive oil. We're going to need about 4 tablespoons or so. I've just got the whole bottle here because I don't like to measure it out. I just kind of pour it into the pan as I go. Maybe I should start measuring. I've got some flank steak. I've got, it's about 1 1/2 pounds. A little more. Actually its like 1.6 pounds. But 1 1/2 pounds is what this recipe calls for. It's just hard to find the exact amount in the grocery store. I've got some salt and pepper here of course. Salt and pepper goes good with everything. I have two medium yellow Spanish sweet onions. I use sweet onions for almost everything unless it calls for a red onion or a green onion just because I like the flavor they give out. And also this recipe really goes best with a sweet onion. Bell peppers. I've got red and yellow. You can mix it up. You can do green. You can do all red. You can do all yellow. You can do, if you can find the purple or orange varieties you can use those, too. I just want to use two different colors and red and yellow work really well with the coloring of the actual stew when it's all done. Now let's see. I've got a half tablespoon of vinegar. Just plain white vinegar. Normal old stuff you get. This recipe would normally call for water but I'm actually using a tomato chicken bouillon. You can buy it at the grocery store by a famous manufacturer. It comes in a little yellow and green box. This will add a really awesome flavor. This has tomato and chicken stock both. You could also just use chicken stock. You could also use beef stock. But it comes out really kind of red if you use beef stock or you can use just plain water. I choose to go this route. I've got about a tablespoon of cumin here. Ground cumin. Very, very important for our recipe. I've got 3 cloves of garlic which I'll show you how to peel later. I don't recommend using the stuff out of the jar. It's packed in the water and the oil. That stuff is kind of nasty and it doesn't taste the same. It's really sweet and doesn't have the same bite that real garlic does. I've got one tablespoon of tomato paste. This is just the plain old stuff you get at the grocery store. It might seem kind of strange using tomato paste in a recipe. But there's lots of recipes that call for tomato paste as opposed to fresh tomatoes because it imparts a different flavor. And also it's a hassle to cook your tomatoes down that much to make tomato paste. And I've also got right here, it's one can, but for all effective purposes it's just a little bit over, it's a 14 1/2 ounce can but it's right at 2 cups by volume of crushed tomatoes. They'll also be called small diced tomatoes at the grocery store but crushed tomatoes is what you're looking for. So these are our ingredients. Let me show you my equipment and we'll get rolling.

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