Add Tomato Paste to Ropa Vieja Cuban Stew

Video Transcript

"Hi my name is Brandon Sarkis o behalf of Expert Village. Today I am going to show you how to make Ropa Vieja which is a traditional Cuban beef stew. Three minutes have passed and you will see that they are softer and they have a nice red sheen. Actually tomato paste should have actually glazed over in the bottom of the pan and that is completely and totally normal and that is completely and totally acceptable. That is what we want the to do. Now we are going to add those crushed tomatoes from earlier and pour those right in there. I made a mess. Stir these in really well. you want to get this in there nice and evenly as well and now what we're going to do is let this simmer for a bit and what will happen is after about a couple of minutes it should come back up to boil and we're going to turn out heat up to high now. We want to get our heat on this quickly and it should start boiling like in the next 30 seconds or so and you can see it is already bubbling at the edges and there is not a liquid in here. Now what we want to do now that it is nice and evenly heated and we want to take the juice from cooking it earlier and just pour that right in. The problem is that you probably are not going to end up with enough of the juice. I wanted about three cups and I only had about two and a quarter so I am going to add a little water to that and now what we are going to do is just add a little bit of pepper, some salt, and give this a good stir and when this hits a boil we are going to turn it down and let it simmer for about 15 to 20 minutes, about 15 minutes should do and then we are going to add the meat in and let it simmer for another 15 minutes. Now we are going to scrape down the sides of our plan, I don't think there is much of anything really stuck. This should be really close to boiling and once this hits a boil we are going to turn this down to a simmer. It is starting to simmer right now. I am going to put a lid on it, turn it down to 6 or 6 and 1/2 maybe even 7 but 6 and 1/2 should do and I'll come back in 15 minutes and we'll add the beef and give it a stir and see how it's looking."