A friend of mine made a perpetual stew about a year ago. It lasted for three months, until he put some kind of smelly fish in and then couldn't get rid of the taste. He eventually had to throw away the whole stew.
Perpetual stew
41–50 of 67 posts
Re: Perpetual stew
#42I tried this recently, but a few days after putting in ground beef, the stew turned rancid. So I thought maybe meat was off limits--but the wiki article talks about a 50-year beef stew. So clearly I just don't have the touch. If anyone has ever done this at home, I want to know what ingredients you used!
I grew up with a semi-perpetual stew (the stove was turned off at night) called pepperpot. I don't remember a recipe, but I remember beef, bones, chili peppers and an extract from cassava root (cassareep) that is a natural preservative.
Haven't had it in decades, but ISTR that it was mostly done at Christmas time and usually was cooked for about two weeks.
Re: Perpetual stew
#43 > See also:
> Ship of Theseus
It's interesting to me because an encyclopedia generally spells everything out for you -- that's it's purpose, to explicitly explain things. The "tangentially-related See Also," on the other hand, demands that the connection be made in the mind of the reader, without explaining the connection explicitly.
Re: Perpetual stew
#44Earlier quoted context omitted.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Danger_zone_(food_safety) Basically anything above 60°C (140°F) has the same safety as below 4°C (40°F).
Wow, I'm "one of today's ten thousand" learning about this, thanks! I always treated the "best before" on bags of frozen veggies as "avoid after" and am very happy to discover now that frozen vegetables apparently remain safe indefinitely. This will save me a bit of money. And now I'm more open to trying this perpetual stew thing too.
LOL. I've always been a "the 'best before' date is a vague suggestion for anything other than dairy products" type.
I just made soup from a bag of a bean mix that I know is definitely more than 10 years old.
Re: Perpetual stew
#45>pot into which foodstuffs are placed and cooked, continuously. The pot is never or rarely emptied all the way, and ingredients and liquid are replenished as necessary.[1][3] Such foods can continue cooking for decades or longer if properly maintained. So, basically, the code base I’ve been working on is a perpetual stew, maintained for decades
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Re: Perpetual stew
#46i heard (and have no direct knowledge) that in a Chinese village would be a "perpetual" large common pot with oil boiling where people would fry their stuff.
Re: Perpetual stew
#47Earlier quoted context omitted.
The first rule of perpetual stew would be: do not add anything which can be overcooked Most starch and carb-heavy items wouldn't be a good fit.
I guess potatoes would eventually disintegrate completely and just make the soup/stew a bit thicker. But yeah, soggy noodles sound unpleasant - but when the perpetual stew was actually in use hundreds of years ago (in Europe), noodles weren't really a thing yet...
Thickening is maybe the most interesting component! I.e. how do you make a thick perpetual stew?
I'd assume thickeners have different behavior when cooked for 1 week+, as you start to get some byproducts you don't normally see in "fresh" cooking.
Re: Perpetual stew
#48I tried this recently, but a few days after putting in ground beef, the stew turned rancid. So I thought maybe meat was off limits--but the wiki article talks about a 50-year beef stew. So clearly I just don't have the touch. If anyone has ever done this at home, I want to know what ingredients you used!
salt? some people don't use salt in their cooking and that quickly speeds up bad things.
Long time ago working student summer construction jobs in Siberia we had "perpetual tea" going for several months - several electric tea kettles were always on at close to boiling, and we were putting into them, without any selection, whatever green stuff was growing higher than 2 inches - ie. above the moss - in the pine forest around. And I don't remember pulling old stuff ever out, only adding new one into the kettles.
Re: Perpetual stew
#49As a kid in Boy Scouts in Alaska, during the annual broomball tournament on the outdoor hockey rinks in winter, every kid would bring a can of soup as "admission". One of the adults would have a massive pot setup on a gas burner, and we'd pour in all the random cans of soup to heat up together. Throughout the day you'd grab a styrofoam cup and ladle in some "suicide soup", then try go guess what mystery chunks you we…
My grandparents told me something similar was the norm in schoolhouses of Appalachia circa 1930s. Read: a few kids in assorted grades.
Everyone brought along what they could, the teacher tossed it into a pot, and by lunchtime that was it.
Per my grandfather's telling, squirrel was not uncommon, and any meat was welcome.
Re: Perpetual stew
#50I tried this recently, but a few days after putting in ground beef, the stew turned rancid. So I thought maybe meat was off limits--but the wiki article talks about a 50-year beef stew. So clearly I just don't have the touch. If anyone has ever done this at home, I want to know what ingredients you used!
Does it still go rancid if it’s kept at boiling temperatures? I’m guessing that if it’s too hot for microbes, then you only have to deal with oxidation at the surface, which can maybe be fixed with periodic skimming. Maybe?
iirc I kept it hot (scalding) but not boiling. I was worried it would boil dry overnight and burn/ruin the pot, but maybe I just need to keep the liquid topped up enough so that doesn't happen. I'll try this next time, thanks!