Perpetual stew
58 comments
·February 6, 2025abdullahkhalids
throwup238
The trick is to use a pasta cooker basket which hangs from the edge of the pot like the ones restaurants use. You dip it in to the perpetual stew so that noodles can cook in the broth then take it out when it’s ready. They’ll still dissolve if you leave it in too long but at least with this method you don’t need to boil a separate pot of water and you can infuse the noodles.
alexjplant
> noodles
Replace them with a heartier starch like lentils or farro. As a bonus you also end up with better micro and macronutrients than you'd get from enriched egg noodles or the like.
My current meal prep stew comprises olive oil, pork, leeks, garlic, carrots, mushrooms, lentils, onions, tomato paste, and kale. For seasoning I'll throw in red pepper flakes and italian seasoning along with some balsamic vinegar if I don't get the depth of flavor I want. A little gorgonzola or other blue cheese on the side really sets it off.
stevenwoo
I have the base with some vegetables that last two weeks like tofu cabbage carrots and onion celery like mirepoix and in separate containers the stuff that deteriorate if in stock like broccoli/mushrooms/spinach/other greens/veggies and add in the separated stuff to the base in a smaller pot along with ginger/garlic/sesame oil. This way I can buy and cook several things in bulk and use them as needed over a week or so, adding them to the base.
ethbr1
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.
rob74
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...
ethbr1
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.
xg15
I suppose, the original practice of perpetual stews solves this by continuously adding both new ingredients and liquid. So while the stew itself keeps going on, every individual ingredient and flavor would vanish after some time and be replaced by something new.
abdullahkhalids
Given the size of my pot and my appetite, I eat about 1/3 of the pot every day, and add about 1/2 a pot of liquid+ingredients. Some of the liquid obviously boils away during the daily cook.
martinpw
Stew of Theseus
RALaBarge
I found this out by trying to use up some olives in my black beans and rice the other day. Devastating.
decimalenough
Olive fried rice is quite popular in Thailand and southern parts of China. However, it uses the Chinese olive (橄榄, Canarium album), which is usually pickled and mixed with mustard greens to create a gloopy black paste that your local Chinese grocery probably calls "olive vegetable" (橄榄菜).
pradn
What sort of ingredients keep well in this process? How about mushrooms and potatoes?
abdullahkhalids
The ones I throw that do well: carrot, cabbage, potatoes, mushrooms, corn, several types of meat. When I was a student, I used to throw in cans of cream of mushroom etc, but I don't eat canned food anymore.
The ones I take out after boiling for a while: onions, bell peppers, meat bones.
Ones that are kinda okay: beans of various sort (become too soft, yet don't disintegrate fast enough, and collect at the bottom of pot so difficult to take out), cooked rice.
Definitely bad: noodles.
ethbr1
Anything you'd normally make a broth out of would be a great fit!
Including bones / carcasses.
nosrepa
Potatoes would disintegrate.
jasonpeacock
As 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 were eating.
Not perpetual but definitely "whatever you had" soup :)
ethbr1
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.
mrbungie
You missed the most important part ;). How was it? Was it any good? Randomly bad/good?
lbeckman314
Annie Rauwerda's exploration of this (cooking a stew for 60 days and sharing it with the community in Brooklyn) was really fun to track along with!
https://www.perpetualstew.club
https://www.grubstreet.com/2023/07/annie-rauwerda-perpetual-...
foodevl
some math because I'm curious: If you draw down and replace 50% of the water every day, each molecule has a 1/2 chance of sticking around. After 3 months that's 1/(2^90). A 5 gallon pot contains around 2^87 water molecules. So after 3 months there's basically none of the original liquid left.
Isamu
>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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do_not_redeem
I 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!
ethbr1
What leanness of ground beef? 70/30 or 80/20? Likely too much fat.
You'd want to keep the meat as lean as possible for longevity purposes.
Alternately, when you cook it, you can either skim the liquid fat off the top (use a large spoon) or absorb it with slices of bread (drag it across the surface and they'll soak up the fat).
do_not_redeem
Good tips, thank you!
piannucci
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?
do_not_redeem
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!
HeyLaughingBoy
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.
trhway
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.
do_not_redeem
I didn't add salt (it tasted fine without) but maybe it would help preservation, I'll try this too!
svilen_dobrev
there were such "perpetual teapots" in huts in high .bg mountains, basically the hut-keeper boiling a tea of whatever bunch of herbs is next on the shelf, forever (several ~months, some huts were closed for winter). Pick one sprig, add water :)
i have tried few times to achieve the same - or okay, at-least-similar - taste, at home.. but no way. Just hours are not enough :/
Though nowadays, this thing is .. mostly gone.
bob1029
I do something like this with my deep fryer when using animal fat.
Replacing it all at once can be expensive and wasteful. You also wind up with a sub-optimal flavor profile for several batches when you do a total reset.
polivier
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.
HPsquared
The Internet in the age of the slopocalypse is becoming like a perpetual stew. Generated content is stirred back in as training data.
SamBam
> 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.
asdasdsddd
Perpetual stew feels like a gimmick but stew does taste better on day 2 and 3 for sure.
copypasterepeat
I agree that the perpetual part is kind of gimmicky, but having a stew for a week or two and stretching it out with additional ingredients can be a big time saver and, as you said, in some ways it gets better with time as it's cooked more.
Etheryte
Slightly different, but many of the best ramen broths are the kind that keep going for ages, so there's definitely more to it than just a gimmick.
Occasionally, I will make a soup that lasts about a week, adding things every day. So not perpetual.
One problem I encounter is that some ingredients disintegrate badly (like noodles), which is not a problem when making it in a huge restaurant pot, but becomes a problem when you have a typical large home pot. I have resorted to cooking noodles separately and then adding them to my bowl, rather than putting them in the pot.
Generally, I also want more ingredients ideas that I like, which is still an open problem. Sometimes I add something new and it destroys the taste.