Booyah

As tradition built it

Booyah

Serves 10 to 12 · 4 hours

Ingredients

• 1.5kg chicken pieces, bone in
• 500g beef shin, diced
• 500g pork shoulder, diced
• 4 carrots, diced
• 4 celery stalks, diced
• 2 onions, diced
• 1kg potatoes, diced
• 400g tinned tomatoes
• 300g cabbage, shredded
• 2 litres water or stock
• to taste salt, pepper, bay leaf

Method

1. Brown the chicken, beef and pork in batches in a very large pot.
2. Return everything to the pot with the water or stock, bay leaf, salt and pepper, and simmer gently for 2 hours, until the meats are falling apart.
3. Remove the chicken, strip the meat from the bone, and return it to the pot.
4. Add the carrots, celery, onion and potatoes, and simmer a further hour until tender.
5. Add the tomatoes and cabbage in the final 20 minutes.
6. Booyah is traditionally cooked a day ahead and reheated, its flavour deepening overnight.

Notes

Its name is plausibly traced to the Walloon dialect bouyon, broth.

What a modern chef changes

The three meats cooked separately to their own correct doneness, then rejoined.

Method

1. Cook the beef shin and pork shoulder together sous vide until fully tender, then the chicken separately to a precise, safe internal temperature, rather than one long combined simmer, so no single meat is over or undercooked by the time the others catch up, the same logic this atlas applies to other communal one-pot dishes.
2. Build the vegetable stock separately, reduced for real depth, then combine everything only at the final stage, so the finished stew carries genuine, layered flavour rather than a single long boil's flatter result.