You need to spend 20 minutes in the kitchen, but barley requires soaking for several hours and cooking with stew for 1 hour.
Army barley
Ingredients
for 4 servings
Barley – 1 cup
Stewed meat – 1 can
Garlic – 1 clove
Onion – 1 medium size
Salt – 1 teaspoon
Tomato paste – 2-3 tablespoons
Bay leaf – 2 leaves
How to cook barley porridge in the army
- Rinse the grits in a deep bowl from 4 to 7 times and put in a saucepan.
- Pour three cups of water into a saucepan and season with salt.
- Cover with a lid and put the cereal on medium heat.
- On the second burner, fry the diced onion until light golden.
- Add a couple of tablespoons of tomato paste to the onion and fry it well.
- Introduce the stew into the frying (if necessary, cutting the meat into pieces convenient for eating and removing excess fat).
- Add black pepper, a couple of bay leaves, garlic and your other favorite meat seasonings to the stew.
- Evaporate most of the moisture from the mass.
- We introduce the frying into barley, mix and cook for another 20-30 minutes until fully cooked.
- Cover the porridge with a towel and let the porridge brew for 40 minutes.
Recipe for multicooker
1. If your multicooker does not have a frying mode, then you can set it to any mode that heats it up to 160 degrees.
2. During cooking, pearl barley increases in volume by 5-6 times, so do not load more than one glass of this delicious cereal into the slow cooker.
3. Multicooker modes, on which it will be convenient for you to cook barley – Buckwheat, Porridge, Stew, Pilaf, Cooking.
4. After cooking, keep the multicooker on the “heating” mode for about an hour – during this time all the flavors will soak even more.
Tasty Facts
– Army porridge is called, since pearl barley was the cheapest cereal, that’s why the soldiers were fed with it. Other names for army porridge are “shrapnel” in honor of an artillery shell, “tarpaulin” in honor of tarpaulin boots, “shot 16” in honor of the caliber, “bolts” in honor of the fasteners of the same name. The porridge got such euphonious names because the barley was boiled without soaking and in large quantities, without oil – and of course, the cereal, boiled under its own weight, turned out to be very tasteless. However, there is a legend according to which army cooks deliberately made pearl barley tasteless so that they would not pester with an additive.
– Since 2012, barley porridge has been banned in the Russian army, preferring more noble and simple cereals in the diet – buckwheat and rice . To justify porridge, we add that until now barley has no equal in terms of price / quality ratio, but apparently, in order to cook it tasty, efforts are often needed that are incompatible with the service.
– Stew can be replaced with meat, but then it should be a fatty part with a bone, so that as it cooks, the meat turns out to be similar to stew.
– The cooking time of barley porridge can be reduced by 1.5 – 2 times (depending on the variety) if you soak it overnight in lightly salted water.
– You can also add grated carrots to your porridge, replace the tomato paste with fresh tomatoes, and at the stage of adding garlic, add finely chopped celery leaves to the porridge. Of course, this will no longer be the same army porridge, but it will only benefit from such manipulations.
– The name of pearl barley is associated with the similarity of processed barley grains with pearls (mother of pearl).
– If you are a big fan of garlic, then five minutes before cooking, grate it on a fine grater directly into the pan – a short heat treatment will not kill the garlic flavor.
– If you fry the cereal in a dry frying pan without oil until golden brown before starting cooking, then the cereal will release less starch into the water and give the future porridge a light nutty flavor.