Easy Veal Blanquette: Master This Classic Dish Effortlessly!

Veal blanquette is the quintessential grandmother’s recipe. However, such traditional dishes tend to involve lengthy preparation times, or so you might think. You’re not entirely wrong. Cooking it usually takes at least two hours, unless you opt for a pressure cooker. While there might not be a way to cut down on cooking time significantly, there is a trick to make the process much easier. Chef Norbert Tarayre shared his helpful tip!

Typically, when making veal blanquette, you start by blanching the meat. Then, you move on to the vegetables: peeling carrots, turnips, onions, and leeks, then chopping them one by one to add to the broth. This process is incredibly tedious, and often, the vegetables end up mushy. But guess what? We’ve been making it too complicated! In his veal blanquette recipe, Chef Norbert Tarayre doesn’t bother with all that fuss. After peeling his vegetables, he simply adds them whole into the pot with the meat. “Do not cut them!,” the chef emphasizes in his YouTube video. “Keep them as whole as possible.” Why? By adding the vegetables whole, their texture holds up better under the prolonged cooking and they won’t turn into mush. For his veal blanquette, Norbert Tarayre keeps carrots, turnips, and onions whole. He only cuts the leek in half lengthwise to fit it in the pot. Once everything is in the pot, he adds the pre-blanched meat and lets it simmer gently for two hours.

At the end of cooking, the vegetables are perfectly tender and much easier to cut than when they were raw. Diners can choose and slice the vegetable they want right on their plates, in a delightfully informal manner!

Note: the only vegetables not cooked in the broth are mushrooms. These are simply sautéed in a pan at the last minute.