“I can’t explain why your stew articles have been well received by everyone, but I can explain why I thought they were awesome. I liked the stew articles because they were a rallying cry for a return to simplicity. Many things, I think, have been overcomplicated in recent years, lifting and eating foremost among them. For several decades now we have endured a barrage of conflicting information: low carb/high protein, high carb/moderate protein, high fat/high protein, “see food,” paleo, keto, blah blah blah. I found some of this interesting, but at the end of the day, I can’t be bothered to actually follow it.

For one, I’m not a strength or muscular development level yet that would make any of those things make sense (and some of them don’t make sense to begin with).

For another, did any of the strongmen of the past follow diets this restrictive? I would imagine that most of them didn’t.

The most common point among all of them, aside from the regular consumption of stew and beer, is the heavy consumption of meat. It seems to me that we would do better to look to the past (or in this case, to more sensible countries) when it comes to figuring out how best to eat if you want to get as big and strong as possible. And besides, while I am certainly aware that too much of them isn’t good for me and while I know others will think differently, personally I am rather fond of some starch and vegetables in my diet.”

Also, the use of stews as you have described them is appealing on a mental level, and you have talked about the importance of the mental side of lifting many times. These kind of traditional stews connect us to the past.

• when we devour a bowl of chankonabe we can imagine in ourselves a kinship with the massive sumo;
• when eating kjotsupa for or medieval spiced beef stew, we can imagine ourselves as the kin of burly, stone-lifting, sword-swinging barbarian warriors;
• hen eating borscht we can imagine a connection to gigantic Russian and Ukrainian badasses who are as strong as the ox that went into that borscht;
• when eating monastery gyuvetch we can recall Bulgaria’s impressive accomplishments in weightlifting;
• when we eat Hungarian goulash, we can recall the history of Hungarian badassery, starting from Attila through the Magyars down all the way to their success at wrestling and weightlifting that seems out of proportion to their population and their national wealth;
• when we feast on a bowl of khoresht, we can do so thinking that the legendary Rostam e Dastan ate the same thing before striding forth to do something epic.

By recalling the past, whether it is our own or someone else’s, we can better imagine what kind of future we will build. A man with no past does not know who he is.

If he does not know who he is, how can he be expected to act intelligently?

Western lifters are like that. We don’t know who we are anymore. Our ties with our past is frayed. We do not have a very strong national lifting culture. There are localized instances of strength culture, but even these are not thriving as well as we might wish. We must build up a culture that celebrates strength, for its own sake and for use, while at the same time recalling to mind the strength cultures of the past; indeed, we cannot build new ones without remembering the old ones.

As we’ve seen thus far, pretty much ever corner of the Earth has a stew dish that’s immensely popular, and as I mentioned in the last installment, the best thing of all about stew is that you can make it out of just about anything.  Thus, I’ve been experimenting a bit with some simple stews one can make without going to much, if any effort.  One such stew (which is delicious cold, I might add) is one I made in about five minutes, having only to brown the stew meat I added and then dump all of the ingredients.

Plague (of Strength’s Holy Fuck, I’m Lazy) Stew

1 lb browned stew meat
1/6 bag Beef Flavored 15 Bean Soup
1 can Progresso Beef Barley Soup
1 can Progresso Lentil and Andoulle Soup

1. Soak beans overnight in water.  Drain the water after soaking (this gets rid of the lectins and other nasty shit in beans).
2. Brown the meat in a pan with a bit of oil, seasoning liberally with mojo, chipotle, curry, and adobo.
3. Dump meat and drippings into crock put with everything else.
4. Simmer for a few hours

Clearly, it gets no fucking easier than that, and given that it tastes badass cold, there’s no reason not to just bring this shit everywhere you go.  I’ve more or less abandoned shakes of late out of boredom with them and love of eating real food, and the simplicity of stew’s prep and ease of its transport makes my life immeasurably better.  One more day of 6 protein shakes and I was going to have to ram my fist down someone’s throat and strangle their soul out of misplaced rage.  Well, not that misplaced- in the last 6 months I’ve discovered that there is a considerable portion of the population who cannot even address a fucking envelope, which makes me feel like we need a few more Chechens motivated enough to fling bombs at random passers by.  In any event, we’ll take one more pass through the world’s stews before I lay this series to rest like the super-flogged dead horse it is.  If there’s anyone out there who remains unconvinced that stew’s fucking magical, nothing on Earth will do so at this point.

Croatian Stew

For the unaware or uninitiated, one might think that the Croats have about as much to do with awesome as a dairy cow has to do with Hubble Telescope repair.  Though they’ve had some unseemly anger management issues in recent years, the Croats have been hard motherfuckers since time immemorial.  Beginning as the Alans, one of the Sarmatian tribes that drove the man-eating, scalp-taking Scythians out of existence and dominated all of southern Russia from China to the Ukraine.  In the early part of the 1st century AD, the Alans controlled the Sarmatian confederation and fucked every group of sword-waving lunatics the ancient world had to offer in the ear on a daily basis, wrecking the Parthians for fun and annoying the Romans as a matter of course.  Later, they moved into what’s now known as Croatia and managed to impress everyone around them enough to get the massive empires between whom they were wedged to leave them alone just by baring their fucking teeth and flexing a bicep or two.

Having established the Croats come from a long line of hard people, you need only look to three modern Croats for proof of the power of their stew- Joseph Tito, tho only man to tell Stalin to go fuck himself and live, Mirko Crocop, the only professional fighter of whom I know to hold political office while knocking motherfuckers out with high kicks on the weekend, and the Great Antonio, one of the coolest and most insane strongmen of whom you’ve never heard but who you should definitely check out here.  Having hung out with a Croat mercenary in Vienna quite a bit (and having done a lot of Brazilian jujitsu on the floors of bars with him), I can personally attest to their awesome, and of their love for “Jota”, the stewroids source of Croatian physical prowess.

Croatian Jota

200g beans
500g sauerkraut
300g potatoes
500g dried ribs
200g dried bacon
few chopped home made pork sausages
3 heads of garlic
salt
Whole peppercorn
2 fresh bay leaves (which apparently prevents bean farts)

Directions:

1. Cook the beans shortly, dry them, and let them cook again.
2. Cook cabbage and ribs separately.
3. When beans are half soft, add them (with rhe water) to cabbage and ribs.
4. Add Laurel leaves, pepper, salt, and chopped bacon,sausages, and garlic.
5. Slice the potato to little cubes and cook it until it all softens.
6. Take out the ribs and serve them on side with the stew.

This is a 4 person serving, but women apparently rarely eat meat and ribs and most often leave it for men to grab, which sucks for the broads but is awesome for the guys hanging out with them.  On second thought, if this represents the average Croatian woman, they can keep passing us the meat:

Indian Stew

Anyone familiar with my stuff should already be acquainted with the badassery of the Indian athletes of yore.  Indian wrestlers were renown for being unbeatable in the last century, and their strongmen in the 19th and early 20th Centuries were some of the best in the world.  Though it’s not frequently discussed, a quick watch of Anthony Bourdain’s No Reservations Indian episodes or my blog on Indian diet shows that meat has been a mainstay of the Indian diet right up until the modern era (not surprisingly, this coincides exactly with the period when they started getting their shit pushed in by colonialists), and continues to be so for the biggest and the baddest motherfuckers in India.  Thus, I give you the most popular of India’s meat stews (at least insofar as I understand it)- vindaloo.

Chicken Vindaloo

Chicken Vindaloo Ingredients:

Vindaloo Paste
1 tsp ground cumin
1 tsp ground turmeric
1 or 2 tsp Garam Masala
1/4 tsp ground cinnamon (you can add more cinnamon, but if can be over-powering, so be careful!)
2 tsp mustard powder
1 tsp ground coriander
1 tsp cayenne pepper
2cm cube of peeled ginger
3 tbsp white wine vinegar
1 tsp sugar

Vindaloo Base
150ml vegetable oil
4-8 garlic cloves, crushed or blended
3 red onions, sliced finely or preferably blended

Other Ingredients
4+ red chillies, chopped finely. This is what gives the heat, so you can use less if you like and also de-seed before chopping if you want to make a milder vindaloo (but why?)
4 skinless chicken breasts cut into bite size pieces
500g good quality chopped tomatoes or chopped tinned tomatoes
1-2 tbsp of tomato puree to taste
1-4 tsp Hot Chili Powder to taste – This is optional and if you do want to make it hotter, I’d suggest adding a bit at a time
Salt and pepper to taste

Chicken Vindaloo Recipe – The Method:

1. Grate or slice the ginger finely and add the cumin, cinnamon, mustard, coriander turmeric, garam masala and cayenne pepper into a bowl and add the vinegar and sugar and mix thoroughly.
2. Heat the oil in a wok or large frying pan. Add the garlic and the onion and cook over a medium heat until they have softened for approx 5-7 mins, but take care not to let them burn or brown too much.
3. Once the onion and garlic have softened, add the chicken pieces and cook for approx 2-3 minutes until the chicken starts to colour.
4. Now add the chillies, tomatoes, tomato purée, and begin to stir in the pre-prepared Vindaloo paste.
5. Add salt and pepper to taste, and bring to the boil. Once boiling, lower the heat and simmer whilst stirring occasionally for approx 1 hour. during this period, it’s important not to let the chicken vindaloo dry out, so add a 1/2 cup of water as necessary.  If you do want to make it hotter than the recipe, then during the simmering time is the right time to gradually add the chilli powder to taste.
6. If you wanted to be traditional, you would ideally serve this Chicken Vindaloo with pilau rice, chapattis, or Naan bread – I especially like some of the Garlic and Coriander Naan’s that are available from most supermarkets, although if you were a bit more adventurous, you could try to make your own.

Dutch/South African/Belgian Stew

Before the Dutch just decided to throw down their weapons and surrender to anyone with a water gun (as they have been wont to do of late), they actually rolled fairly hard.  Not hard in a Cossack sort of way, but hard in a lording-intelligence-over-everyone-while-pointing-a-.44 Magnum-at-their-faces-and-telling-some-broad-to-get-her-tongue-further-up-their-ass-or-everyone-dies sort of way.  The Belgians and Dutch have long had good bodybuilders and strongmen, and the South Africans have rolled hard at everything they’ve ever done, ever.  Dutchmen Ab Wolders, for instance, was a perennial runner up at the World’s Strongest Man in the 1980s, and Pierre Van Den Steen blew everyone around the same time away with his ridiculous leanness.  South Africa boasts Gerrit Badenhorst, frequent WSM competitor and former champion powerlifter, in addition to Arnold Schwarzennegger’s idol- former champion bodybuilder and all around badass Reg Park.  Clearly, anyone speaking Dutch or an offshoot thereof has a reasonable chance of being a hard motherfucker, especially when one factors in such badasses as the Rhodesian Seleous Scouts and SAS.  Their stewroid of choice was Waterzooi, which might be the oddest of all of the stews thus detailed due to the fact that it’s pretty much a meat-heavy cream soup.

Waterzooi

Ingredients
1 whole large chicken
4 carrots
3 celery stalks
4 shallots or small onions
Parsley
1 sprig fresh thyme
1 bay leaf
Salt and freshly ground black pepper
2 leeks
400 grams mushrooms (about 14 ounces)
4 egg yolks
1 cup cream
1 lemon, juiced
2 tablespoon butter
Pinch nutmeg

Directions
Preparation for the stock: Place the chicken in a pot of water, covering the chicken entirely. Add 2 carrots, 2 celery stalks, and 1 onion, cut into approximately 1-inch pieces. Add parsley, thyme and a bay leaf and poach until chicken is cooked. Add salt and pepper, to taste.

Cut the remaining carrots, celery, onions into 1-inch sticks and place them in a saucepan with water to cover. Cut the leeks into 1-inch sticks, slice the mushrooms and add to saucepan. Parboil vegetables in salted water. Take out the chicken when poached (no red color must be seen under the skin) and discard vegetables from stock. Strain the chicken stock through a fine sieve. Take the skin off of the chicken and cut chicken into 8 pieces. Put the chicken and the parboiled vegetables into the stock. Mix the egg yolks with the cream and add to the stock. Add the lemon juice and butter. Season with salt, pepper and nutmeg.

Serve in soup plates with boiled potatoes or white steamed rice.

Senegalese Stew

When most of us think of Africa, we definitely don’t imagine a bunch of jacked dudes beating the brakes off each other in a dirt pit like they’re in a paleolithic fight club.  Instead, it’s much more likely we imagine two half-starved thirteen year-olds blabbering bullshit about Allah while committing numerous atrocities as part of a daily ritual to lay hands on a bag of moldy rice.  Though neither the introduction of Islam or Western colonization has done a motherfucking thing other than make the lives of Africans immeasurably worse, they’ve managed to hold on to some of the tribal shit they did prior to the invasions of the aforementioned flaming assholes that made them so fucking cool back in the day.  One such tradition is Senegalese wrestling, known in Senegal as laamb, which is by far and away the most popular sport in the country and has recently drawn the attention of the West.  As you can see above, the lack of modern training facilities isn’t hurting the physiques of the Senegalese, and their strength is attributed to brutal basic training and the dish considered to be the Senegalese national flag, Ceebu Jenn.  Ceebu Jenn is, of course, a stew, and is the most commonly consumed dish in Senegal and is the preferred fuel for the hours-daily training for laamb.

Senegalese Thieboudienne / Ceebu Jenn

Ingredients
3 Tilapia cleaned and cut into 4 pieces each
3 branches of parsley finely chopped
3 branches of cilantro finely chopped
3 bay leaves
1 tablespoon of thyme
3 green onions finely chopped,
2 tablespoon of Afro Fusion Cuisines’ All Purpose Seasoning
4 ounces of tomato paste
2 plum tomatoes finely chopped
3 medium onions finely chopped
3 lb broken rice (broken one once or twice)
1 cup of oil
salt , black pepper
Vegetables of your choices
2 large carrots root cut into 4 inches pieces
1 eggplant root cut into 4 inches pieces
1 cassava or yucca root cut into 4 inches pieces
3 okra

Instructions

1. Clean the fish very well and set aside
2. Prepare the special marinade called “Nokoss” by mixing in a blender all your spices and herbs
3. With a sharp small knife make small cut on the fish. Using ½ of your marinade in step 2 stuffed the fish and immediately broil or fry then set aside
4. Parboil or steam your rice and set aside
5. In a heated pot, using 4 tablespoon of the oil used to fry your fish, put a dash of salt , add onion, tomato paste and plum tomatoes (cook for 5-7mn stirring) .
6. Add 6 cups of water to the pot, add the cut veggies, add the fish already fried and lastly add
7. The remaining half of the marinade Let simmer for 15 minutes for the fish and Juices to blend
8. Remove the fish roe from the pot and start plating
9. Then remove from the sauce the cooked veggies and add it to the plate.
10. Add the pre-cooked or steamed broken rice to the boiling sauce
11. Put the fire on low and let it reduce…should take about 15-30 mins depending on the nature of your rice. Your Thieboudienne is ready!

Nigerian Stew

Like Senegal, Nigeria’s got a tribal sport that make the violent games we grew up with, like Kill the Cow, for instance, look as violent as a no-touch game of pattycake- dambe.  Dudes who compete in dambe throw more haymakers than drunken hillbillies at a Kenny Chesney concert, and just like those hillbillies throw them with just one hand.  In fact, a quick google search appears to show that the haymaker is the sole strike employed in dambe fighting, which apparently only ends when you remove someone’s head Mortal Kombat-style with a punch telegraphed from 1880’s London.  After watching a couple of videos, the parallels between hillbillies and dambe end, because while hillbillies hurt each other as infrequently in fights as do dambe fighters, hillbillies lack both the intellect and the flexibility necessary to throw the occasional kick you’re likely to see in dambe.  Nevertheless, any sport in which the participants rock out Art “One Glove” Jimmerson style as if they’re in the first UFC is all right by me.  The food of choice for these hilarious tribal combatants?  You guessed it- motherfucking stew.

Nigerian Beef and Chicken Stew

Serves 10

Fresh Plum Tomatoes (referred to as Jos Tomatoes in Nigeria) – 1.5kg
Tinned tomato paste: 600g (or watery tinned Tomato Puree: 1.2kg)
Vegetable Oil: a generous amount (see this video)
Whole Chicken (hen) – 1.2kg
Beef: 15 pieces of medium cuts
Onions: 2-3 medium bulbs
Habanero Pepper & Salt (to taste)
Seasoning: 3 large stock cubes & Thyme (2 teaspoons)

Important notes on the ingredients

Chicken: Hen (female chicken) is tastier than the cockerel or rooster so it is the preferred chicken when cooking all Nigerian recipes.  Each of the different parts of the chicken (wings, drumsticks, hips etc) has its own unique taste and all these together makes the stew (and in fact all your cooking) taste better than if you use only one part of a chicken.

Tomato Stew is fresh puree tomato and the tinned tomato paste that has been boiled and fried to remove all traces of water and the sour taste of tomatoes. It is the base for the Nigerian Beef & Chicken Stew.

1. Grind / Blend the chilli pepper and cut the onions into small pieces before you cook Tomato Stew
2. Wash and blend the fresh plum tomatoes. Remember to remove the seeds unless you are sure your blender can grind them very well.
3. If using the thick tinned tomato paste that is common in Nigeria, mix it with cold water to get a softer consistency. See the video below for how I did this.
4. If you are using the watery tinned tomato puree that is common in Europe and other parts of the world, open the tins or packets and set these aside, you’ll need them soon.
5. Cut the onions into small pieces.

Cooking Directions

1. Pour the fresh tomato blend into a pot and cook at high heat till almost all the water has dried. If you have the watery tinned/boxed tomato puree, add these to the pot and reduce the heat to low. Cook till the water in the tomato puree have dried as much as possible.
2. Add the vegetable oil, the chopped onions and the thick tomato puree that you mixed in step 2 above (if it’s the puree you are using). Stir very well.
3. Fry at very low heat and stir at short intervals till the oil has completely separated from the tomato puree. A well fried tomato puree will also have streaks of oil, unlike when you first added the oil and it was a smooth mix of the tomato puree and oil. Taste the fried tomato puree to make sure that the raw tomato taste is gone. With time and experience, you can even tell that the tomato puree is well fried from the aroma alone.
4. If you are happy with the taste and you are sure that all the water has dried as much as possible, pour out the excess vegetable oil like I did in this video, then use it in your cooking.
5. If you are not using it immediately, leave to cool down, dish in containers and store in the freezer.
6. – See more at: http://www.allnigerianrecipes.com/stews/tomato-stew.html#sthash.Qe46H92G.dpuf
7. Cut up the chicken and cook with half of the chopped onions, stock cubes and thyme. When the chicken is almost done, add the beef and cook till well done. Then add salt, allow to simmer for about 5 minutes, transfer to a sieve to drain. Grill or fry the chicken and beef. This is optional but it gives them a rich golden look.
8. Notes about cooking the chicken:
9. Add water up to the level of the contents of the pot when cooking the chicken.
10. When cooking chicken, I do not add salt to the raw chicken. This is because salt closes the pores of the chicken (and infact anything you are cooking), this prevents the natural flavour of the chicken from coming out into the surrounding water and prevents the seasoning from entering the chicken to improve the taste. The result is that your chicken stock will not have a rich natural taste. It will only have an artifical taste of seasoning.

Note:  Only add salt when the chicken is done. A lot of people think that adding salt early makes the chicken taste better but there’s a big difference between a salty taste and a rich taste. What gives food a rich taste is not salt but the natural flavor of the food so allow this natural flavor to come out into your stock by NOT adding salt too early. And remember, stock cubes already contain salt so you really don’t need more salt.

Cooking Directions Continued

1. When you are happy that the tomatoes in your tomato stew are well-fried, pour out the excess oil as I did in the video below.
2. Place the pot of tomato stew back on the stove and add the chicken stock (water from cooking the chicken). There may be tiny pieces of bones at the bottom so be careful not to add those.
3. Add the chilli pepper and the grilled chicken and beef. Stir very well and add salt if necessary. You can also add some water at this point if the stew is too thick.
4. Cover the pot and cook at medium heat till the contents of the pot is well steamed. Stir again and you are done.

Korean Stew

Though they’re not all that well known for being jacked or strong, Koreans eat burn-your-asshole-spicy soups and stews for almost every single meal.  Given that they’re chugging stewroids all the live-long day, it won’t surprise you that Koreans are not the tiny yellow pussies they’re generally credited with being.  Instead, Koreans have a long lineage of being hard motherfuckers, as Korea is essentially the Poland of Asia- jammed between China and Japan, they’ve had to fight constantly for their entire existence to ensure that neither country was able to force them into a massive gimp suit and rape them with a horse dick-sized dildo until they’re bleeding out of their eyes.  To that end, the Koreans have focused more on martial prowess than strength, and have become some of the hardest hand-to-hand fighters in the world.

Currently Koreans are representing hard in K-1 and the UFC, boast the unbelievably badass Mas Oyama as one of their own, and have pulled down a shitload of medals in judo (40), taekwondo (14), boxing (20), wrestling (35), and weightlifting (11), in spite of the fact their country has only 49 million inhabitants and has only existed as a country since 1948 (which means they’ve basically got twice as many medals in those sports as the US when you account for longevity and population).  Stew appears, once more, to be the nutritional formula for success if you want to be a fucking badass.  Given the frequency with which they eat stew, it’s hard to pick a single recipe for their stewroid of choice.  As such, I’m picking my favorite, as I could not love a human baby as much as I love bulgogi.  In fact, I will only consider myself wealthy when and if I can hire a Korean man to follow me everywhere i go with a hibachi, constantly grilling bulgogi for my consumption.

Bulgogi Jungol

Serves: 4

Ingredients
2 cups marinated bulgogi
1 onion, cut into strips
2 scallions, chopped
Carrots, cut into strips
1/2 cup bean sprouts
Other bite-sized vegetables (preferable colorful) like peppers and broccoli
1 cup water
1 cup mushrooms of your choice (enoki, shiitake, button or a combination)
1 block tofu
Salt or soy sauce to taste
Noodles, cellophane/dangmyun/sweet potato (optional)

Preparation

1. In a soup pot or a large wok, stir fry marinated bulgogi and onion(s) for a couple minutes. Put ALL the marinade into the pot, do not discard any liquid.
2. Add vegetables (except for mushrooms) and cover with water.
3. Bring to a boil.
4. Reduce to a low simmer.
5. After 5 minutes, add mushrooms, tofu, and scallions.
6. Turn off after 3-4 minutes.
7. Season to taste with salt and soy sauce.
8. If adding noodles, add cellphane (dangmyun) with the mushrooms or add pre-cooked noodles at the end.

And there you have it- stew is the fucking balls.  It’s easy to make, easy to transport, and generally the shit.  Like the guy who emailed me stated above, most people make diet and training way too fucking complicated.  You don’t need a calculator or an Excel spreadsheet to get jacked.  You don’t need gurus telling you what to do, how to eat, or what to think- this shit is too fucking simple.  If you’re a person who really needs guidelines because you’re nearly retarded, eat twice your bodyweight in protein, make those calories half your daily intake, and if you want to lean out, keep your carbs low and fats high.  If you want to gain weight, split your calories between carbs and fats for the second half of your caloric intake and eat more total calories.  It’s not as though Arthur Saxon or Earle Liederman delved deep into programming and diet- they trained heavy, ate a metric fuckton of food (including a lot of stew), and drank their faces off, just like the Russians, Finns, sumo, and Icelanders do now.  Moreover, if the Indians and Senegalese can get jacked in third world environments with this type of diet, so can you. Stop thinking about it and just do it- this shit is too simple to fuck up.