Braised Lamb With Flageolet Beans by Delia Smith.

Tested and Proven - delicious Cassoulet /A dish consisting of white beans and various meats/!

Ingredients
900 g lamb neck fillets
225 g cherry tomatoes
salt and freshly milled black pepper
225 g flageolet beans
2 tablespoons oil
2 large onions, peeled, halved and cut into 1 cm rounds
2 cloves garlic, finely chopped
25g plain flour
1 level dessertspoon chopped fresh thyme leaves plus 4 small fresh thyme sprigs
570 ml supermarket lamb stock or water
3 small bay leaves

Method
You need to start this recipe by soaking the beans.
You can do this by covering the beans with twice their volume of cold water, then soaking them overnight.
Alternatively, on the same day, boil them for 10 minutes then leave them to soak for a minimum of 2 hours.

When you're ready to cook the lamb, pre-heat the oven 140C, trim off any really excess fat and then cut it into rounds about 2 cm thick.
Now place the casserole over direct heat, add 1 tablespoon of oil, then, as soon as it's smoking hot, brown the pieces of meat, a few at a time, wiping them first with kitchen paper so that they're absolutely dry when they hit the fat (don't add more than 6 pieces at a time).

Then as soon as each piece is nicely browned on both sides, remove the fillets to a plate and carry on until all the meat is browned.

Next, add the other tablespoon of oil and, keeping the heat high, brown the onions round the edges, moving them around until they take on a nice dark caramel colour – this will take about 5 minutes – then add the garlic, stir that into the onions and let it cook for another minute or so.

Now sprinkle in the flour and give it all a good stir, allowing the flour to soak into the juices.
Add thyme leaves, then gradually add the stock, stirring all the while as you pour it in.

Next, return the meat to the casserole and season it well with freshly milled black pepper, but no salt at this stage.
After that, drain the beans, discarding their soaking water, and add them to the casserole as well.

Finally, add the thyme sprigs and bay leaves and, as soon as everything has come up to simmering point, place a tight-fitting lid on and transfer the casserole to the centre shelf of the oven to cook for 1 1/2 hours.

Towards the end of that time pour boiling water over the tomatoes and then, after 30 seconds, drain off the water and slip the skins off.
Add these to the casserole, along with a good seasoning of salt, then replace the lid and carry on cooking for a further hour.

Before serving, remove the bay leaves and sprigs of thyme and taste to check the seasoning.

Cassoulet.

Cassoulet: a rich stew originating in southwest France containing beans and various meats (such as sausages, pork and preserved duck or goose).
Cassoulet Recipe - LifeStyle FOOD: Recipe by Rick Stein.
ingredients
500g home-salted belly pork
65g duck or goose fat
1 head garlic, broken into cloves, peeled and sliced
1 large onion, chopped
1kg dried haricots, blancs beans, soaked overnight
large bouquet garni made from leek, celery, thyme sprigs, bay leaves and arsley stalks
6 good quality Toulouse sausages
4 legs duck confit, cut into two at the joint

1. Cut the piece of belly pork lengthways into three thick slices, then cut each piece across into two.
2.Preheat the oven to 180C/350F/Gas 4.
3.Heat 50g of the duck fat in a six-litre flameproof casserole dish.
4.Add the garlic and onion and fry gently until soft but not browned.
5.Add the beans and the pieces of salted belly pork, cover with 1¾ litres/3 pints water and push in the bouquet garni.
6.Bring to the boil, skimming off any scum as it rises to the surface, then cover, transfer to the oven and bake for one hour or until the beans are just tender (this will depend on the age of your beans).
7.Heat the remaining duck fat in a frying pan and brown the sausages all over.
8.Lift them onto a board and slice each one sharply on the diagonal into three pieces.
9.Remove the cassoulet from the oven and increase the oven temperature to 220C/425F/Gas 7.
10.Add the sausages and the pieces of duck confit to the casserole and push them down well into the beans.
11.Return the casserole to the oven and bake uncovered for a further 45 minutes or until the liquid has reduced and the cassoulet is covered in a dark golden crust.
12.Serve straight from the pot at the table.

How to Make Traditional Cassoulet.

How to Make Traditional Cassoulet (And Why You Should Put Chicken in It!) | Serious Eats
First off, it's the shape of the pan.
A traditional cassole has a tapered shape that gives it an extremely high surface area to volume ratio.
More room for evaporation means better skin formation and better browning.
In fact, the last two pictures above are of cassoulets cooked in the exact same manner, the only difference being the vessel they are cooked in.

Unfortunately, it's tough to find a good cassoulet pot around here.

A regular cassoulet will form a crust in about 4 hours of cooking in a 150°C/300°F oven.
What about if you just cook your Dutch oven cassoulet for longer or hotter?
I tried a variety of time and temperature ranges.
At the very best, what you end up with is this:
Decent crust alright, but the crust is really formed by the beans and the meat, not by the liquid itself.
Underneath, the beans are too dry.

The second problem is the store-bought stock I'd been using.
Homemade chicken stock tends to be very high in gelatin, a result of the high amount of connective tissue in the bones and cartilage used to make it.
Store-bought stock, by contrast, is thin and watery.
It's this gelatin that forms the crusty raft on top of the cassoulet, giving it both crust and body.

It's these two problems—wrong pot, not enough gelatin in the stock—that lead many recipes to resort to using breadcrumbs to create an artificial crust.

So what's the solution? Well the obvious one is to just make your own goddam stock.
It's actually way easier than it sounds, though it again requires a bit of a time commitment.
I'll admit it: sometimes even I'm too lazy to make my own stock when I've already got a day-long project ahead of me.

So what's the next best thing?
Just fake it.
By blooming store-bought unflavored gelatin in regular store-bought stock, you can create a rich stock full of body that forms a raft just like the real deal.
I don't go easy on the gelatin either (remember, you have to make up for using the wrong-shaped pot as well).
A full three packets for a quart of liquid gives it the body and crust I'm looking for.

In order to get a cassoulet that stays nice and loose underneath while still building a crust up top, it's important not to drown that crust out.
If your liquid level starts to get too low, add more liquid (just plain water works) to the pot by carefully pouring it along the side of the pot so that it goes under the crust, not over it.