How to cook azu from pork?

Azu - a dish of Tatar cuisine, which is cut into small pieces of meat, stewed with tomatoes and slices of salted cucumber. Often, this dish includes potatoes and carrots. Traditionally, the azu is made from beef, lamb or horse meat. However, this dish has become so widespread that new options have appeared. For example, some people like to cook azu from pork or from poultry.

It should be noted that to prepare azu from pork you need to take only lean meat, otherwise the dish will turn out to be excessively greasy. Therefore, with a piece of pork, you must first cut off all visible fat.

So, how to cook azu from pork? First, prepare the necessary products, we need about 500-700 grams of lean pulp, a couple of small bulbs, three tomatoes. If there are no tomatoes, then you can use tomato sauce or tomato paste. Another take a carrot (medium size), 3 salted cucumber (small) and 6-7 potatoes. In addition, we will need about half a glass of meat broth and seasoning - pepper, salt, bay leaves, garlic, greens. If there is no broth, then it can be replaced with salted boiling water.

All products are ready, we begin to prepare aza in Tatar from pork. Meat should be cut into small oblong pieces, about 2 by 4 cm. Cut onions into thin semicircles, pickled cucumbers - small cubes.

Tomatoes scalded with boiling water, so they will be much easier to peel. Then cut in half and extract the seeds from them. We cut the tomato pulp into small pieces. Carrots are cleaned and cut randomly. You can cut it in circles, or you can - straw, who loves it.

Now reheat the frying pan with a little oil and start to fry the meat portions. This should be done with strong heating and laying the meat in one layer. In this case, the meat will quickly cover with a crust and will not have time to start the juice.

Fry the meat lay in the cauldron and a little salted, and add the pepper. Do not salt raw meat, because when roasting it will allocate a lot of juice and the prepared dish can turn dryish.

After all the meat is fried, put onions and fry it until it becomes clear. You do not need to brown the onions. We send the fried onions to the kazan to the meat.

Now we pour broth into the cauldron, add the tomatoes and put them on the fire. If there are no tomatoes, then add tomato paste or sauce, you can use tomato juice. Stew for about five minutes and add carrots. Continue to simmer with a slight heating for forty minutes, until the meat will not reach the ready.

Meanwhile, we clean the potatoes and cut it with straw. Fry the potatoes in a frying pan with the addition of oil almost until cooked. Salted cucumbers cut into small cubes and allowed with the addition of a small amount of broth.

Add the roasted potatoes and pickled cucumbers to the ready-made meat, put the bay leaves and season the dish to taste. We extinguish another five minutes, then remove it from the fire, put garlic in chopped garlic and let the dish brew for 10-15 minutes.

We spread the prepared azu from pork on plates and sprinkle it with chopped herbs.

Above was a classic version of the preparation of azu from pork. But there is still a "quick" version of cooking this dish from pork tenderloin. We take 400 grams of tenderloin and 300 grams of peeled potatoes, cut into cubes. Also take one onion and cut it into strips. We put everything together with the cauldron, which was previously poured a little vegetable oil, fry. Then pour in broth (one and a half cups) or water, salt, add pepper and seasonings to taste, cover with a lid and stew for 10 minutes. Then add to the cauldron a finely chopped cucumber and a couple of spoons of tomato paste. Again, close the lid and simmer for another 10 minutes until the softness of meat and potatoes. Remove from the fire, add garlic, mix, and you can call everyone to the table.