Stewed Vegetables in a Clay Pot with White Wine (Guvech)

Preparing the pot and vegetables

1. It is surprising that cooking in clay pots is so uncommon for us, because food from a pot is much juicier and tastier than food cooked in a frying pan or saucepan. The aroma of the whole dish stays inside the ceramic, and for this the lid is often sealed with dough. Vegetables in a pot are neither boiled nor fried, and by and large not even stewed. And this is not baked vegetables in the end. They are more like slowly simmered. Besides, food in ceramic cookware hardly ever burns.

   

2. Prepare a 2 l ceramic pot: rinse it with cold water before adding the food and let it stand for 10-15 mins. The pores of the ceramic need to absorb water, and then the dish will be much juicier.

   

3. Fry the onion: peel it, cut it into thin strips and fry over medium heat in olive oil until soft and lightly browned.

   The onion, pepper and eggplant need to be fried briefly before they go into the pot. First, they give a pleasant aroma, and second, they become much softer and tastier. Onion turns sweet when fried anyway.

   

4. Cut the vegetables. Remove the seeds from the bell pepper (it looks very pretty if the peppers are of different colors) and cut it into large pieces. Peel the eggplants and cut them into cubes. Peel the potatoes too and cut them into cubes. The size of the pieces is up to you, but I think you shouldn’t cut them too small.

   

5. Add the cut pepper to the fried onion and fry everything together until the pepper is soft. If the pepper is quite thick-walled, you can simply bake it and peel off the skin, and only then cut it. In that case there is no need to fry it.

   

Layer the vegetables

1. Transfer the onion and pepper mixture to the clay pot and level it so that it covers the bottom completely.

   

   Spread the cubed potatoes over the top in a single layer.

   

2. Fry the cubed eggplants for a few minutes in the oil left over from frying the onion until lightly browned. Eggplants soak up oil like a sponge, but don’t add more oil.

4. Over the potatoes, spread the peeled, cubed raw zucchini. If the zucchini already has formed seeds, it is better to cut them out. Add a little salt, ground black pepper, a bay leaf and one teaspoon of dried savory, called “chubritsa” in Bulgarian. It is an exceptionally good spice for vegetables and meat.

   

5. Lay the top layers. Scald the tomatoes with boiling water, peel them and remove the seeds. The seeds are hard and, however you cook them, you will feel them in your teeth, but you can also leave them in. In winter, canned tomato pulp will do. Cut the tomato pulp into large pieces and spread it over the zucchini. Put the fried eggplants on the very top.

   

   Grate the garlic over the top on a fine grater and sprinkle everything with chopped herbs.

   

Simmering in the oven

1. Pour in 100 ml of dry white wine and 100 ml of water, cover the pot with the lid and put it into a cold oven. Only then turn the oven on. Set the temperature to 220-230 °C.

   

2. Wait for it to boil, then lower the temperature. The liquid in a clay pot takes about 15-20 mins to come to a boil, and you can easily see this by the wisp of steam from the vent or from under the lid. Then you can lower the temperature to 200 °C and leave the pot of vegetables covered for an hour to an hour and a half, until the potatoes are soft. Or longer.

   

Serving

1. Let the vegetables stand in the pot for 15-20 mins: even when taken out of the oven, they continue to cook. By the way, don’t pick the pot up with a wet towel, it doesn’t like that. And it is best to set the hot pot on a wooden board.

2. Transfer the stewed vegetables to individual plates. Note that the vegetables are not stirred together. Scoop them up from the very bottom so that all the layers end up on the plates.

   

   Serve the vegetable dish hot.