Beef Stew

Cafe Society
1

I just bought a slow cooker and I want to make beef stew. It’s my very first time making any sort of stew, so guide me.

What spices should I use? Any tried and tested recipes you can post or link me to?

How do you know the stew is done? What texture should the meat have?

What setting should I use - low, medium, high? Correspondingly, how long should it cook?

The SO and I are both stew lovers, so we’ll both be hyper-aware of all the tastes and textures. I want to knock his (and my own) socks off.
(I know about Allrecipes. I will be looking there as well.)

2

I don’t have a stew recipe for the slow cooker, but I wanted to mention that allspice is wonderful in beef stew. Just a pinch really accents the beef flavor. I would also use garlic and black pepper.

3

I make a very good, savory stew, but I do it in a 5 quart stew pan. My experiments with a slow cooker were always less satisfying. Anyway, here’s my recipe. Perhaps you can adapt it for a slow cooker. Also, IME, the process is more important than the list of ingredients. You can make lots of different types of stews, but if you cook them wrong they’ll be disappointing no matter what you put in them.

My Stew;

1-2 lbs of stew meat. Rather than buy pre-diced stew meat, I like to take a cheap roast and cut it up myself. I can generally save $1 a pound or more this way.
Potatoes - preferably red or white rather than russets.
Carrots
Celery
Red onions
Other vegetables as you wish - corn, green beans, zucchini, mushrooms, etc. I do not use tomatoes in my stew, but that’s just me.
Sage
Thyme
Whole bay leaves
Kitchen Bouquet or beef bullion
Salt, pepper.
Optional - 1 clove garlic, dash of oregano, whole peppercorns, tarragon, rosemary.

Add enough olive oil to the pan to coat it well and get it good and hot. Saute one slice of chopped red onion in the pan and add the stew meat. Sear the meat thoroughly on all sides. Add one potato chopped into medium smallish pieces, the sage and thyme (about 1/4 tsp each), 1 or 2 bay leaves and enough water to cover everything. Bring to a boil, cover and reduce heat to a simmer. Let this simmer for about 2 hours (less if you’re really hungry, more if you like very tender stew meat), stirring occasionally to prevent sticking. Add more water as needed.

By this time, the meat should be very tender and the potato should be virtually dissolved. It helps give your stew more body. Add in the rest of your vegetables, a teaspoon or so of Kitchen Bouquet or one boullion cube and salt and pepper to taste. Bring this back to a boil, then cover and simmer, stirring often, for about 1/2 hour or until the potatoes and carrots are sufficiently tender. Let cool slightly, ladle into bowls and serve with thick slices of sourdough bread.

To adapt this for slow cooker, sear the meat and add to the cooker with the potato, let simmer all day on low. Add vegetables and cook on high for about an hour.

4

my basic stew recipe works with chicken or beef.

note I have a 6 quart and fill the sucker to full and bag the left over and zip lock them in single servings to freeze

carrots 3 ish
potatoes 2 big ones? maybe 1.5 big ones
celery (optional) 1 or 2 stalks
onions one medium size
red/yellow/orange (pick one) pepper
brocoli, hmmm around one good size double handful.
3 pounds of meat, stew beef works great. with chicken I go dark meat. you can use steak if you want to cut if up.

for spices, oregano, basil, salt, garlic, crushed red peppers (note Crushed red peppers are one of the few spices that provide heat that survive 8+ hours in the crock pot., most hot stuff loses its heat after that long)
(edit, forgot to add how much on spice) one heaping spoonful works well with most of the spices (not the salt) keep in mind you can add more spice later but you cant take it back out. that said crock pot stew is pretty hard to fuck up.

with chicken I use some chicken powder stock stuff.

with beef I really really prefer to use some of my home made stock but water will do in a pinch. you can use beer but do not use dark beer. this is one case where light beer will do fine.

chop the stuff up to edible sizes, toss in the pot, ad fluid to cover every thing. (feel free to push stuff down a bit just dont smash it)

either cook on low for 8 ish hours or store in fridge for 8-48 hours and cook on low for 8ish hours.

a couple things, my old pot I cooked on low, my new one I cook on high but the new one has a dial that goes from warm to using the base to cook on, the old one had OFF, LOW, and HIGH settings only.

the potatoes are the test, after 7 hours if the taters are still to firm then turn up the heat a bit for an hour and check again.

stir now and then (every few hours is fine if that)

salt is really important to ad Some of dont over do it, just get some in there early.
Pepper is added after as in add it when you are about to eat it. supposedly it can make soups bitter if you cook it with them the whole time.

with the chicken stew I add about a cup of olive oil and a generous (1-2cups) of garlic and it comes out buttery as hell its tasty.

and if this isn’t a big enough ramble to make my beef stew stock I make pulled pork or shredded beef. which is super easy. 3-6 pounds of beef or pork boneless. with the beef stew beef or something you can cut up fairly bite sized.
add meat, one jar of spicy v8 and one jar of franks red hot buffalo wing sauce, or a jar of hot salsa, or a jar of your favorite bbq sauce or whatever the hell you want that looks good on meat. but 2 jars of liquidy stuff is good. veggies if you want, onion celery, peppers
garlic and salt

cook for 8 hours low, drain off all the fluid you can and KEEP IT, freeze it in a quart size bag and use for stock later (you may easily get more than one bag of stock out of a batch its up to you if you want to keep all or just one bag)

shred the hell out of the meat with a plastic spoon the big ones you use for stirring stuff. of the meat doesnt fall apart its not done. when you have done all that plop it on a bun and eat. (good with tomatoes, spinach, pepper jack cheese, avacado, and other stuff)

5

Allspice is nice for beef stew. There is a Swedish beef stew called “kalops” which is spiced with allspice, bay leaves, and cloves (about 3 allspice berries, 1 clove and 2 small bay leaves for every pound of meat.) The rest of the ingredients are beef chuck, onions, carrots, beef broth, and some sardine/anchovy brine (you can put in a teaspoon or two of fish sauce, aka nam pla or nuoc mam. It doesn’t give the dish a fishy flavor, just perks up the sauce. I suppose you can also try Worcestershire, if you’d like, but Wooster sauce tends to overpower if not used sparingly).

If you want to knock your socks off, for most stews I would suggest browning the meat first. There is a lot of flavor developed in browning. Now, I’ve never used a slow cooker before (I love my Dutch oven), and that may kind of defeat the point of the hassleless cooking a slow cooker affords, but I cannot help but stress that browning the meat is pretty important in creating flavor. (Now, this is not necessary in all beef stews, mind you, but most of the ones I like start with browned meat.)

Beef short ribs, in particular, make for wonderful stew, as do oxtails, or chuck. I prefer to make stew with meat that is bone-in.

6

I disagree. I actually prefer beef stew that is made in something like Guinness or a bock/doppelbock. I don’t like beef stews made on light lagers. The dark beers tend to be a lot less hoppy and the sweet, malty taste works much better with beef, IMHO.

Perhaps the king of beef stews, to me, is beef bourguignon and its chicken cousin coq au vin, both made with a lot of red wine.

7

I like to put a single serving sized can of V8 into my beef stew about 15 minutes before serving.

For me, it’s easier to make a stew or soup in a regular pot. My veggies never really get done enough in a slowcooker, for some reason. On the other hand, my slow cooker turns out marvelous pot roasts. I just throw a cheap cut of beef or pork in there, add a few seasonings (salt, garlic powder, and onions in some form), some dry red wine (about a quarter cup is all), and let it simmer all day. It’s done when I can no longer lift the meat out of the cooker in one piece. The broth is worth saving.

8

I just made beef stew tonight. In a pot, though.

I do 1-2 two pounds beef, browned with a bunch of garlic in olive oil. Then I pour in a cup of wine and a cup of beer (dark beer because it tastes better, and somebody has to drink the rest of the bottle. Mmm… beer.) and a few cups of water and some bullion cubes. Also a couple of mushrooms chopped up into bits, bay leaves, rosemary, some worchestershire sauce and some tomato paste. Simmer for an hour or so. Add potatoes, and whatever else you picked up at the grocery. Today I got a turnip and some carrots, but I forgot to put the carrots in. I’ll eat them tomorrow.

Serve with the rest of the wine from the bottle. The beer you can drink while you’re letting everything cook. :slight_smile:

9

Fascinating! Beer in stew. Does it do something chemically or is in there just for the taste?

And thank you all for the ideas. Now I need to go look up what V8 is. Never heard of it.

10

My beef stew:

1 to 1-1/2 lbs stew meat
1 onion, coarsely chopped
2 tbs tomato paste
1-2 tbs flour
Bay leaf
1/2 tsp dried thyme
1/2 tsp dried rosemary
1 to 1-1/2 qt chicken broth or beef broth
2-3 carrots, chunked up (or 1/2 bag of baby carrots)
3-4 potatoes, chunked (I like to use reds)

Season the meat with salt and pepper. Brown (in two batches) in a little olive oil, or veg oil. Remove the meat, and brown the onions in the drippings until starting to soften. Add tomato paste, and saute a minute more. Add in the meat, and sprinkle with a couple of tbs flour. Stir until starting to brown and add broth to cover. Add seasonings, as well as salt and pepper to taste. Bring to a boil, until broth starts to thicken. Add the veggies. Dump it all in your crock pot, and if necessary, add more stock to barely cover. Cook on low all day.

I usually just cook it on the stove top, and add veggies after about 1-1/2 hours simmer time, then cook another hour until veggies are done.

11

My recipe:

1 onion
3-4 cloves garlic
1 lb. beef
2-3 strips bacon (optional, but a yummy addition)
3-4 potatoes (not too big, the thin-skinned red or white variety)
3-4 carrots
1 sprig fresh rosemary (maybe 12 needles)
1 tsp. thyme
1 cup red wine

Brown onions and garlic in olive oil, add beef and cook until brown. Add wine, rosemary, thyme, and enough water to completely cover the meat, cover pot, simmer on low-to-medium heat. Sit down, have a glass of wine. After about an hour and a half or so, fry the bacon and add some crumbled bacon to the pot. Peel carrots and cut into bite-size pieces, wash potatoes and cut them into chunks, add those to the pot and simmer for another 30 minutes or so, until potatoes are cooked. Serve and eat.

12

All I really have to add to the recipes already posted is one more herb: savory. It’s excellent in pretty much any beef dish, but I find it to work best in stew.

Oh, and a second on the garlic and peppercorns (cracked, not whole).

13

We usually just chop up some beef, onions, carrots & potatoes, add some whole (peeled) cloves of garlic and some black pepper, pour a bottle of Guiness over it and let it do its thing for 6-8 hours, and it’s good, doesn’t even need spices. Serve with homemade bread.

Also love a good pot roast - cut slits into it and insert whole, peeled cloves of garlic, dredge in flour & brown on all sides, then throw in crockpot, add vegetables and some veggie stock or just water, and cook for many many hours. Mmm.

14

I’m glad to see Kitchen Bouquet recommended. It adds flavor without adding a lot of sodium, but more important, it gives the broth a rich brown color.

I didn’t know people were still using it. I thought it was a cooking thing from the 50’s. :cool:

15

As a tasty goulash alternative, try adding some hot paprika to your stew.

16

Or brains, for a ghoulish touch.

17

A couple of star anise make the stew taste richer. Celery seed also goes well with beef.

The meat in a stew should be tender enough so that it’s no longer chewy, but not so tender that it falls apart. How long to cook it depends on the cut and quality of the meat. The best cuts for stew, like chuck or brisket, tend to be tough and will only become tender with a lot of slow cooking. These cuts have a lot of flavor and make rich gravy (because they contain a lot of collagen, which breaks down to gelatin with long cooking).

You’ve been given a lot of recipes and a lot of ideas. In my opinion, it’s best not to try to do everything at once. Your stew will taste better if it has only a few types of vegetables and spices. With too many ingredients everything will become indistinct. You should also be aware that vegetables release liquid when cooked, and if you’re not careful you can end up with watery stew.

18

I read once that the meat should be floured before browning for a stew. It tends to keep the meat a little moister, and the flour might help to thicken the stew.

Does anyone else do that?

19

Yep. Flour, salt and pepper. Shake off the excess, sear it good in some oil, then deglaze with whatever liquid you’re using. Searing meat and then cooking in liquid is called braising (not trying to talk down to you) and is the best method for tenderizing tough cuts or keeping good cuts from getting tough. I also like to roast the vegetables if I have time, which adds some depth to the stock.

20

I just leave the meat as it is and plonk it in after all the hard vegetables have had time to simmer for a while. Here’s what I do:

First I open a bottle of beer and make sure that it is not off. Then I start cutting some vegetable into nice small cubes, using potatoes, swedes, sweat potatoes and carrots and pumpkin. While I do this, I also bring a a couple of liters of water to a boil adding some beef cubes. When the water is boiling, I put in the veggies, and pinch of salt and crunch some pepper over it, also adding a laurel leaf and a handful of chive.

While the veggies simmer, I taste the beer some more, cut the meat into nice strips, and throw them in after a little while. Now its probably time to open more beers.

Now that the veggies and meat is simmering, I add a copule of handfulls of garden peas (you know the ones still in the pea shell) and green beans, and chopped onions and chopped mushrooms. Then I enjoy some more beer and chop a handful of parsley and put that in, and pour in a whole bottle of beer. Personally I prefer to use bayer.

In the time it takes to finish of the six-pack, the strew is done and ready to serve.

Cheers!