I like browning floured, seasoned beef and then deglazing with vermouth or whiskey. I usually use deboned shin (lots of collagen). Also, a teaspoonful of sugar towards the end. Sugar is an essential spice for almost any dish, in small amounts.
'Sokay. Someone named Chefguy can talk down to me about food anytime he likes. 
Freudian shlip? 
Eh? You cook the vegetables longer than the meat?
Even “hard” veggies like carrots and potatoes take a lot less time to cook than stew beef does. It can take a few hours for brisket or beef shank to get tender. If you cook vegetables that long they’ll turn to mush.
I won’t bother with my recipe as these all seem to cover all the bases.
Here is the goodness that is V8 .
I should make a gratuitous mention at this point of the folly of letting your stew boil. If you are using a pre-made stock, you can get away with some boiling. Boiling stock will emulsify the fat into the broth which will result in a greasy mouth feel. A low simmer is best, with periodic skimming of any fat that rises to the top. Fat is just fat, and provides little, if any, flavor to the dish.
pulykamell, I wanted to verify the kalops recipe. I looked around online; all of the recipes I found have lots more allspice and no clove. Do you have an actual recipe? (See note below re my stew problem.) I really want to give this a try, it sounds very different from anything I’ve made.
AuntiePam, I love my Kitchen Bouquet. I’ve gotten several people hooked on it. I didn’t do much cooking until the 80s and learned about it from my mom, so maybe she picked it up in the 50s.
I have no good stew recipes. Mine never turn out right. I almost always add too much liquid, even when I try not to.
On a side note, one of my partners calls soup “stew”. I’m talking your basic beef/onion/taters/tomatoes/clean-out-the-frig-for-veggies soup. To her it’s “stew”. I’ve been to at least one rural restaurant here that does the same thing. Must be very, very regional - I’ve lived here my whole life and never heard of this until the last few years.
Here ya go. That’s where I got the recipe I use from. Actually, when I last made it, I doubled the amount of allspice.
There’s a pretty easy way to fix this: near the end of cooking, strain out and reserve the solids, then boil the liquid to reduce and thicken it. Then put the solids back in, mix and heat gently.
I’m not sure what you’re describing here. To me, stew can be anything from liquidy to fairly dry (just a little sauce sticking to the meat). This is what I think of when I think of stew generically.
edited to add:
There’s a million and a half ways to thicken a stew, from potatoes to tomato paste to simmering it down and letting it reduce to flour in the form of roux, a slurry, etc.
Thanks for the recipe! I’ll give it a try, maybe this weekend. I don’t have nam pla or swedish anchovies. I’m thinking of adding soy sauce and a little anchovy paste instead. I’ll let ya know.
To me, this is stew. Stew has limited ingredients (e.g., meat, potatoes, onions, maybe carrots, maybe a few peas for color) and a thick gravy. It’s usually thickened with flour (either by dredging the meat pre-browning or via the “sprinkle on veggies” as in your recipe). The stew is braised in a small amount of liquid that gets thickened up as it cooks down. You can create variations with your meat, seasoning, cooking liquid, etc.
This is soup. It’s simmered in lots of liquid and has broth instead of gravy. General ingredients for basic soup around here are some type of beef (roast, hamburger, stew meat, trimmings; can be fresh or leftover from a prior meal), canned tomatoes, potatoes, various other vegetables depending on what’s available. I know a lot of people that call it “refrigerator soup” because their moms used it as a method of cleaning up all the week’s leftovers.
There’s lots of soups and lots of stews but to me the major difference is the braised-in-little-liquid-with-thickener that results in a thick gravy vs. simmered-in-lots-of-liquid that results in a broth. Everyone I know uses the terms that way, except my SO. I keep telling her that someday I’ll make a proper stew (not one of my too-thin near-stews) so she can see the difference.
I think there’s a wide continuum there. I would, too, call the first dish you linked to a stew and the second a soup, but there’s plenty of stews that are cooked in lots of liquid. Take boeuf bourguignon, which is simmered in a bottle of wine and beef stock, or coq au vin, which is simmered in practically the same thing. Then there’s Hungarian goulash, which is traditionally made without thickeners of any sort, but has no added liquid.
I guess to me the test would be, could you serve it on a plate with boiled potatoes or dumplings or does it have to be served in a bowl? If it has to be contained in a bowl, then it’s soup.
oops
Previous post is mine.
There is definitely a continuum there, and I could go with your definition.
My “archetypal” stew is in a bowl with the potatoes already added, but could be served on a plate if’n ya wanted to (ya heathen!). I had to learn about boeuf bourguignon, coq au vin, ragouts, minestrone, chowders, et cetera and so on, much later in life after I lived on my own. Growing up, there was “soup” as described above. I think I discovered “stew” either from a cafeteria (Furr’s or Picadilly’s) or from Dinty Moore. 
I just had to post to say that I made this yesterday and my husband and I have voted it the best beef stew we’ve ever had. My picky 3-year old just sucked the stuff down. It was awesome and is now going into regular rotation. Thanks pulykamell!
I’m jealous! I intended to make it over the weekend, but life problems intervened. I’m lining up for another try this Sunday.
Did you have noodles or something with? I was trying to decide what sides to use.
We put it over egg noodles, and had roasted green beans with it. Both were very good. (I learned how to roast green beans in a free copy of Cook’s Illustrated. 1 lb beans, tossed with some olive oil and salt, roasted in a 450 degree oven (we used our toaster/convection oven) for 10 minutes, then toss 'em around and cook another 10-12 minutes. They should shrivel nicely. Next time I’ll check them sooner because some of them were a bit overdone. But they were still yummy. The article said people ate them like french fries, which is exactly what happened at my house.)