Irish · Main
Beef and Guinness Stew
- Intermediate
- 3 h
- roughly 2 of 4 for cost
Leads with a sweet edge rounding the corners, a silken, spoon-slow texture, with a bitter-edged char at the rim.
Ingredients
- 1.2kg beef chuck, big chunks, patted dry
- 2 tbsp flour; 3 onions, 4 carrots, 2 celery ribs
- 500ml Guinness + 300ml beef stock
- 2 tbsp tomato purée, brown sugar 1 tsp, thyme, bay
- Mash or colcannon to serve
The skills inside
Sweating aromatics: soft, never brownedSkimming: foam, fat and a clear brothMashing & puréeing
Allergen screen
Found: gluten · celery · alcohol
Screened for: gluten, dairy, egg, nuts, peanuts, fish, shellfish, molluscs, soy, sesame, celery, mustard, lupin, alcohol. Not screened: sulphites.
Screened by keyword from the ingredient list, not reviewed by a person; check every label for what the list cannot show.
Method
- Brown beef HARD in batches: gray meat makes gray stew.
- Soften vegetables; purée in; flour in; scrape the good crust up with a splash of stout.
- Everything back with Guinness, stock, thyme, bay; oven 150°C, 2.5 h, lid ajar. 300 min
- Skim, season, and add the pinch of sugar: stout turns bitter as it reduces; the sugar squares the account.
How to tell it is going right
This dish has no standard of its own yet. It is judged on the techniques it exercises: checked at the pan, while there is still something to be done about it.
Skimming: foam, fat and a clear broth 73 recipes
- It is held below a rolling boil for the whole time. Agitation drives fat and fine protein into the liquid as an emulsion, and nothing skimmed afterwards will take them back out.
- The grey foam that rises in the first minutes is lifted off and discarded rather than stirred back in.
- Fat is taken from the surface where it gathers, the pot moved off the centre of the heat if that is what it takes to collect it in one place.
- The liquid is visibly clearer at the end than it was at the start: it is possible to see down into it.
- Nothing lifted off goes back in. What was skimmed is discarded, not tipped back once the ladle is full.
Where it goes wrong The pot was allowed to boil, usually while something else was being attended to. Fat and protein emulsify into the liquid under agitation and cannot be lifted off afterwards, so the finished broth stays cloudy and greasy however patiently it is skimmed from then on.
Mashing & puréeing 114 recipes
- Smooth to the degree the dish asks for, judged on the tongue rather than by eye: no lumps, no fibres, no grit, unless texture is the point.
- No gluey elasticity: a spoonful drops cleanly off the spoon rather than stretching in a rope behind it.
- The consistency holds: it mounds on a spoon and stays there, neither slumping flat nor standing so stiff that a spoon has to cut it.
- Nothing separates on the plate: no water or fat weeping out into a ring within a minute of serving.
- The colour is even throughout, with no streaks of unincorporated fat, liquid, or seasoning at the edges of the bowl.
Where it goes wrong A starchy ingredient met a high-speed blade, so the cells burst and released their starch: what should be light comes out as an elastic glue that lifts off the spoon in one mass.
At the Table
- The Pour
- Syrah (northern Rhône) or Nebbiolo
- Also Right
- The braising wine itself, better bottle
- From the Taps
- Belgian dubbel
- Zero-Proof
- Beet & blackcurrant shrub
Long-cooked beef trades bite for depth: savory, structured reds echo the pot; and pouring the braise’s own region is law.
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