Beef & Guinness Stew - St. Patrick's Day Special - Beef Stewed in Guinness Beer

hello this is chef john from foodwishes.com with beef and guinness stew that's right we're doing a delicious beef stew featuring ireland's second most popular export i believe shamrocks are number one and it really does make for an incredibly flavorful stew and would say patrick's day right around the corner this could be a great menu option i mean you don't want to repeat last year where you drank too much green beer and ended up eating lucky charms for dinner that wasn't good so we're going to start by going over to the stove where i have a heavy skillet on medium-high heat i'm gonna throw in a few slices of bacon that i cut up and we're gonna cook that until all the fats rendered out and it's pretty much crisp all right it's gonna look like that we're gonna turn off the heat we're gonna transfer the bacon into our stew pot all right reserving as much of the fat as we can because we're going to use that fat to brown our chunks of beef so you should have at least a tablespoon or two of fat in there if it doesn't look like you have enough add a little splash of vegetable oil but it should be fine crank the heat up too high and then we're going to brown some very well seasoned meaning they were tossed with salt and pepper cubes of beef chalk you know we like our beef chuck for stews that's from the shoulder lots of flavor lots of connective tissue really does make a wonderful stew meat so i just bought a big old beef chuck roast and cut it into like two inch pieces all right i didn't show that step we've showed that many times it's not very interesting you take one big piece of meat and make it into lots of smaller pieces pretty straightforward so we want to brown that very well over high heat and once those pieces are nicely seared you can go ahead and dump those right on top of your bacon bits and then we're going to use the pan for a third time this time to soften our onions and get our cooking liquid prepared so i'm going to toss in two onions that i just roughly chopped kind of a large dice we're gonna put the heat back on medium and we're gonna sweat those onions for about five minutes with a big pinch of salt they'll start deglazing the bottom a little bit picking up some of that beautiful caramelization after about five minutes i'm gonna dump in my minced garlic and we don't want that to brown or get bitter so we're only going to cook that for about a minute and you can see through to the bottom of the pan we have a beautiful fond built up and you know what fond is that's all those caramelized juices at the bottom of the pan so once that garlic has cooked for about a minute we're going to go ahead and deglaze with our guinness beer there it is guinness draft which is weird because it's in a can we're gonna pour that in so i'm using one i believe it's a 14 ounce can and once you pour the beer in just simply give it a stir with a wooden spoon scraping along the bottom we want to make sure all that lusciousness from the bottom of the pan dissolves into this liquid i would say just give it two or three minutes on medium stirring like that and at that point you can go ahead and dump that into your stew pot and by the way don't taste anything yet it's not going to taste good yet it's not even really going to smell good yet smells a little bit like a wet leprechaun at this point but don't worry it's going to get incredibly delicious so we're going to dump that into our stew pot and then it's time for the rest of the ingredients first of which would be some tomato paste and i wish there was a less attractive way that i could put that in there all right so about a quarter cup of tomato paste i'm also going to throw in some fresh thyme do not pick those leaves off it's always easier to pick out stems than pick off stems do not forget that we're also going to add some carrots and some celery very traditional of course we're also gonna add just a touch of sugar to balance the bitterness in the beer and some freshly ground black pepper and then last but not least we're gonna add enough chicken broth to just basically come up to the top of the ingredients all right just a couple cups now as far as salt goes i generously salted my beef and i also generously salted the onions so i think i'm okay for now of course you're going to taste and adjust as you go that's the rule and then what we're going to do which is fairly standard stew procedure you can turn the heat up to high bring it up to a gentle simmer and then you'll adjust your heat and back it down you want it just lightly bubbling like that and then basically we're just going to cover that and cook it till fork tender which is going to take about two hours depends on how big you cut your beef and of course with any simmering stew every once in a while take off the lid give it a stir if you want to skim a little bit of foam or fat from the top feel free and by the way we did not add any flour or root to this so we're going to thicken this naturally which is going to be the next step so after two hours mine was fork tender well technically it was knife tender and if it's tender you're ready for the last step raise the heat to medium-high and boil that for about 15-20 minutes until it reduces and thickens slightly and even though we didn't use any flour or roux or any thickeners like that that connective tissue in the meat will break down and get nice and sticky and it will combine with that tomato paste in there to form this beautiful beautiful texture i mean look at that looks like we thickened it but we didn't that is just natural stewie goodness and there you go you can see those time stems very simple to pick out now all right so don't waste your time sorry no rim shot that was not an intentional pun doesn't count of course you know you gotta taste this for final seasoning might need a little salt if you put in a little cayenne i wouldn't be mad and if i'm not mistaken that is ready to serve and what should you serve it with there's only one choice some kind of potatoes so i'm gonna do a nice ring of green onion mashed potatoes and look at that stew that really was one of the better stews i've had in a long long time and i eat awesome stews on a regular basis that multiness from that dark beer really does amazing things to this gravy a very simple dish yet at the same time it has a very rich deep complex flavor just a gorgeous bowl of food so anyway that's it beef and guinness stew i really hope you give this a try whether it's for st patrick's day or just any time of the year head over to foodwishes.com for all the ingredient amounts and more info as usual and as always enjoy an air and go bra you

Channel: Food Wishes

Views: 1,095,219

Keywords: Beef, Stew, Guinness, St. Patrick's Day, Beer, meat, chef, john, foodwishes, dinner, Food, Cooking, Kitchen, Recipe, Cooking (science)

Id: T9ZXL2uILF8

Length: 5min 49sec (349 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 14 2013