Skip the lean, pricier cuts of meat and go for the less expensive, tougher cuts. The long, slow cook time leaves lean meat, like sirloin, tough and chewy, while tougher cuts, like chuck, break down and become really tender.
Unless you have a fantastic butcher, buy a larger piece of meat and cut it yourself. This ensures that you have the best and freshest quality meat. It’s great to buy a larger piece of meat than what you intend to use for stew. Extra meat can be minced in a food processor for burgers, or sliced thinly for stir fries.
Whatever you do, don’t just add raw meat to broth and expect it to make stew. Also, when browning, don’t stop at lightly browning the cubes. Searing the meat is an essential step for making a great beef stew. This is where the stew really starts to build its deep, rich, flavour. Set the cubes of beef in a hot pan and let them cook for a few minutes until the bottom has a dark crust, then repeat that process for the other sides of the meat.
Some people think the coating on the surface of the meat helps it caramelise and brown. It actually just prevents the meat from browning properly and developing flavour.
Vegetables cook a lot quicker than beef, so there’s no reason to add them to the pot at the same time. Add them too soon, and you’ll be left with mushy (and unappetizing) veggies. Add hearty vegetables, like carrots, turnips, and potatoes halfway through cooking. If you plan to include delicate vegetables, like peas, wait to add them until a few minutes before taking the stew off the heat.
Onions add a sweetness and flavour that few other things can match. At a stretch, if you don’t have an onion but you have a leek, you could use that. But it will not have the same sweetness and caramelised flavour, no matter how you cook it. Similarly garlic adds its rich fragrance, and sweet-savoury flavour to stews, but ultimately is less essential than onion.
Hard herbs that are best suited to a long slow cook. These are also the herbs that suit the flavour of a beef stew best: a couple of fresh or dried bay leaves, rosemary, thyme, oregano and sage. You could use parsley stalks if you happened to have any. You don’t need all these herbs, one or two will do. You can’t go wrong with just rosemary and thyme.
You don’t want to use a pot that is too large because if there’s a lot of space between lid and food, steam fills the space and creates condensation on the lid, which drips into the sauce. That’s how you get a watery sauce. If want the sauce or gravy to reduce, that’s when you take the lid off.
Skim the top of your stew and remove as much of the fat as you can before serving. And just be careful: If you make your stew too thick, it will be too hard to skim.