basiscraft: Basic Beef Stew

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There are many such recipes. This one describes the skeletal structure of "Tom stew" which is a platform for "improvisation" (aka, using up stuff in the fridge).

I have not provided ratios here – this is a quantity-free recipe. Use common sense.

• cheap beef
• onion
• taters
• shrooms
• parsnip and/or turnip (e.g.) <–— secret ingredient
• "Wundra" (TM) flour or similar thickener

Everything in big chunks.

Trim excess fat from the beef but of course keep some fat in there.

Fairly high heat and brown the beef in an almost-dry pan. Transfer that to a crockpot BUT leave out one piece to cook a little bit more for sampling. It's a good snack while you cook.

A little salt and pepper here is OK but go really, really light on that. Flavors will concentrate in the crockpot so in this early stage, seemingly underspiced is well spiced.

Leave the pot (you are using cast iron for browning, right?) with the beef fat and other little remains from the beef and…

Again, fairly high heat: brown the shrooms and onions. This is a little touchy, in my view because you want to get some genuine carmelization out of the onions but you want to do it hot enough that you don't make them translucent – browned some on the outside and boarderline raw otherwise.

Transfer those shrooms and oninos to the crockpot.

At this point, the bottom of your cast iron browning pot should hopefully be sizzling with melted suet and slightly thick and sticky with browned leavings of beef, onions, shrooms, etc. You should be risking disaster of a sludgy, sticky, burnt mess on the bottom of the pan.

So brown the potatoes in that.

Turn the heat down a bit because those taters take longer. Have a decent spatula on hand so that after 7 minutes or so you can peel the previously unmoved, now browned on one side taters off the bottom of the pot. Maybe given them a toss and another 5 minutes or so and into the crockpot.

Is the browning pot now good and messy?

Good! Brown the parsnip. You almost forgot the parsnip, didn't you. Ha ha!

Finally, deglaze your browning pot (beer is fine, wine good), add to the crockpot. Top of the liquid in the crockpot with water and give it an afternoon or so.

To this basic foundation you can add pretty much anything and its all good.

It pretty much all has to cook for half or 3/4 of a waking-hours day on not too much heat.

For the last half hour or so, toss in some thickener – a tiny bit of sifted flour is fine as would be 17th century traditional thickeners like bread crums or east asian favorites like corn flour or tarrow root. Don't go heavy on the thickener in any case and do make sure it has a chance to cook.

It's done when the beef is fork-tender, of course.

To go with mine, I grabbed some breadmaker-prepared dinner roll dough out of the freezer, thawed, rolled into golf-ball-sized balls, split half-way with a knife, added butter in that slice, brushed with some milk, and tossed in the oven at 375 I think. Breadmakers are stupid corney ridiculous pieces of junk and I would really hate to trade mine away because they are nice to have around. It's like e-z-bake ovens for grown-ups.