Now, there's only so much beer that Dan and I can consume in 10 days, so I turned to my recipe box to find some good ways to use it up. One of our favorite beef stews over the years has been the Jamie Oliver recipe for Beef Stew with Newcastle Brown Ale (with some modification). I decided to use this as the starting point for my recipe and, voila! We created Pittsburgh's East End Winter Snowmelt Beef Stew.
As I said, the inspiration for this recipe starts with Jamie Oliver's recipe, but there are some modifications that have been made (notably, I deleted his rosemary dumplings* - which are worth trying, but need some serious tweaking to the cooking time - I would recommend making a rosemary biscuit instead), which I think gives me the right to re-christen it for Pittsburgh.
Winter Snowmelt Beef Stew
(with thanks to Scott at the East End Brewing Company for making such a fabulous beer)
Ingredients
2-1/2 pound stew beef. I used a mix of extra lean and regular.
3 TB. flour
Olive or Canola Oil
Salt & Pepper
3 - 4 slices bacon, cut into 1" pieces
4 stalks celery, chopped
4 large carrots, chopped into 1/2" - 3/4" chunks (you can also substitute parsnips for 1/2 the carrots)
1 small handful fresh rosemary, leaves stripped from stalks and chopped
4 white potatoes, chopped into 3/4" - 1" chunks
5 cups Winter Snowmelt beer (or other dark beer - the darker beers will add a slightly bitter flavor to the broth that cooks off with time. You may want to adjust your seasonings to match your beer choice.)
- Place the beef chunks in a large bowl and toss with flour and salt and pepper (to taste). Over medium heat in a large skillet, brown the beef in several batches in a few tablespoons of oil. As it finishes browning, transfer the meat to a large stock pot of slow cooker.
- When the meat is finished, add another tablespoon of oil to the skillet (if needed). Over medium heat, saute bacon and onions. When onions begin to turn translucent, add celery and saute 4 - 5 more minutes to bring out the flavor.
- Transfer onions, bacon and celery to stock pot containing meat, and add rosemary, potatoes, and carrots. Pour 1-1/2 cups of beer into saute pan over low heat to deglaze the yummy crust that has formed in the bottom of the pan from the flour, meat and veg mixed. Scrape the pan and stir beer mixture until pan is deglazed. Pour mixture into stock pot with beef and veg.
- Add remaining beer (3-1/2 cups) to stock pot, as well as additional water to just cover the beef and veg. Stir and put on medium heat until it begins to simmer and bubble. Once the stew mix is simmering, turn on low heat (to continue to simmer). Cook 1 hour with lid on. Once meat is beginning to become tender, crack the lid to allow the moisture to start to evaporate and the stew to thicken. (if using a slow cooker, I have used high heat and about 3 - 4 hours of cooking time) On the stove, the cooking time for me was about 2 hours.
- Seasoning note: If you taste the broth before the stew has really started to thicken, it may have a slight bitterness to it. This will fade away as the stew cooks and the alcohol cooks off as well. The longer it cooks, the "sweeter" the flavor becomes from the blend of beer and beef. Salt to taste when stew is almost finished.
Serve with rosemary biscuits or bread, or ladled on top of big pile of thick buttery egg noodles.
*Much like the other saucy English chef du jour, Nigella Lawson, I find Jamie's baking-related recipes to always sound like a good idea, but completely lacking in technical precision and prone to failure. They are both excellent cooks, and fabulous at pairing flavors, but I tend to find myself rewriting their baking recipes to get the desired results. I am not sure if something was just lost in the conversion to American ingredients and (ironically) English measure as opposed to metric, but I have sneaking suspicion that it is the very spontaneity and casual nature that makes their cooking so good and enjoyable that ruins their baking recipes. Cooks Illustrated (aka The Gospel According to Christopher) found the same results with over 1/3 of Nigella's baking recipes as FAILS.
