Beef and Ale Stew
May 31, 2010
Beef and Ale Stew
A few days ago, I saw this interesting beef stew recipe in a Mann’s beer label. After googling a bit, I stumbled upon this Jamie Oliver recipe of a slow-cooked beef and ale stew. It looked simple and good enough so I decided to try it out as a welcome lunch for an old friend who’s visiting us this weekend. You can see the full recipe on the original website so here are just a few comments on how we actually did it.
Potatoes instead of dumplings. We felt like the suggested dumplings were not a worthy addition so we decided to cook potatoes within the stew instead. We added the potatoes only in the last 30 minutes of simmering to avoid them to completely melt in the stew.
Rice as side dish. Not sure this is a common side for a stew around here, but rice is sort of the default side for lots of dishes in Brazil. It worked pretty well for us.
A bit more beef. The original recipe suggests 500g of beef but we used 650g because, well, we wanted more meat in the stew.
Newcastle. The recipe suggests Ale, Guinness or Stout. We used Newcastle because we’ve successfully used it before on another recipe, I know how it tastes, and I like it a lot course.
This stew was surprisingly simple to make. It takes a long time to cook — it’s a slow-cooked stew after all — but the actual preparation takes just a few minutes. We used the hob instead of the oven — because we don’t have a proper pan to use in the oven — but the beef got very tender and tasty anyway! I’ll definitely try other stew recipes in the future. Bon Appétit!