The art of the beef stew
The quest for a perfect beef stew is, of course, a lifelong one.
It takes even longer after you realize that there isn’t one perfect beef stew, but constellations of them. The dish is practically universal.
So far, I have mastered two styles, the basic American and the European classic. The big difference between our beef stew, and French boeuf bourguignon, Provençal daube and Tuscan peposo, is the loud presence of red wine. Traditional American beef stews are lubricated with water and onions; later versions, with beef broth or tomato sauce. Real wine was simply not available to most American cooks until well into the 20th century.
But red wine and beef are such an elemental combination that a stew of the two together is worth studying. Stews with wine must be cooked slowly. The alcohol, acidity and fruitiness that make wine lovely in the glass are not so nice in the serving bowl; they have to be tamed by cooking. But the tangy, syrupy taste they leave behind is an ideal counterpoint to red meat.
Like red wine, red meat benefits from slow, low cooking. You can read endless treatises by food science wonks about precisely how low-temperature cooking takes meat from tough to tender and back again, not to mention the roles played by plasma, muscle fibrils and collagen in how it tastes. But you don’t need to know any of that — just as your grandparents didn’t — to master a beef stew. What you do need to know is how to cook on low heat, which, in a modern kitchen, isn’t as easy as you would think. Preindustrial recipes assume that you are cooking on a wood-fired; for a home cook, simmering a stew to tenderness could take hours or even days.
For most of my life as a cook, whether making a stew, a braise, a daube or a ragù, I found it impossible to sustain “gentle” cooking on my gas burners. All those delicious French words for simmering: mijoter, to murmur; frémir, to shiver; mitonner, to cook quietly, were out of my reach. All I could do was bouillir (boil).
I’d tiptoe away from a barely simmering stew — as from a baby who has finally gone to sleep — and be summoned back five minutes later to find a heaving, splattering mass. While some cooks are on an eternal quest for more BTUs, hotter surfaces and bigger flames, I wish for the stovetop equivalent of a Sterno can.
So the first time I baked a stew in the oven, I felt as if someone had reinvented the wheel for me.
When I made a Roman-style oxtail stew, baked in a tightly covered pot, I was bowled over by its taste and texture, not to mention by how much easier it was to manage the heat. After that, there was no looking back.
Most of us rarely set our ovens below 325 F, but baking a stew at 300, or even 275, is ideal. The meat softens, but never collapses or
becomes stringy. The liquid and aromatics are fused into the kind of rich, complex sauce that professional chefs used to spend decades learning to achieve.
My favourite recipe has hints of rosemary, thyme, orange peel and juniper berries, uses a whole bottle of wine, and is thickened simply by crushing the longcooked potatoes and carrots into the sauce at the end. (It has been cobbled together from recipes by several South-of-France-loving food writers, like Richard Olney, Mireille Johnston and Patricia Wells.) Any herbs, vegetables and spices of your liking are equally viable.
It does take a good three to five hours to cook a big batch of stew this way. I am quite comfortable leaving my house with the oven on low; many people are not. But beef stew is a movable feast: You can cook it at night or over the weekend; or cook it for half the time, then refrigerate (or, in cold weather, leave it in the turned-off oven overnight). The cooking process can be completed the next evening, or beyond, and the finished stew can wait days (in
the refrigerator) before being served. (Like gingerbread, dark chocolate brownies and other dishes with powerfully flavoured ingredients, red-wine beef stew benefits from a rest before serving.)
In the oven, heat comes from all directions, not just from below, so there is no need to stir. All you need to capture it is a heavy pot with a heavy lid, like a Dutch oven or a cocotte. Because of the tight seal between pot and lid, the pressure in the pot seems to help the liquid penetrate the meat.