Beef stew: a progression

When I was in the sixth grade, my mom ended her term as a the stay-at-home variety and became the working type. Once or twice a week my older sister and I were encouraged to help out by cooking the evening meal for the family.

I would love to have a heartwarming tale of how this responsibility jumpstarted my passion for cooking, but I’m afraid we were too busy baking pans of brownies and sheets of cookies. Our cooking didn’t progress much beyond my mother’s basic instructions for getting a skillet of chicken and rice or a pot of beef stew simmering.

And that stew was far from memorable. We would combine stew meat with potatoes and carrots. (Our unadventurous palates rebelled against adding such aromatics as … shudder … onions.) Then we’d pour a can of tomato juice over the top and stick it in the oven for a few hours.

With this dish as the archetype for beef stew, it took years before I felt like making it as an adult. When I finally ventured to look at recipes, I was surprised to find that tomato juice wasn’t featured at all, and that the sauce was generally beef broth and maybe wine, perhaps with a touch of tomato paste added for umami.

And speaking of umami, that fifth food flavor that is essentially yumminess itself, how about mushrooms? Though eleven-year-old me never would have gone for it, I now embrace this addition wholeheartedly.

Last week I thawed a couple of packages of Svec Farm beef stew meat and got to work. I used this recipe as my jumping off point, though I modified it more ways than I can recall to recount at the moment. (I’m sure it’s absolutely fabulous as written.)

Compared to the dump-and-bake method of my youth, this version requires a considerable amount of additional time and effort. And suffice it to say that it is completely worth it.

So go ahead. Find quality grassfed beef and brown it (in batches!) in bacon grease before you tuck it into a sauce of homemade beef stock and wine.

Buy the herbs. Add those aromatics and umami boosters. Sauté the mushrooms in butter.

Reduce your sauce on the stove before adding it back to your stew.

And definitely serve it over creamy mashed potatoes.

Whichever side of eleven years old you find yourself on, you’re sure to love the result.