Cuts of meat are slowly, slowly simmered in a broth, soup, or gravy. This gives the meat time to be slowly tenderized as it's exposed to low heat in a large pot or Dutch oven.
The best stews take the longest time to prepare, but there are relatively few ingredients that need to go into a good stew. Stews are found all over the world. There's Irish beef stew from Ireland, beef stroganoff from Russia, and goulash from eastern Europe. Every country has its national stew, and traditionally, it's been the country's poorest that have eaten it.
That's because stew meat is often considered to be the lowest quality meat. It's the leftover scraps and morsels that have been scrounged or scavenged. You can technically stew any part of the animal, but that's not necessarily the best thing to do. Equally, the most expensive beef cut isn't going to be the best option for stewing and you're wasting your hard-earned money and a good cut of beef by cooking it the wrong way. As you'll see, though, the best stewing meat isn't the worst meat either, but we'll take a good, cheap stew over a rare and expensive wagyu cut any day!
And while a beef stew is the most popular style of stew, it's not the only ingredient. You can have chicken stews, sausage stews, cabbage stews, and so much more. Beef stew is a hearty, winter-warming favorite. Irish stew is served in a rich, gravy-like sauce with carrots, potatoes, and any other leftover vegetables you can find. In France, beef bourguignon might sound very fancy, but it's really just a tender, slow-cooked beef stew.
Even chili con carne is technically just a slow-cooked beef stew with a Tex-Mex twist. Beef is clearly a stewing favorite, and that's because when it's slow-cooked and simmered in thick sauces and gravies, you can really bring out the flavors while producing tender parcels of meat. But to bring out the flavor and tenderness through stewing, you need to know what kind of beef for stew to choose. You've probably picked up a packet of beef labeled 'stewing meat' or 'stewing beef'.
It's commonly packaged up and sold in supermarkets, and it's remarkably cheap. It's also the worst kind of beef you can buy for stewing yes, despite its name!
It's the offcuts, the scraps, and the leftover gristle and fat from the better cuts. The butcher simply throws everything into a packet and labels it as fit for stewing.
Unfortunately, it's not the best option, purely because it's made of all the leftovers. It's also a good idea to keep your chunks consistent. If the pieces of meat aren't uniform in size, they will cook at different rates. If some of the cuts are not suited for stewing, you'll be left with an uneven stew. Some parts will be tender, other pieces not so much. Equally, you don't want to be using the most expensive cuts, either. These cuts tend to be the tenderest to begin.
While what we're aiming for by stewing is a tender outcome, we actually need cuts of meat that aren't already tender. The most delicate cuts of the beef are the cuts that are going to be toughened up by the stewing process. Tender steak is good for grilling quickly at high heat, but it's not made for stewing slowly at low heat.
There are a few contenders. You need a cut that's not fatty or tender, but that's lean and full of what's called collagen. This is your secret stewing ingredient. The more collagen, the better the cut is for stewing. Collagen is also known as connective tissue. Collagen takes a long time to break down, but it gives you an incredibly tender cut of beef when it does. That's why collagen-rich meat is best for stewing. The slow stewing process allows the collagen to slowly breakdown, gently tenderizing the meat as it does.
Now then, there are a few cuts of beef that do the job well when you're looking for stewing meat, but the best cut is always going to be the classic chuck roast.
The chuck roast is a collagen-heavy cut that comes from around the shoulder. To give you a visual, I simmered lean, collagen-poor beef eye round for two hours. As you can see in the photo below, the cut has relatively little marbling—intramuscular fat and connective tissue i.
Once fully cooked, it's pretty much a stew's worst nightmare, nothing but tight little bundles of parched muscle fiber. What's interesting about all of this is that regardless of how much collagen a piece of beef has, it'll lose roughly the same amount of moisture when cooked.
I weighed two equal, gram portions of beef, one chuck lots of collagen and connective tissue and the other eye round not much at all , then simmered them for two hours and re-weighed. The chuck lost grams of its weight, while the eye round lost grams, a measly gram difference. That means both cuts dry out approximately the same amount, but the chuck, with the help of its gelatin, seems to be moister when you eat it.
The key, then, is to seek tough cuts of beef with plenty of collagen and fat for stews To find out how each of the six most common tough cuts performs, I browned each, then simmered them all in water until tender, which was about two hours in most cases. The following are some of the best cuts of beef for stewing, yielding meat that's juicy and tender even after long cooking:.
Now let's take a closer look at each one to see what the advantages and disadvantages are. The chuck is a primal cut from the forequarter of the cow and includes the shoulder, neck, and upper arm muscles.
When I talk about the chuck here, though, I'm talking specifically about the meat from around the shoulder and not the arm or neck portions. It's a relatively cheap cut, with good flavor and lots of connective tissue and fat, making it a very appealing choice for stews. The downside is that chuck is made up of many different muscles, so you're more likely to get irregular pieces—some leaner, some fattier, some tenderer, some tougher.
Overall, it averages out in a good way. Verdict: This is your workhorse stew cut. It's readily available and affordable, and it performs admirably. Short ribs come from a primal cut on the underside of the cow called the plate, not, as one might expect, from the rib primal. They are, in essence, the ribs right down where they get close to the belly. They tend to be more expensive than chuck, and you have to consider that some of what you're paying for is bone weight, but what they offer is a deep beefy flavor with a beautiful, even grain throughout.
Verdict: If you want consistency in both texture and flavor, short ribs are where it's at, but they come with a high price tag. This cut is a little harder to find unless you go to a good butcher. It comes from the sirloin, the part of the cow right in front of its hind legs. According to one butchery book I have, it used to be left attached to T-bone steaks it made the steaks look like they had long, thin tails , but these days it's sold separately.
A lot of sources recommend high, dry heat for the cut, like grilling, and indeed it's delicious that way—meaty and buttery. But it turns out to work well as a stew meat, too. If I had to describe the taste and texture, it's almost like the love child of a hanger steak and a short rib, tender enough but still with some chew. Verdict: If you love deep beefy flavor and don't mind chewing a little more, you may like this one. Oxtails are, to my taste, one of the most delicious cuts to come from a cow—if not the most delicious.
It's a toss-up between them and tongue for me; I can't pick a favorite. They pack more gelatin and fat than any other cut I can think of, and their flavor Each cross section of the tail has a bone in the center that's filled with marrow.
As they cook, rendered fat from the marrow seeps out, basting the meat and flavoring everything in amazing ways.
The downside, though, is that those bones make up a good deal of their weight, and they add quite a bit of labor, too: If you want a stew made from oxtails, be prepared to fish them all out of the sauce at the end, flake the meat off, and discard the bones before returning it to the pot. The fact that you have to pull the meat from the bones also means you're not likely to get nice little cubes of beef in the final stew; morsels and shreds are mostly what you'll end up with.
One more consideration: In my tests, the oxtails took close to three hours before they were tender enough to serve, and could have easily used another hour if I'd wanted the meat to fall off the bones.
Compare that to two hours for the other cuts I tested except shanks, which also needed three hours. Verdict: Their flavor is hard to beat, and they'll deliver more gelatin to your stew than you'll know what to do with, but it comes at the expense of an extra-long cooking time, low meat yield per pound, and plenty of bone-picking work. Brisket comes from the breast of a cow and is most often smoked for barbecue and cured to make pastrami, though braising it whole is also popular.
It's divided into two parts: the leaner flat or "first cut" and fattier point "second cut" or "deckle". The lean flat is far easier to find than the point, which is a shame because the point is far juicier and moister, thanks to all that fat in it.
For stews, I'd steer clear of the flat, since it'll end up tough and dry, which means that hard-to-find point is what you'd need. One of the best things about brisket is how cheap it is—at my butcher, it cost less than the chuck. After a couple of hours in the stew pot, it was moist and had a pronounced beef tallow flavor, much more so than the other cuts due to its ample fat.
The muscle fibers themselves are thick verging on ropy, which I didn't love in a stew context. Verdict: The point cut of brisket wins on cost and moistness, but it's otherwise not my favorite, given its ropy muscle fibers. This cut is best known for its use in osso buco , though it traditionally comes from veal in that dish. It's a cross section of the cow's legs, which is why you get that single big bone in the center.
Beef shanks aren't usually cheap, and on top of that, you have to account for the fact that a good third of each piece is bone weight though, as a bonus, you get to eat the marrow after!
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