Alright so today yall are gonna learn some beef stew whether you want to or not. I recommend jamming the new prefuse while you read this, because that is what I am doing.
Step 0, make sure your kitchen is dirty as all hell, because food tastes better that way. Ask Gordon Ramsay.
Step 1, go to the HEB and get some stew ingredients, or as I call them, stewgredients (I don’t call them this). For this particular stew, my stewgredients are celery, carrots, potatoes, garlic, mushrooms, onions, some stew beef, and assorted shit I had already like salt. God damn you don’t have any salt? What a transient. Feel free to put other crap in your pot, or leave stuff out (except at least one onion, you need that mfer). Tomatoes, squash, cabbage, other meats, whatever, you are making this so put whatever your tiny black heart desires.
Oh you will also want to get some wine, because this bitch is heavy and it is tough to get more than one or two beers down with it, and you want to get full and drunk right? If not gtfo. Since we are eating beef you are going to get a red wine, I recommend a merlot because its got the most alcohol in it and I am sort of toasted on one now. But really I don’t know dick about wine so drink whatever you want.
Anyways, so get all your shit and you should have something like this:
stewgredients
Step 2: Prepare your veggies. That means cut up your potatoes, get rid of that weird middle leafy celery, chop your onions, etc. Now, I got two onions because I wanted to leave one huge for the the stew and chop another one up fine for the fond (french for “shit stuck to the bottom of the pan”).
Step 3: Get your stew pan (one pan cooking here folks) and put some olive oil in the bottom.
A quick asside here, I am not going to be using any measurements because I am assuming that you have the basic modicum of culinary ability to know how much fucking olive oil to use to cook some onions and garlic. Also this is your stew so make how you want.
So toss some onions and garlic around in oil and let them cook for a little, The idea here is to get them sort of yellow and stuck to the bottom as to impart their condensed flavor.
This will smell fuckin awesome. You can use butter here too, but I have some olive oil for the time being. So before they get all burned and nasty, take them out of the pan and save them somewhere.
Step whatever we are on: Next you want to put your stew beef in. Now on mine I put some salt, pepper, and a little bit of flour to give it a nice crust. You may need some more olive oil here, try not to suck so bad as to not know. The idea is to just brown the outside so after it stews for a few hours it still has some nice flavor and colour (the u means classy) on the outside parts.
After it has seared on both sides, take it out and cut that bitch up into manageable pieces. You could cut it up before hand but then it is tougher to get an even sear on the whole thing yo. Try to resist the caveman urge to eat it right now:
Ok so now comes the cool part. Get your beverage, preferably some wine and dump into your still hot pan which hopefully has little stuck on bits of beef, onion, and garlic. This is called deglazing and the liquid is used to scrape up all that condensed flavor on the bottom. Now my fucking grocery store wouldn’t sell me wine at 10am even though I wasn’t going to get drunk! Ok so I probably would have had a glass even that early in the morning but its only because its the Julia Child way. You should always be as drunk as possible while cooking.
Anyways, so deglaze your shit, toss the rest of your ingredients in, including the stew meat and the onions you took out earlier. Now, for the base of the soup you have a few options. If you are hardcore like some fucking Alton Brown wannabe you have your freezer full of soup stocks, so go ahead and use one of those. If you are a normal person like the rest of us you can either use water (what I use, go fuck yourself) or a premade stock or boullion cube. To be honest most of that shit is just salt so I don’t mess with it. Honestly I just put all the shit into the pot, and cover with water and let it sit for 6 hours. All the beef and vegetable flavors come out and its not hella salty and nasty. I hate the taste of premade stocks but what do I know.
At this point feel free to put in whatever seasonsings you want. However I would suggest to err on the light side of things, becuase you can always add more later! The main thing that makes you a good cook is tasting. So a few hours in grab a taste of this and see what it needs. Probably salt, and heat. You can use black pepper and shit but I like to add some cayenne because it is awesome. I also like to add some rosemary because I am usually too ghetto to have some fresh laying around to add in when its done. But definitely use some, because beef and rosemary go together like coke and hookers. After adding your seasonings go sit around and get high watching basketball for 6 hours and come back to something like this:
Also your house will smell like stew while you are making this so strap in. When its done (you will know because you are tasting it, right?) serve in whatever fashion you like. Like I said a before a sprig of fresh rosemary would be totally tits, but I usually garnish mine with tears of loneliness and as much booze as I can cram down my gullet. Oh and toast.
Don’t make fun of my wine glass. Mine were all dirty and I will take a clean regular cup over washing a dirty wine glass every time.
ENJOY