Mastering the Art of Beef Stew (Published 2018) (2024)

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. (Cooking wine, which is salted and shelf stable, was invented for American grocery stores.)

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 or coal-fed stove; for a home cook, simmering a stew to tenderness could take hours or even days.