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Lugus Cooking Blog: Easy Beef Stew

  • Cooking Blog
  • 4 minutes (866 words)

Welkom to the first ever Lugus cooking blog. Today we will explore the world of tasty, hearty but more importantly easy beef stews. AS COVID-19 causes most of us to have a lot more time on our hands, there is no excuse to not put some time in making a dish.

 

The dish
Easy mustardy beef stew (yes, without shame, stolen from Jamie Oliver, but tweaked a bit). The dish requires almost no previous cooking experience, but will certainly not disappoint.

 

Cooking time
4 hours and 20 minutes (20 minutes of doing something and 4 hours of watching Netflix and waiting for the oven to do its thing)

  • About a kg of beef, preferably shin of beef from a butcher, but the “Runderlappen” from Albert Heijn will also do the trick
  • 300-400 gram of carrots
  • 200-300 grams of parsnip
  • 2 Large white onions
  • 120-150 ml of Worcestershire sauce (that hard to pronounce semi spicy brown liquid)
  • 3 heaped tablespoons of wholegrain mustard
  • Red wine, a kinda good one. If you would not drink it, you should not cook with it.
     
  • Optional:
    • Potatoes
    • Unsalted butter
    • Milk      
    • IMG-20201008-WA0019

 

Method

  1. Pour yourself a glass of wine or beer, turn on the oven and set it to 160 degrees Celcius.
  2. Get yourself a large pan, preferably a large casserole pan, and put on the gas on low-medium heat.
  3. Get your meat and start slicing them into chunks the size of two thumbs. Season them generously with salt and black pepper. Add a bit of olive oil to the pan.
  4. Wait until the olive oil starts to slightly smoke, then put in the meat. Depending on the size of your pan, you might only get to fit half of the meat in the pan. This is no problem; just fry the meat in two turns.  Make sure all the meat touches the surface of the pan (do NOT jam everything in, trust me; getting a nice dark crust on the meat makes it taste 10 times better).
  5. Fry the meat for 8-10 minutes and in case you fry in two turns, fry the rest of the meat.
  6. While the meat is cooking, grab a chef’s knife and start slicing the carrots and parsnip in chunks slightly smaller than the meat.
  7. After the meat is cooked, set it aside, and put the vegetables in the same pan (without washing it, even if there are some burned pieces at the bottom of the pan; we will use this later on). Fry for 5 minutes and in the meantime boil 800 ml of water.
  8. 20201008-142659
  9. Get the onions and slice each of them into 8 pieces. Throw them in the pan and fry for a couple of minutes.
  10. Add the meat to the pan. At this point a lot of delicious burned pieces will have started to collect at the bottom of the pan, so we are going to loosen them up. Turn up the heat and add red wine to the pan and with a wooden spoon or spatula, scrape the burned goodness form the bottom of the pan. Stir well and wait for the alcohol in the red wine to evaporate, this takes a minute or two.
  11. Get the whole grain mustard and add 2 or 3 heaped teaspoons to the pan. The amount of mustard is taste depended, so I suggest you start with this, but do not hesitate to add more later on if you like the taste. After, add the boiling water while stirring the pan and also add the Worcestershire sauce (start with the 120 ml, but again do not hesitate to add more if you like the dish to have a bit more of a kick).
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  13. Now give it one last stir through, put on the lit and transfer to the preheated oven. Now the fun part begins: you can almost leave the pan completely alone for the coming four hours, but I do recommend to stir the pan every 45 minutes or so and season to taste with pepper, salt, mustard or Worcestershire sauce.
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  15. (optionally) After three hours, boil a bunch of potatoes and wait for them to be soft enough to stab them with a fork without applying much pressure. Drain the water, add some milk, butter and a pinch of black pepper and start to mash with either a potato masher or a pole blender. You will end up with an easy, but delicious mashed potato (add some grated nutmeg if you feel like it).
  16. After four hours or so, take out the pan and if everything went well, you will be left with a hearty, meaty, soul-warming pan of brown goodness with the consistency of really thick soup. Take a couple of deep plates and serve with mashed potato or French fries (maybe not as fancy, but it is one of the best combinations out there).
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I hope everyone enjoyed reading through the first Lugus Cooking blog, be sure to try this recipe out some time! If this blog triggered the internal chef in you, and you would like to share any of your own favourite recipes, be sure to contact the board!

 

Written by Oscar Timte

 

 


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