The fifth recipe I made for the Cook the Book Fridays group using the Everyday Dorie cookbook by Dorie Greenspan is Beef and Beer Stew/Beef Carbonnade Chock Full of Vegetables, it can be found on pages 146-147.
Ingredients: allspice, cloves, flour, salt, pepper, beef chuck stew meat, canola oil, bacon, butter, onions, garlic, Belgian ale, beef broth, brown sugar, cider vinegar, grainy mustard, tomato paste, thyme, bay leaves, and noodles for serving. I also added carrots as suggested in the Beef Carbonnade Chock Full of Vegetables version, and dollop of sour cream.
Stew and Roast Season at our place is coming to an end soon as once the weather turns nice enough, we enter Grill Season and don’t look back until at least November. I’m happy to get this recipe in while it is still a bit temperate in temperature as there is nothing quite as comforting as a bowl of beef stew in the winter months. This recipe has a bit of fussing here and there (the amount of onions particularly as it took mine over 50 minutes to fully caramelize), but once that is all accomplished, it takes care of itself while it is cooking. We liked it well enough, we would have liked it much better without the addition of the brown sugar. Overall, it was too sweet for us, which is why we included a dollop of sour cream to try to combat that sweetness a bit. And in all fairness, the carrots I added also contributed to the sweetness, emphasized by the brown sugar. The onions are caramelized and they impart quite a sweet flavor, so the addition of the brown sugar, in my mind, was not necessary, unless you like your savory dishes with a bit of sweetness. Another time I will skip the addition of brown sugar. But that’s just us…you do you. Definitely worthy of repeating.
To see what others in the group made this week, click here, for the Cook the Book Fridays link. We don't publish recipes from the book here in deference to the author, but sometimes the author has been generous and you can find them online.