Ultimate beef stew with seasoned dumplings

I love stews! Getting wonderful ingredients together and gradually, step by step, blending those flavours in with one another. Beef is the kind of meat which will become so beautifully tender when braised over a few hours too. It’s a joy to eat, but also to make.

What I love to do is get the seasoning – salt, black pepper, and aromat too if that’s your thing – all together first into the big saucepan or casserole dish you’ll be using. Keep the hob off for now. Now get your meat (I like to use topside of beef personally), cut it up into the desired-sized chunks, and put into the dish. Add olive oil and, with the hob still off for now, mix around all the beef with the seasoning and oil, and once you’re happy that all the beef is evenly smothered with the seasoning, put the hob onto maximum temperature and let the heat slowly rise.

Cooking the meat like this on a cold temperature and working up to a hot temperature will draw out all the moisture from the meat, meaning that as you cook and move around the meat the juices will smother the meat and impart even more flavour into it, whilst the water content merely evaporates.

Whilst the beef is getting seared, you can chop up all the veg you’ll be using. I like to use mushrooms, leeks, carrots, baby potatoes and onion. I chop all the veg into big chunks. Keep an eye on the meat and turn over the chunks accordingly. Chop garlic finely, and add that and the onion to the meat once it’s nearly cooked. Mix well, making sure the onions soften and caramelise.

Once all the liquid has gone from the dish, add three or four cans of chopped or plum (I prefer plum) tomatoes, adding about 100ml of water too (you can put the water into the cans and wash out all of the remaining tomato juice for this). Now’s a good time to add the rest of the seasoning. Rosemary, thyme and oregano always work brilliantly with stews. I also add a few dashes of Worcester sauce at this stage, along with a small dash of white wine vinegar to add a great kick to the flavours. Add two or three beef stock cubes, and mix well.  If you’re using plum tomatoes, puncture them so even more juice is released into the dish.

Get the potatoes in now as they take much longer to cook than the rest of the veg. Mix well, and turn the heat down to the lowest temperature. Leave for a few hours, and when you’re about half hour away from dinner time, add the rest of the veg.

For the dumplings, it’s suet, self-raising flour and water. But I also add salt and oregano for an extra punch of flavour. I also oven-bake them as I like mine dry and hard rather than soft and stodgy (which is sometimes what you get when cooking them in the stew).