Skillet Beef and Beer Stew

Feeling somewhat inspired after watching Julie and Julia the other day, our experience cooking beef stew tonight had me thinking about how i would love to blog about this experience. The reason being that I rarely ever cook beef and my knowledge of different cuts of meat and how they should be cooked is very limited. Cooking is a fun activity that my sister and I engage in together all the time, and learn how to make a new recipe almost every week, although we generally stick to basic meats like chicken... there i dark or there is white meat two options, limitless ways to cook the chicken and it will taste good.

But, with pork and beef, it's a whole seemingly limitless variety of different cuts, each needing to be cooked a particular way in order to be good. You cannot fry a roast and get nice tender pieces of meat, the roast has to be slow cooked or cooked with a lot of liquid. Needless to say, when Sarah began to read the recipe to me, it sounded delicious and I wanted to try it although we had no idea what the cut of beef should be. It called for "12oz beef round roast cut into cubes", which we wrote down word for word on our grocery list. What we ended up buying was "Outside round oven roast." Now, I'm not sure about exactly how many different beef cuts there are, but I wouldn't be surprised to find out that the use of the word "outside" is actually important and that it means it need to be cooked for really long time to be good. That's the reason why I'm even making note of the distinction between what the recipe asks for and what we bought!

Even just choosing our piece of meat was an adventure! We got to Sobey's and conveniently the cut of meet which we bought was on sale! That was a good start, but then we had to choose our piece and we were clueless again! I don't know what to look for when choosing a good cut of beef, but we ended up choosing the piece that had the least visible fat because we were going to trim it off anyways although I had the fear that maybe this will end actually having a negative effect on the moistness and tenderness of the beef after it had been cooked.

Anyways, we had our meat, and that's one thing done: we've chosen the right cut of meat and it was on sale, and we think we've picked a good piece.

So, we cut up the meat into cubes that are a "stew" size, and then we made the stew. The stew smelled really good as we were cooking it, but I thought that maybe the meat would not get to cook long enough to absorb a lot of flavor, and we were right. The meat turned out good, it was tender, but it was not as flavorful as I would have liked. This probably could have been achieved by tenderizing the beef first and then, if we had had more time, we could have cooked the stew for longer.

Sarah is set on getting a slow cooker now though which will be awesome because we can throw together slow cooker recipes in the morning and have nice tender beef dishes ready!

So.... how was our overall beef experience? Well, thankfully, we bought the right cut of beef which we cut up with no major events! Overall, I would have just wanted the beef to have had more flavor, but that can be attributed to the short cooking time, not spicy enough sauce and (maybe) that we didn't tenderize the beef first.

We'll try again, and I'll let you know how it goes!