Tender Beef Is Earned, Slowly
A tale of two beef stews.
I’m going to do that food writing thing where I tell you a longwinded story before I get to the point. So, just in case you are in a pinch and you just want the information: if you’ve tried the beef in your beef stew an hour into cooking and it’s tough, put it back in the pot and keep cooking it. It’s going to get more tender.
Doesn’t that seem like some witchcraft or something? I’m still baffled by it. But, alas — my beef stew was tough. As in, I almost threw it away tough. And by the next morning, it had become tender and wonderful.
Here’s the story, if you feel like a story. I had family coming over this weekend. We were headed to a school fundraiser and I didn’t know how much, or what kind of, food was going to be there. Two of my family members are on low-carb diets. Having recently been on a (different) diet myself, I know how challenging it can be to go into unknown food situations, so I let them know I’d make a low-carb beef stew that they could eat before the event.
I had a lot going on this weekend. I had to bake a bunch of stuff for the aforementioned fundraiser, I had to make a Clifford the Big Red Dog costume for my kid, I had to do meal planning for the coming week (which…didn’t…happen). It would have been easier to skip the stew. But the stew was important to…
