Perfecting Beef Stew

What base ingredients belong in a beef stew, and what ingredients are often added to enhance it?
I'm looking to perfect my beef stew recipe and want to see how others prepare theirs to garner things I may not be doing.

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It's more technique than ingredient.

Salt and let sit for several hours. Season, and fry. Let sit, then divvy the pieces.

Then probably root vegetables.

After that you have to make a stew using great herbs, aeromatics, spices, and everything else while in the end incorporating the beef to break down the cartilage into soft stew, and timing the root vegetables in to the overall product.

It's 80% method, 20% ingredients at best.

Depends entirely on what kind of stew you're trying to make. Beef stews range from Boeuf Bourguignon to Rendang Curry to Borscht to Chili con Carne; there's all kinds of beef stews.

But you're talking about that Sunday night football fuel, best served over mashed potatoes, way better than Campbell's chunky soup stew...

Essential ingredients:
-Beef, obviously. I like to use chuck cuts for stew. Remove any extraneous connective tissues and fat, those parts will not break down during cook time. Cut into good-sized chunks, keeping in mind they will shrink during cooking. Some recipes recommend coating the meat with flour before browning to help thicken the stew. This works but many modern cooks shy away from thickening sauces with starches and other liasons; most chefs would reduce the stock used to thicken the soup in the end. There's also something to be said for using a good roux, see: gumbo. Do what you want. Almost always brown the meat first, and then deglaze the pan with...

-Cooking liquid: This will usually be some beef stock, a good red wine, or both. Or water, if times are really tough (and you somehow got beef for cheap? use something decent ffs)

-Vegetables: All up to you, this is what differentiates beef stews. In chili, you'd use chili peppers obviously. For Bourguignon, onions (cipolini or some other small onion), mushrooms (flambe them with cognac unless you've got chantrelles or something) and I like to add carrots even though they aren't really authentic. Many people add potatoes to beef stew, but I don't because I like to eat mine over mashed potatoes, or a potato galette if I'm a fancy fucker. You could also throw in peas, green beans, and the like near the end of the cooking time if you like. Tomatoes get a mention here, as they're usually present in western stews in the form of tomato paste. To be honest, they're basically a form of natural MSG added to whatever you're cooking, and the myriad ways of cooking them for inclusion in stew (other than chopping and tossing them in) are endless.

-Herbs: Thyme is almost universally present in western beef stews. Some recipies call for bay leaves but that doesn't make sense if you're using a good stock to cook with, which already had that flavor imparted in the first place. Eastern recipes will have all kinds of shit thrown in depending on where the recipe is from. Dill is common in most Eastern European recipes, and it works well. Oregano doesn't make much sense with beef at all really. Cumin and coriander are ubiquitous with beef curries throughout most of Asia but that's beyond the scope of this thread I guess.

-Etc: Treating each ingredient individually is the key to an outstanding beef stew. As I mentioned before, brown your meat, flambe your mushrooms, and such. Frying tomatoes before adding them to the mix yields amazing results.

-Last tip: If you have access to/know how to make demiglace, add a tablespoon or so at the end of cooking and stir it in. That will turn your simple beef stew into memeshit Michelin Star worthy stew of the gods.

Mushrooms are my favorite ingredient in beef stew. Hearty and tasty.

Quality post. Everything here is basically true for any hunk of animal you want to cook. The parts change a bit, but the general methedology is the same

Plenty of sweet onion. Don't dice. Slice very thickly, into only 4-5 sections for each onion. Brown in oil. They sections fall apart during the process. You don't want them very crispy just brown and translucent. Deglaze the pan to get every bit of that good onion flavor added to the broth.

Vegemite/marmite.

>Vegemite/marmite.

wat

keep it simple, cook in layers. sautee mirex poix, brown beef properly, deglaze with good red wine, add quality stock, add portion of veg, salt pepper thyme bay leaf, let it stew, add rest of veg.