What is stew meat

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Nothing quite beats a hearty, rich, warming beef stew on a cold, dark, winter's evening. Beef stew is comfort food for the cold, but before you crack out the cooking pot, you might be wondering: what is stew meat, and what is the best cut of meat for beef stew?

In today's article, we'll explore what stew meat is and why it's so essential for your beef stew that you get the right cut of meat. Grab your Dutch oven from the cupboard, prepare the potatoes, and get ready to start stewing! Stew meat, or stewing meat, is the principle cut of meat placed into a stew. Stewing is one of the oldest forms of cooking on the planet.

It's been around for as long as we've had firepits and pots. It's a simple, yet effective way of cooking that can leave tough cuts of meat as tender as a tenderloin steak! The premise behind stewing is slow cooking. Cuts of meat are slowly, slowly simmered in a broth, soup, or gravy. This gives the meat time to be slowly tenderized as it's exposed to low heat in a large pot or Dutch oven.

The best stews take the longest time to prepare, but there are relatively few ingredients that need to go into a good stew. Stews are found all over the world. There's Irish beef stew from Ireland, beef stroganoff from Russia, and goulash from eastern Europe.

Every country has its national stew, and traditionally, it's been the country's poorest that have eaten it. That's because stew meat is often considered to be the lowest quality meat. It's the leftover scraps and morsels that have been scrounged or scavenged.

You can technically stew any part of the animal, but that's not necessarily the best thing to do. Equally, the most expensive beef cut isn't going to be the best option for stewing and you're wasting your hard-earned money and a good cut of beef by cooking it the wrong way. As you'll see, though, the best stewing meat isn't the worst meat either, but we'll take a good, cheap stew over a rare and expensive wagyu cut any day!

And while a beef stew is the most popular style of stew, it's not the only ingredient. You can have chicken stews, sausage stews, cabbage stews, and so much more. Beef stew is a hearty, winter-warming favorite. Irish stew is served in a rich, gravy-like sauce with carrots, potatoes, and any other leftover vegetables you can find. In France, beef bourguignon might sound very fancy, but it's really just a tender, slow-cooked beef stew.

Even chili con carne is technically just a slow-cooked beef stew with a Tex-Mex twist. Beef is clearly a stewing favorite, and that's because when it's slow-cooked and simmered in thick sauces and gravies, you can really bring out the flavors while producing tender parcels of meat.

But to bring out the flavor and tenderness through stewing, you need to know what kind of beef for stew to choose.

You've probably picked up a packet of beef labeled 'stewing meat' or 'stewing beef'. Beef tenderloin? It's a weak muscle, which means that it's low in collagen and very tender—hence the name.

A cow's shoulder muscles, known as the chuck, on the other hand, support much of its body weight, which makes them very strong, collagen-rich, and, yup, you guessed it: tough. Other factors also help determine the amount of collagen, like age younger animals have more of it , but how much a muscle is used and its strength are the biggest predictors within any given animal. At this point, you're likely wondering what this has to do with stew. And, once again, the answer is collagen.

See, collagen is tough as heck when raw—you'll have as much luck chewing through it as my free-falling friend did completely tearing my ligament—but cook it long enough and it'll transform into meltingly soft gelatin, giving the meat a moist and tender texture. That gelatin will also seep into the surrounding stew liquids, increasing their viscosity and giving them rich body.

But simmer a low-collagen, tender-when-raw cut like tenderloin for three hours, and it'll turn horribly tough and dry. To give you a visual, I simmered lean, collagen-poor beef eye round for two hours. As you can see in the photo below, the cut has relatively little marbling—intramuscular fat and connective tissue i. Once fully cooked, it's pretty much a stew's worst nightmare, nothing but tight little bundles of parched muscle fiber.

What's interesting about all of this is that regardless of how much collagen a piece of beef has, it'll lose roughly the same amount of moisture when cooked. I weighed two equal, gram portions of beef, one chuck lots of collagen and connective tissue and the other eye round not much at all , then simmered them for two hours and re-weighed.

The chuck lost grams of its weight, while the eye round lost grams, a measly gram difference. That means both cuts dry out approximately the same amount, but the chuck, with the help of its gelatin, seems to be moister when you eat it.

The key, then, is to seek tough cuts of beef with plenty of collagen and fat for stews To find out how each of the six most common tough cuts performs, I browned each, then simmered them all in water until tender, which was about two hours in most cases. The following are some of the best cuts of beef for stewing, yielding meat that's juicy and tender even after long cooking:. Now let's take a closer look at each one to see what the advantages and disadvantages are.

The chuck is a primal cut from the forequarter of the cow and includes the shoulder, neck, and upper arm muscles. When I talk about the chuck here, though, I'm talking specifically about the meat from around the shoulder and not the arm or neck portions. It's a relatively cheap cut, with good flavor and lots of connective tissue and fat, making it a very appealing choice for stews.

The downside is that chuck is made up of many different muscles, so you're more likely to get irregular pieces—some leaner, some fattier, some tenderer, some tougher. Overall, it averages out in a good way. Verdict: This is your workhorse stew cut. It's readily available and affordable, and it performs admirably. Short ribs come from a primal cut on the underside of the cow called the plate, not, as one might expect, from the rib primal.

They are, in essence, the ribs right down where they get close to the belly. They tend to be more expensive than chuck, and you have to consider that some of what you're paying for is bone weight, but what they offer is a deep beefy flavor with a beautiful, even grain throughout.

Verdict: If you want consistency in both texture and flavor, short ribs are where it's at, but they come with a high price tag. This cut is a little harder to find unless you go to a good butcher. It comes from the sirloin, the part of the cow right in front of its hind legs.