As autumn draws in I'm craving a good, hearty beef stew. This slow cooker recipe makes the cheapest cuts of meat taste like the most expensive. By batching cooking this beef stew you'll have quick and easy weeknight dinners on a budget and healthy to boot.
We don't have beef very often because it is so expensive. In fact part of me thinks it may be a little misleading to call this a budget recipe as it's one of the most expensive dishes we eat. But even having splurged on good quality fresh beef it's still only 76p per serving, a budget recipe by most people's standards.
Ingredients and Tools:
2kg Beef Joint £10.59
Garlic 16p
1kg Onions 50p
1kg Carrots 59p
1kg Frozen Peas 62p
2.5kg Potatoes £1.20
Plain Flour 5p
Beef Stock 12p
Rosemary - from the garden
Total = £13.83
Makes 18 servings = 76p per serving
Food purchased from Aldi
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Instead of buying the ready cut chunks of beef for stews it's cheaper to get a big roasting joint and cut it up yourself.
In my experience enough flour to coat the beef is just the right amount to thicken a beef stew like this one.
Instead of using a separate bowl to toss the beef chunks in flour I'm using the same pan I'm going to be cooking it in. This will save me time and money when it comes to the washing up.
I love my stainless steel skillet. The sides on this one are nice and high so I can easily brown enough beef for a big batch cook. It's stainless steel so I can scrape off all that lovely burnt on flavour and add it to the slow cooker.
I'm also using the same pan to fry the garlic.
Normally I would use my food processor to dice the onions but for this beef stew recipe I really want the vegetables to be nice and chunky, so I'm chopping them by hand.
As soon as the garlic has started to cook I throw the onions into the same pan to fry them.
I'm leaving the skin on the potatoes, mostly because I'm short on time. I think the beef stew would taste better with peeled potatoes but there's lots of vitamins in the skins, or so I've heard. I guess it's a matter of personal preference and for me it's more often than not a question of how much time I have availible.
So I've loaded my browned beef chunks and onions into the slow cooker. I've started added the potatoes and it's almost full. There's no way I can fit the rest of the potatoes never mind the carrots and peas. This is a common problem with doing a particularly big batch cook. This is how I solve it.
I add the stock and herbs to the slow cooker along with the meat and onions.
This gets stirred and cooked as normal, on low for at least 4 hours for this beef stew recipe.
The rest of the veg goes into my trusty stock pot. I'll boil them about half an hour before the slow cooker has finished cooking.
I then mix together the contents of the slow cooker so that's the meat and everything that gives it flavour, with the boiled vegetables.
A there we have a really hearty dish of beef stew.
Here are a couple of my other beef stew recipes.
