How to Make Better Beef Stew — With Less Meat
Use this template and riff as you’d like
Our team spent weeks — years, really — developing “less-meatarian” recipes, classics that de-emphasized meat and rely preeminently on vegetables, grains, and legumes. Both the Food Matters and VB6 cookbooks feature those kinds of recipes, and the style has mightily influenced our cooking for more than 10 years now.
It’s a style that presents infinite opportunities. Finding myself with a pound of stew beef and a pantry full of (mostly) root vegetables, I decided to put the pressure cooker to work and produce a beef-and-root-vegetable stew that would stretch that pound of meat to serve 10 or 12 rather than three or four. We’ll eat it for days.
This recipe is a model, a guide. You can follow it precisely, and I can tell you it’s wonderful. But you can also use it as a template with room to improvise.
Bit o’ Beef Stew With Vegetables and Spices
Makes: At least 8 servings
Time: About 2 hours, with the pressure cooker
1. Take a handful, half or ¾ cup, of white beans and cook in twice as much water in the pressure cooker for a half-hour at high pressure. They should be done by then. Salt and set aside.
