Hearty Beef and Stout Stew

I think this just may be the best CL beef stew recipe I've made yet. And I've tried a lot of them. Thanks to the reviewer's notes before me, I opted to use my slow cooker to make the beef more tender and it worked perfectly. I prepared the stew as directed but held back the carrots and mushrooms until the last hour in the crock pot. Total cooking time in the crock pot was around 5 hours on low heat. I used the beef broth and flour at the end along with the soy sauce. The best sauce, even DH commented how delicious it was. We served this with CL's Cauliflower Mash recipe from January 2014.

I thought this was a really tasty recipe, especially with the mashed potatoes/kale they suggest. I agree that the beef was a little tough. I would either use a more tender cut or cook it longer (maybe during the 15 minutes the sauce is thickening).

The flavor of the sauce was amazing, but the beef was too tough. I'm going to try by placing the meat in a slow cooker for a few hours after browning and deglazing the pan.

So delicious. We cooked this in a cast iron dutch oven, omitted the mushrooms and added a few extra veggies instead. We seared the meat all around then let it rest before slicing and adding it back into the pot. Also, we enjoy a thicker stew so we added 2 more tablespoons of flour. We had no issues with timing - everything took about as long as the recipe suggested. Definitely take the time to make the mashed potatoes and kale, as shown in the photo. Fantastic way to warm a winter evening.

Easy to make, though the meat ends up being very tough. Perhaps I'll try it again with beef fillet. As is I would not try it again. Didi

I doubled this recipe and it turned out really good. It only took about 40-50 minutes to pull together, but I did use pre-cut carrots and onions. The stout added a nice depth to the broth. Next time I would cut back on the soy sauce to see how that effected the taste but other than that it was very popular with my family and the leftovers were great the next day.

This recipe took approximately 2 hours from start to finish, with little to no downtime. It is NOT a 40 minute recipe! It is a good recipe - but not great. One of the "fast features" of the recipe is to cut the chuck into thin slices and then cook for just a few minutes - while that results in quickly cooked meat - you would be better off braising/roasting the meat, as this quick approach result s in a tougher meat for which you need a knife. Bottom line, the sauce/flavor is good but you would be better off taking more time and braising/roasting the meat.