Hawaiian-Style Beef Stew | Food Wishes

Hello, this is Chef John from foodwishes.com with Hawaiianstyle beef stew. That's right. I thought I knew about all the beef stews there were to do, but then I found out about this and realized that wasn't true. So, I gave it a try and it was incredible. And now I'm going to show you how to do what might actually be the best beef stew. And to get started, let's go over the most important tip in this entire video, which is not to buy pre-cut stew meat, but rather get a nice piece of beef chuck and cut it up yourself. And not just because it's going to be cheaper and it's super easy to do, but because you can pick out the piece of meat you want in the butcher case, so you're able to get something beautifully marbled like this. And since a beef stew is only going to be as good as the beef that goes in it, I cannot stress the importance of this enough. And what we'll do is cut that into about one and a half inch pieces. Although a little smaller or a little bigger will work, right? The key is to try to get them relatively uniform so these pieces of meat get tender at the same time. And once we do have our beef prepped, I'm going to season it right on the board by sprinkling over some kosher salt, followed by half the amount of the flour called for. And what we'll do is give that a thorough tossing until those pieces of meat are evenly coated. And you know what the salt does, but what this flour is going to do is dry the surface, which is going to help us get a beautiful brown crust on the meat when we brown it up in the next step. And for that, we will heat up some vegetable oil in our stew pot set over high heat. And we will transfer those freshly fled pieces of meat into the pot. And then we'll proceed to brown those very well on at least two sides. All right, that's the minimum. And if you have the time and patience, you could do four sides or even all six if you want. But I think two very well brown sides is probably enough for this. And yes, to ensure better browning, you want to do this in two batches probably. So even though I won't show you the second batch, that's exactly what I did. But anyway, once that meat's been transferred into a bowl, we'll set that aside for now. And we'll reduce our heat to medium high. And we will transfer in our roughly chopped up onion. And we'll cook that stirring for a couple minutes or until it just starts to turn translucent, at which point we'll transfer in about 3 tablespoons of tomato paste, which ended up being way more exciting than I thought it was going to be. But anyway, once that gets transferred in, we'll cook this stirring for about 3 or 4 minutes or until that tomato paste starts to kind of brown onto the edges of the onions. And while this is sort of an optional step, I think the depth of flavor you get if you do this makes the couple extra minutes this takes more than worthwhile. And that's it. Once we've toasted that tomato paste a little bit, we'll sprinkle in the rest of our flour. And we'll cook that stirring for a few minutes to take off that raw pasty edge. And once we feel like that's happened, we will dump in our second tomato product, which is just going to be some plain tomato sauce or tomato puree or crushed tomatoes. or really any kind of tomato product will work. And then we'll follow that with some beef broth or if things are going well for you, some beef bone broth. And we'll go ahead and stir that in and raise our heat to high. And we'll wait for this to come to a boil. And while it does, we can add the other two key ingredients, which is going to be some worsture sauce as well as a whole bunch of soy sauce. And in case you're wondering, the things that make a regular beef stew a Hawaiian style beef stew would be the additions of the tomato as well as the soy sauce and possibly the woreser sauce. Right, the tomato and soy for sure. And even though not all the recipes call for the wishes, to my taste, I think it's an important addition. And then once things do come up to a boil, we'll transfer in our browned beef along with any and all accumulated juices. And we'll give that a stir and reduce our heat to low or whatever heating setting gets you a nice gentle simmer. And what we'll do is cover this tightly. And we will let it simmer for 1 hour to give it a nice head start before we add the rest of the ingredients. And after about 60 minutes, this is what mine look like. And what we'll do at this point is go ahead and add our black pepper plus a few shakes of cayenne. So people know this is our recipe. And by the way, we could have added that earlier, and I would have, but I forgot. And that's it. We'll also add in our stew veggies, which will be some celery and carrots, as well as some potatoes, of course. And I'm using some nice big Yukon Gold, which I peeled and cut into some nice big pieces. Okay. I usually don't like to cut the potatoes too small, since we don't want those totally falling apart while this cooks. And then we'll cover this back up and we'll let it simmer gently on low for another hour. at which point our meat's probably not going to be done yet. But what we'll do is uncover this and give it a nice stir. And then we'll continue cooking without the cover on for another hour or so, stirring occasionally. And we'll do that until our meat is very, very tender. And as usual, as is simmers, if you want to skim some of the fat off the top, feel free. I mean, you guys are after all the grandpa sees of whether you should decrease. And by the way, the Grandpa Cy I just referred to is Grandpa Clarence, whose recipe I adapted this one from. So, a big thanks to him. And by finishing this uncovered, our sauce will reduce down a little bit, which is going to thicken things up. And at this point, any of that fat that wasn't skimmed off is basically going to get emulsified in, which not only adds some flavor, but it also gives our stew a lovely shine. But anyway, like I said, we'll simply continue simmering uncovered until our meat is nice and tender. And since this meat seemed to be just about perfect, I was down to one last task, which is of course tasting for seasoning and maybe sneaking in another pinch of salt or a little splash of soy, but that was tasting really good as is. And once it is, we can grab a ladle and serve up. And by the way, if you don't want it quite this thick and you want something a little brothier, just simply reduce the amount of flour by half and you'll end up with something a little bit thinner in texture. But either way, I recommend we serve this with rice. And then I finished up with a little bit of freshly ground black pepper, plus a scattering of green onions. And then I grabbed a fork and a spoon and went in for the official taste. And that, my friends, as I mentioned in the intro, just might be the best version of beef stew. And the umami level, which is what us foodies call something that's super savory, is just off the charts. In fact, it's so flavorful, it can actually break your mouth. I mean, not literally, but metaphorically, oh yeah. So, I really did love everything about this, and I really do hope you give it a try soon. So, please follow the links below for the ingredient amounts, a printable written recipe, and much more info as usual. And is always in joy.