The Best Instant Pot Beef Stew Recipe - Easy Family Dinner (2024)

FAQs

Why is my stew meat tough in Instant Pot? ›

Additionally stew meat tends to have more tough gristle, which will never get tender. Using a large piece of boneless chuck allows you to easily trim off all the unwanted parts first, then cut the beef into uniform 1 1/2-inch pieces that will cook more evenly in the pressure cooker.

I almost always add some beef bouillon crystals to my stew, it helps oomph (yes, a technical term) the beefiness of the stock. Sometimes also use a few shots of worcestershire sauce or soy sauce - both will also add some oomph to the flavor.

The most important key to making stew meat tender is being sure to cook it for a long time. If you want super tender beef, you'll need to cook it on a low heat in a Dutch oven on the stove or a slow cooker for at least a few hours.

Taste: For overall taste, the pressure cooker was the hands-down winner. Beef, carrots, and potatoes all retained their rich flavors. After 8 hours in the slow cooker, they emerged bland and seemed to need salt.

Unfortunately, once you overcook a piece of meat in the pressure cooker, there's no going back. You'll be left with a pile of dry, crunchy, tasteless fibers and no amount of additional pressure cooking is going to put that moisture back into the meat.

After collagen breakdown, if you keep cooking, your meat won't be any more tender. Instead, the muscle fibers simply stop holding in any moisture and you can cook it for another week but it will simply be dry and tasteless. How do I make my meat soft? I want to make a beef stew.

The best cuts of stew meat are lean with a high concentration of collagen-rich connective tissues—such as chuck or shoulder cuts—that also have some fat marbling for flavor. Lean cuts of meat come from parts of the animal that have lots of muscle, like the legs.

What emerged was beef that dissolved into a dry, pulpy mass in your mouth as soon as your jaw moved. The flavor was there, all right, but the beef was totally destroyed (along with my mom's dreams of stew, and my ego). Turns out you definitely can overcook beef stew.

What is the most tender meat to use for beef stew? ›

The most tender and juicy beef stews always take at least a few hours to cook. Start with a cut with lots of connective tissue, such as beef shank, neck, or chuck, and be sure to cook the meat on a light simmer for at least a couple of hours.

Cook it slow and steady.

This gives collagens in the tough muscle tissue time to melt and make the meat tender. Try tasting a bite after an hour, two hours, and three hours — you'll see how the meat goes from chewy to pretty good to fall-apart tender.

This can be achieved by simmering the stew on low heat for a long period, either on the stovetop, in a slow cooker, or in the oven. The low and slow cooking technique allows the collagen in the meat to break down, resulting in tender and juicy meat.

Cooking meat does not make it tough, it gets more tender. Meat does get dry at higher temperatures, time does not matter that much. The higher the temperature the more moisture is squeezed out of the meat making it more dry, I guess that it what you describe as tough.

Now if your meat is tough after the stewing process, then there's a few things that might have gone wrong. Two options really, either it is really a poor cut of beef, or more likely it hasn't been cooked for long enough. Usually 3 hours in the oven in a casserole dish at 180C/350F should make any cut of beef tender.