March 17, 2023

A Recipe for Stout Irish Stew

It’s Friday afternoon, the day after our homebrew club’s St. Paddy’s Day Potluck.

It’s also been a long stretch without a break from translation projects and beer writing projects, a few of which you’ll soon see in print.

And it’s been quite some time now since I posted a recipe. The last time was just as the pandemic hit, when I wrote an article about fermenting cabbage into sauerkraut.

So it’s nice to take a break from writing by … writing. Writing about something completely different for change is actually quite relaxing.

And today’s actually St. Patrick’s Day, so there’s that, too. If you’re like me and have left your food plans till the last minute, you might just get this recipe in time for your St. Paddy’s Day festivities over the weekend. In this case, fortune favours the procrastinators. Even if you don’t cook this for dinner this weekend, it’s still stew season for at least another month.

*I’ve included a number of tips below. These are helpful for any stew you’ll make, from goulash to stoofvlees (Flemish stew).

Stout Irish Stew

Ingredients:

2.5 lbs. lamb shoulder, cubed
4 oz country ham, diced (see note below on bacon)
2 onions, cut in large dice
3 garlic cloves, chopped coarsely
3 celery sticks, trimmed and cut on the diagonal in ½-inch slices
3 carrots, trimmed and cut on the diagonal in ½-inch slices
2 tomatoes, diced
6 sprigs fresh thyme
2 bay leaves
2 bottles Guinness Extra Stout (330mL/11.2 oz.)
2 cups stock (see note below)
2 tbsp tomato paste
1.5 tsp sea salt, divided
1 tsp freshly ground black pepper, divided
2-3 tsp brown sugar

Directions:

Trim meat of excess fat (no need to be too vigilant), cut into large cubes (about 2 inches), and then mix in ¾ tsp salt and ½ tsp freshly ground black pepper.

In a skillet, render the fat from the diced country ham or bacon, then remove and place in a casserole. Over medium-high heat and working in batches, brown the meat cubes on all sides. Remove to the casserole. Reduce heat slightly about partway through so that the bacon fat doesn’t burn.

Brown onions with heat at medium-high. They’ll start to release their juices, which will take up some of the browned bits from the meat. Keep sautéing till the juices evaporate and the onions start to brown, about 7-10 minutes all told. Add the carrots and celery and sauté for about 2 minutes, then add garlic and sauté until the garlic turns aromatic (careful not to burn it). Remove all of this to the casserole.

Deglaze skillet with one bottle of beer, add the tomato paste and dissolve, then scrape it all into the casserole.

Add the diced tomatoes, the other bottle of beer, the stock, 2 tsp of the sugar, the rest of the salt and pepper, and the bouquet garni of thyme and bay leaves to the casserole and slowly bring everything up to the point where the liquid starts to boil.

Cover, reduce heat to low, and simmer. Check seasoning after an hour and add more salt, pepper, or sugar if necessary. Give it all a good stir, cover, and simmer for another 1.5 hours. Check the doneness of the meat, adjust seasoning, and reduce the stewing liquid (see note below).

Cooking tips:

Meat

Lamb is classic in an Irish stew — or, more accurately from a historical point of view, mutton. But if you find the strong flavour of mutton a bit much (or, more likely, if you can’t even find mutton), lamb shoulder is the way to go. But you won’t in any way be considered a heretic if you use beef in your Irish stew. If lamb’s too hard to come by, use beef chuck, the best beef cut there is for stewing. You could also do a 50/50 mix of lamb shoulder and beef chuck.

Country ham/bacon

This gives you the fat you need for browning your meat (and adds nice flavour to boot). I use country ham in this recipe merely because I have a tonne of it on hand. En route to bourbon country in early 2015, we decided it would be a great idea to buy a whole leg of country ham at Benton’s Smoky Mountain Country Hams in eastern Tennessee. Needless to say, it was a bit more than we could eat, so we eventually took it to a butcher, who sliced it into thin rounds that we’ve kept in the freezer ever since. The flavour is more funky, “gamey,” and phenolic than bacon, but it adds an interesting flavour dimension all its own. Use some if you have on hand. If not, bacon’s bacon in all its awesomeness, after all.

Browning the meat

This is one of those process steps that reminds me a bit of debates around decoction in Central European brewing. Some people swear by it, others claim it makes no difference in flavour, still others acknowledge that while you can taste the difference, the result doesn’t completely redeem the amount of time and effort. (For what it’s worth, I’m in the decoction camp for beers brewed professionally, and in the latter camp when I’m brewing at home.).

So. Browning meat. Here’s where I stand. Yes, it takes a goodly amount of extra time. (Figure in about an extra 20-30 minutes on the front end, depending on how large your recipe is, and then time on the back end cleaning up all the grease splatters that have varnished your stove to a nice sheen.) But the extra layers of flavour from Maillard reactions and deglazing the pan does contribute to a richer and more complex dish.

Now, you’ll get a perfectly good stew if you don’t brown your meat ahead of time. In fact, Irma S. Rombauer’s recipe in an older edition of The Joy of Cooking declares right off the top that “this famous stew is not browned” (1973, p.423). Besides that, a number of different culinary traditions don’t brown the meat ahead of time. The tagine of northern Africa is but one example.

At the end of the day, the choice is up to you. I haven’t cooked an Irish stew using the Joy of Cooking method yet, but I’d imagine that the tradeoff is a lighter stew with more distinct flavours of the ingredients in comparison with the heartier one with seared meat and deglazed drippings — analogous, perhaps, to unoaked versus oaked wines.

Cooking liquid

Beer is always a challenge to cook with. Most are too bitter, either because of the hops or roasted malts. My go-to beers typically include Scotch ale, German Hefeweizen, Belgian Dubel or Quad, or Doppelbock. I use Guinness Extra Stout in this recipe because I find it has more malt richness and a fruitier yeast character than Guinness Draught. But it still has that native stout roastiness. I use brown sugar to round out these rougher edges. You could also use jaggery or kuro-sato (Japanese “black sugar”) if you have either of these in your pantry. Both will impart interesting layers of flavour.

Whichever beer you choose, you’ll also want to add stock for additional flavour layers. Most recipes call for beef stock, which is classic. (If at all possible, avoid the bouillon cubes and use homemade stock.) I use chick pea stock here. In fact, it’s one of my secret ingredients that finds its way into just about every dish I make that calls for stock, from stews to risottos to paella. I like snacking on veggies and hummus, so I always have chick pea stock in the freezer. When prepared right (plenty of salt in the water you use to soak your chick peas overnight), the result is a wonderfully thick stock rich in nutty umami. It’s also perfect for vegetarian dishes. (I’m not entirely sure, but I think the proteins in the chick pea stock also help thicken the stew.)

Thickening your stew

To dust your meat with flour or not? Many recipes for stew suggest doing this, but I prefer time. If you aren’t in a hurry and cook this for about 4 hours, simmering uncovered for the last hour or so of cooking the stew should get you a nice consistency. If you don’t have quite that much time, just reduce the cooking liquid when the meat is cooked to your desired tenderness. Remove the meat and as many of the veggies as you can after about 2.5–3 hours of cooking, turn the heat up to medium-high/high, reduce down to your desired consistency, then add back the meat and vegetables. About ten minutes does the trick.

Carrots, celery, and other aromatics

Add the carrots and celery after the onions are slightly browned, then add the garlic for about 30 seconds at the end. Some add the carrots and celery later in the cooking process so they retain more of their firmness and distinctive flavours. If you’re not cooking your stew for more than about 2.5 hours, sauté them with the onions and garlic. They’ll contribute nice flavours to the stew without turning to mush. Herbs are up to you, but I like to keep it simple with a bouquet garni of fresh thyme and bay leaves.

Tomatoes and tomato paste

As far as I can tell, neither of these are traditional ingredients in Irish stew. But I like how the acidity of fresh tomatoes and the sweetness of tomato paste counter the stout. Some folks like to “brown” the tomato paste with the aromatic vegetables. And I do that as well in other dishes. In this dish I just dissolve the tomato paste in the beer as I’m deglazing the pan.

Serving:

Arrange a generous ring of mashed potatoes (or, better yet, colcannon) around the edge of the plate and spoon the stew into the center.

As for beer? If it’s St. Patrick’s Day, that one’s easy: put on your best leprechaun outfit and pour yourself your favourite stout. On any other day of the year, any robust malty beer from porter to Scotch ale to Belgian Quad will stand up well to this hearty stew.

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All images by F.D. Hofer