Black Country Beef Stew

This Gordon Ramsay’s Great British Pub Food Recipe was the last dish I cooked in my old flat – a bit of a milestone I guess. I actually made the stew a week or so ago, but I’ve been so busy moving out of my old place and into the Lawyers that I’ve only just found the time to write up the results – forgive my blogging tardiness!

Anyway, for the international readers amongst you (and maybe also the Londoners who aren’t quite sure what lies outside of the M25…), the Black Country is a small part of England’s west midlands region. It’s concentrated around the coalfields of south Staffordshire, and is a friendly, rough and ready kind of place. I was raised just a few miles up the road in the pot (the ceramic kind) making areas of north Staffordshire, but we always considered ourselves completely different from our black country cousins. For one, they talk REALLY strangely down there. Not exactly famous for its culinary heritage, the area is probably best known for pork scratchings and pints of dark mild, both of which I happen to love. I imagine this hearty stew, rich with beef and black pudding, was just the thing for a guy returning home after a long days slog down the mine.

I was pretty excited about cooking this recipe as it would be the first chance I had gotten to use some of the veal stock I made a few weeks ago. I was hoping that the homemade stock would give the stew a real depth of flavour. You can see the stock below, straight from the freezer, along with a host of other ingredients, namely good quality braising beef, plain flour, olive oil, onion, carrot and celery, tomato puree, bay, parsley, sage and thyme, a bottle of decent pale ale, top quality black pudding, chestnut mushrooms and a handful of chives.  Quite a list!

To get things started, I roughly cut up the braising beef into generous bite-sized chunks. I took a couple of tablespoons of the plain flour and seasoned it well with salt and pepper before spreading it out loosely over a large plate.  I then tossed the beef chunks in the flour to coat each one.

To brown the meat, I heated a wide, heavy pan with a little olive oil and then added  the beef and cooked it for a couple of minutes on each side until the edges began to take on a nice dark colour. I think it’s best to cook the meat in small batches so as not to overcrowd the pan. You want the beef to fry, but trying to fry too much at once will just result in the meat stewing in its own juices instead – not good.

As the batches cooked, I set them aside onto a plate to use later.

Once the beef was all nicely browned, I added some more olive oil to the same pan followed by the onion, carrot and celery that I had previously chopped. To this I added a good squeeze of tomato puree and a little seasoning, before leaving the vegetables to sauté.

While that was gently cooking, I got on with tying the herbs into a bouquet garni. I’m sure there are correct French techniques out there for making these things, but I’ll be the first to admit that I know none of them! I just took a rough handful each of bay, fresh parsley, sage and thyme sprigs and roughly tied them all together using cotton string. It didn’t necessarily look pretty but it seemed to get the job done.

After five minutes or so, the vegetables had begun to soften and take on some colouring.  I tossed in the browned meat and the bouquet garni and then added in the defrosted veal stock and a pint of decent pale ale (I used Batemans triple XB). At this point it’s a good idea to open up a bottle for yourself too!

I gave everything a good stir and then turned up the heat to bring the stew to a simmer. Once things were bubbling away, I turned the heat right down and partially covered the pot with its lid and sat back to wait. The stew takes about four hours to cook, ever so slowly, until the meat is mouth-wateringly tender.  After four hours, my stew had reduced down somewhat and the smells coming from the stove were absolutely delicious. By now I was starving!

At this stage you can add a little cornflour or arrowroot to thicken the stew slightly if you wish. My tummy was now rumbling so I wasted no more time in getting on with finishing off the stew with the addition of mushrooms and black pudding. First of all, I chopped up the pudding into bite-sized pieces, added a little seasoning and then fried them in a wide pan with some olive oil. I let the pudding pieces cook until they had gone a rich black colour and the edges were a little crunchy – just how I like them!

I added these to the stew and then quickly did the same with the mushrooms, roughly chopping and seasoning them before frying them off in olive oil until evenly browned.

I stirred these into the pot before tasting the stew and adding salt and freshly ground black pepper until the seasoning was just right.

I served it up alongside some simple boiled potatoes and a sprinkling of freshly chopped chives. You can see the finished dish below, paired with a bottle of  Moorhouse’s Black Cat, which is a great example of a traditional dark mild.

The first bowlful certainly didn’t last long, and I was straight back to the pan for a second helping. The stew was fantastic, well worth the wait. The homemade veal stock gave the stew an incredibly rich background flavour and the beef literally fell apart in my mouth.  The addition of the black pudding was unusual but really worked, making the dish just that little bit different from a normal beef stew. Overall, definitely a success and certainly something I would be more than happy to make again. Chalk this one up as a winner!