Warm, tender, and fall-apart delicious! This Braised Beef is the ultimate comfort food made in a Dutch oven. Learn how to transform a tough cut of beef into a succulent, flavorful beef stew with my easy step-by-step method. It is such an easy recipe!
This slow-cooked braised beef is perfect for a cozy family dinner, meal prep, or a special occasion. The rich, savory sauce with melt-in-your-mouth beef, onions and carrots will become an instant family favorite!
Ingredients
* 3 lbs of Beef (chuck roast, Osobuco, whatever cut you have!)
* 2 tbsp olive oil
* Coarse salt
* 4 Onions, 2 Carrots
* ¾ cup Red Wine (or substitute)
* 2 cups Beef Broth
* 2 tbsp Tomato paste
* 2 tbsp Flour
0:00 Introduction
0:10 Cutting the Vegetables
2:38 Prepping the Beef
4:54 Searing to Perfection
6:50 Cooking the Aromatics
9:15 Deglazing with Red Wine
10:05 The Slow Braise
10:45 The Final Reveal & Taste Test
**Instructions:**
1. Pat the beef dry and season generously with salt and pepper.
2. Heat oil in a Dutch oven over medium-high heat. Sear beef in batches until browned on all sides. Remove and set aside.
3. In the same pot, add onions and carrots. Cook until softened. Add flour and tomato paste, cook for 1 minute.
4. Pour in the red wine to deglaze, scraping up the browned bits. Let it reduce by half.
5. Return the beef to the pot. Add beef broth. Bring to a simmer.
6. Cover and transfer to a preheated 300°F oven. Braise for 3-4 hours, or until the beef is fork-tender.
7. Skim off excess fat if desired. Serve over mashed potatoes, polenta, or egg noodles.
Enjoy!
#BraisedBeef #ComfortFood #BeefRecipe #EasyDinner #SlowCooked #DutchOvenRecipe #FallApartBeef #SundayDinner #dutchoven #ossobuco #dinnerideas
What could be better than carrots, onions, and slowcooked beef? This brazed beef dish is warm, tender, and fall apart delicious. Let’s make it together. Before I get started on cooking the beef, I’m going to cut up the vegetables. So, that will be four to five onions and two carrots. I guess it’s onion season because these onions were extremely fresh and they were making me cry the whole time I was cutting them. I was somewhat cutting them blind, closing my eyes here and there because I couldn’t just not handle it. I like to put a lot of onions in my bra beef dish, but if you’re someone who doesn’t quite like onion as much, then you don’t have to put as many. It’s really up to you and your family’s preferences. Just remember that these onions will greatly decrease in volume as they cook. So, you may think you have a huge bowl of onions, but in reality, they will reduce in size exponentially. The next step is to slice the carrots. I’m just going to peel the carrots real quick here. I got these at the grocery store, so not from my garden, and therefore I will peel them. I like to cut these carrots up relatively small. I like them to sort of blend in with the sauce because that way my kids are less likely to pick them out. You could make bigger chunks, though, if you prefer them that way, such as what you would see in a stew. There are so many ways to cut these vegetables and really everyone has their own preferences, so feel free to do as you please. I was quite excited on this day to make this braze beef dish. To me, a dish like this is best on a cold day. You just get that warm, cozy feeling while eating it. Now, my family bought half a cow in the middle of the summer. So, we were given all these nice roasts and um they also buo and the chuck. And I never really got a chance to make any nice stews or slowcooked beef meals with it because I just didn’t feel like it was well suited for summertime. So now that it is heading into winter or late fall and the weather’s starting to change and it’s getting much crispier outside, it just feels like the perfect dish to finish off the day and to enjoy with my family for dinner. So, here I went back to the onions after my eyes had somewhat recovered, but again, they were starting to burn, so I really wanted to finish this up as quick as possible. Got the job done, though, just wiping away several tears, but now I have my bowl of carrots and my bowl of onions. Normally, I would have started searing the beef while I was cutting the vegetables just to save on time, but I realized that the beef was still a little bit frozen. So, I was having it thaw in just some cool water while I was cutting the vegetables. And it gave it just enough time to fully defrost. That way, I could start cooking it or searing it on on the stove top. I did not want to sear it while it was partially frozen. I mean, it wasn’t really frozen. It was still just a bit too cold. I wasn’t sure if there was still frozen bits in it. So, I you don’t want to sear it frozen at all because that will release a lot of the water and you don’t want to end up steaming it and having all this water in the pot or pan. You really want to make sure that it’s nice and dry so you get a good brown sear on it. Here, I just took out the meat. So, today I will be cooking three o. That is like the leg portion of the cow where you have a lot of bone marrow in the bone. So it it’s a very flavorful cut of meat. After I patted it dry, I am going to heavily salt it with some coarse salt. You want to make sure to salt all sides of it. And so I’m just keep turning it and adding more salt because I want to get a good sear and I want to make sure the salt fully penetrates into the meat. It’ll add a lot of flavor. I did not have any beef stock on hand this day. I still need to make some beef stock with the bones. So instead of going to the store and buying some beefto, I just chose a cut of meat that has larger bones. So that way if it cooked throughout the day, I could use water and it would flavor it with the bones that are in the cuts of meat. Another benefit to using osubco is you can um scrape out the bone marrow and eat it afterwards. It’s super good for you. It’s very healthy. We like to take a piece of homemade baguette and dip it in the sauce and then put some bone marrow on it and take a bite and eat it just like that because it is delicious. We can’t let any part of that cow go to waste. On to the next step, which is searing the osabuko. It is important to put lard or oil in the pot before you start searing the meat. If you don’t have some some sort of oil base, then the meat will end up burning on the bottom of the pan, and you won’t be able to make a very good sauce out of that. You really don’t want burnt meat bits. This is the first step to enhancing the flavor and to to getting a lot of flavor that’s going to be in the gravy portion. I have the temperature set to medium high, and I made sure that the Dutch oven was fully heated before I put the meat inside. You want to let it sit for several minutes, at least 3 minutes on each side. You do not want to touch it and move it all around. If you notice that the beef has absorbed most of the oil, then add more or lard that is. It should be nicely browned like you saw there. Have a snack while you wait for it to sear if you have some time. I’m trying to get a quick yogurt bowl in here while my kids are busy playing on their own so that they don’t steal half of my food. So, back to the beef. We’re checking all the sides. Make sure you keep a close eye on it because it can burn fairly quick if the moisture level runs out. You don’t want to add any water, though. That will not help with the sear at all. So, I just added a couple bits of lard because I noticed that it was a bit dry. Let’s speed this up a bit so that we can move on to the next step. Also, I should mention that I am cooking this in the Dutch oven that I will be using to finish the dish in. I want to make sure I get all of that flavor. So, I will use this dish to cook everything. That way, all the flavor stays within the Dutch oven. Once the meat is done, transfer it to a bowl and let it just rest as we move on to the next step. Make sure you brown all sides. Make sure to turn the temperature down to minimum while you take the meat out so that nothing burns in the pot. And should look just like this. Some nice brown meat. Next step is to cook the onions. So, I turned up the temperature a tiny bit, just between medium and low, and I added all the onions into the pot. Now, I shouldn’t have to add much oil. there’s probably a lot of moisture already at the bottom of the pan. Also, if you add salt to the onions, they’ll release a lot of the water and they should be able to use that to start cooking. But if you notice that it’s way too dry, then feel free to add a tablespoon of oil or lard. While stirring these onions, I will scrape the bottom to delaze the pan. This is how we start building our flavor. They shouldn’t take too long to turn translucent, about 2 to 3 minutes. I fiddle with the temperature here and there. I tend to turn it up when I want it to really start cooking and then I’ll turn it down once I realize that, okay, all the onions are fully warmed and they’re simmering nicely. Here, I’m opening a small can of tomato paste. Tomato paste is actually something I really want to make from scratch, but I only had so many tomatoes this year, and it takes a lot of tomatoes to make tomato paste. You really have to cook down those tomatoes so it becomes nice and thick. And I didn’t want to sacrifice my tomato sauce to make into tomato paste because then I would not have enough sauce to last me throughout the year. And I find tomato sauce extremely important. Whereas I could supplement tomato paste with the storebought and it won’t change the flavor too much. So here’s what my carrots and onions look like. I just added the carrots in recently. And once I have that cooked, I’m going to add some flour. So, this is about two tablespoons of flour. This step isn’t in every braze dish, but I like to add some flour. It thickens the dish and the sauce in the end. I’m making sure to always scrape the bottom of the pan to get any burnt burn not burnt bits, but brown bits that were at the bottom from the beef. And I will constantly do that while making this dish because that’s how you really build the flavor by scraping up any little brown bits at the bottom or anything that’s been caramelized such as this tomato paste. So what tomato paste does and why it’s important to put it before you add any liquid is it caramelizes on the sides and the bottom of the pan. You want to give it a bit of time so that it turns to a darker, more golden red, as you saw there in the image. And that way, you know, it’s really enhancing the flavor and becoming extra sweet, and you need that sweetness to contrast the richness of the beef. I added some wine. So, funny story is I actually thought I had red wine available, but it needs to be decanted. We have wine that my husband’s uncle makes and he gave us a bunch of it, but it’s still sitting in the original jug and I did not have the time nor manpower to decant the wine. It’s a bit of a process. So, I didn’t have any red wine on hand. I ended up finding some rosé and I thought, why not? I’ll try it with that. And it worked, but I still think red wine would have been a better choice. So, I just added about 3/4 to a cup of red wine. I measured with my heart. I let it reduce by half and it burnt the alcohol away. And then the next step was to add back my beef to this dish. So, I’m just slowly placing it, kind of pillowing it into the onions and carrot mixture. And I don’t want to waste any of that sauce. Make sure you keep all the sauce that came with the meat. That is delicious sauce that adds so much flavor. So, I’ll even fill my bowl with water to get every last bit. And you want to make sure the beef is submerged about 2/3 of the way. Last step is to put it in the oven for about 4 hours at a low temperature, about 300. And here’s how it turned out. I can tell you it was absolutely delicious. My whole family loved it. I served it with a baguette and some broccoli and it was divine. Let me know what you think.
Dining and Cooking