Did you make a batch of beef stew and it was too thin for your liking? Learn some methods to thicken up a watery stew after it's done cooking so it will be just as you like it. We will go into detail about the different thickening agents you can use.
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Whenever I am making a soup, stew, or chowder one thing I always have on mind is the texture of the liquid. I want it to have some body, I don't want it to be thin like water. But I also don't want it to be so thick that it's just absorbed into the rest of the ingredients.
When it comes to making beef stew there are several different options you can use to make your stew indeed a stew and not a soupy mess or just beef and veggies with no liquid left.
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💧 Evaporation
This might be the simplest method, but also the longest. You cook the stew longer without any lid covering it so some of the water can evaporate. This requires patience and at this point after cooking your stew for a while you are hungry and want to eat. Plus continuing cooking while it may not hurt the meat as it takes a long time to cook could turn your vegetables to complete mush or water log your potatoes. I would pick one of the other methods we are about to discuss.
The cooking liquid I most often use for beef stew is beef broth. You also could use beef stock or mushroom broth. I also have been known to just use water but I heavily season that water with spices and sun dried tomato powder.
🌾 Flour
The most common way that stew is thickened is by using all purpose flour. There is three ways to do this:
- Once the stew meat is browned, toss it in flour before adding your liquid and other ingredients.
- When the stew is finished make a slurry - a combination of flour mixed into cold water. The recommendation is 1 part flour to 2 parts water. Mix these together in a small bowl then add into the stew. Make sure there are no lumps in your slurry before adding to the stew.
- Not often seen for stew recipes, but you could make a roux - a mixture of fat and butter that is cooked first separately before the liquid is added.
- There is a French technique called a "beurre manie". You don't cook the flour and butter you just take softened butter and mash it with flour to form a thick paste. Then mix that into the stew. Since you aren't cooking the flour first, you may end up with more of a flour taste in your stew. Some are ok with that and others despise it.
🌽 Corn Starch
If you don't want to use wheat flour, then you can try using corn starch. Here is what you need to know about thickening with corn starch. It has more thickening power than flour as it doesn't contain gluten that lowers the power of flour. But I must say that if you are trying to completely avoid gluten, you need to make sure your corn starch is actually gluten free. It's possible for cross contamination to happen if it was processes in the same place as flour is. Anthony's Organic Corn Starch is batch tested and verified gluten free.
👍 Pro - You need half the amount of corn starch to thicken than flour.
👎 Con - The thing to know with corn starch is that it takes a higher temperature to thicken than flour does.
It really comes down to personal preference whether to choose flour or corn starch. Or you can look to these root starches as well.
🥔 Potato Starch & Tapioca Starch
If you want to use potato starch instead of flour or corn starch you can. Note your stew will take on a glosser appearance. And the starch is better used at low temperatures and won't hold up to heat well. So you need you have use it and once your stew has thicken, kill the heat. Boiling it can cause the starch to lose it's thickening ability.
Same thing with tapioca starch, which is also a root. These starches I think do better for baking than for a stew but that doesn't meat you can't use them. If you are avoiding wheat flour these are good options.
Use both of these starches for a slurry in the same amount you would for flour. 1 tablespoon of starch to 2 tablespoons of water.
I haven't experimented enough with both of them side by side to tell you which is better or how potato is different from tapioca. Depending on where you shop, sometimes you can find tapioca starch for cheaper. And sometimes it's the reverse.
🥕 Pureed Vegetables
Here is actually my favorite method and it doesn't involve adding anything else. No flour or no cornstarch. It's a great gluten free option.
You can remove some of your carrots, potatoes, other starchy veggies you are using from your stew and puree them separately from the rest. Add this back into the liquid and it will help to thicken it up and give it body. If you go this route, you might want to use more vegetables than your recipe calls for, so that you still have enough whole vegetables in the stew.
Whenever I make bean soup I use this method. I puree some of the beans with the cooking liquid to add body to the soup.
🍅 Tomato Paste
The last option I want to mention is tomato paste.
👍 Pro - This is probably the easiest to use and the one that will add the most flavorful. You could add it at the start but I think there are advantages to waiting until the end. Then just add a little bit at a time until the stew is your desired consistency.
👎 Con - The downside is that if you need to add a lot, the tomato flavor will dominate your soup. It will taste more like tomato soup with beef. If you like that then it's not a bad thing.
⏲️ When to Thicken
No matter what I am using I always wait to the end, when the stew is done to thicken it. You don't want to do this early on because then you could find yourself short on cooking liquid. Plus you want to see if your stew is going to need thickening in the first place.
I believe that your goal for a stew is to have the right amount of liquid at the start that your stew will have the perfect amount in the end. But that goal is hard to attain. You have variables like the weather, how much water your veggies absorb, etc. Never feel bad if you need to thicken your stew.
➕ More Beef Stew
We did a series of blog posts on beef stew during the Winter of 2023. Check all those out posts out below.
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