Most tough stew meat has not been cooked badly. It has been stopped at the wrong moment. Stewing beef goes through a stage where it is tougher than it was when it went into the pot, and if you taste it then, it is easy to think you have ruined it. Keep going and it turns.
I cook a lot of long braises: bigos, beef bourguignon, and a Jamaican lamb curry in the slow cooker. They all behave the same way, and once you know why, tough meat stops being a mystery. If you want to put it into practice, my beef bourguignon builder lets you pick the cut and the cooking method and writes the recipe around them.
The short answer
Stew meat is tough for one of three reasons: it has not cooked for long enough, it has cooked too hot, or it is the wrong cut for stewing. The first is by far the most common, and it is the easiest to fix, because the answer is more time.
How to make stew meat tender
You do not tenderise stew meat before it goes in the pot. The long, gentle cook does that, because it is what melts the connective tissue. A marinade only reaches a few millimetres in, so it flavours the outside and does not change the texture. What you control is five things:
- Pick a cut with connective tissue in it: chuck, shin, leg, skirt or flank. Lean, tender cuts like sirloin only dry out.
- Cut it into pieces of the same size, so it all finishes together.
- Keep the liquid at a bare simmer, the odd bubble and no more. A hard boil makes it stringy and dry.
- Give it the time. In the slow cooker my beef madras takes four hours on high or seven to eight on low.
- Test a piece with a fork. It is ready when it gives way with no effort and pulls apart along the grain. If it does not, put the lid back on and give it another half hour.
Meat is two things, and they cook in opposite directions
A piece of beef is muscle fibres held together by connective tissue, and heat does opposite things to the two of them. The muscle fibres get firmer, drier and tougher the longer they cook. The connective tissue, which is mostly collagen, does the reverse: given enough heat and time in liquid, it melts into gelatin and goes soft.
That is the whole reason stewing works. A stew is not about cooking the muscle gently. It is about cooking long enough to melt the connective tissue, so the fibres it was holding together can fall apart.
Why it gets tougher before it gets tender
The collagen does not melt straight away. At around 60°C, before it starts to dissolve, it shrinks. The sheaths wrapped round the muscle fibres tighten and squeeze the juice out, the meat shrinks in the pan, and it turns chewier than it was raw.
Keep cooking, and from about 70°C upwards the collagen starts turning into gelatin. Given time it softens to something close to jelly, and the fibres it was binding stop behaving as one solid lump. The fibres themselves are still dry, but now they pull apart easily, and the gelatin gives the meat a moistness of its own. That is the texture you are after.
So there is a window in the middle of the cook when the meat is at its toughest. If you taste it an hour into a stew that needs three, you are tasting that window. It is not ruined. It is not finished.
Still tough? Give it more time
If stewing beef is tough, the answer is almost always more time, not less. Put the lid back on, keep it at a gentle simmer, and check it every half an hour. It is ready when a piece gives way to a fork with no effort and pulls apart along the grain.
It is why my bigos recipes have such long cooking times. The Królewski version goes five hours on high in the slow cooker, or seven on low, and bigos hultajski six hours on high. Those are not generous estimates. They are what it takes for the collagen in stewing beef to melt.
Too hot makes it worse, not faster
Turning the heat up does not help. A hard, rolling boil pushes the muscle fibres further past the point where they have already lost their juice, and you end up with meat that is both stringy and dry.
Keep the liquid below the boil, at a bare simmer where only the odd bubble breaks the surface. Inside the meat you want it well short of boiling the whole time. An oven at the usual 165 to 175°C can bring a pot up to the boil on its own, so if you braise in the oven, check that the liquid is barely moving rather than bubbling hard.
The cut matters as much as the time
Stewing needs a cut with plenty of connective tissue, because that is what melts into gelatin. Those are the hard-working muscles: chuck from the shoulder, leg, shin, skirt and flank. They are tough raw, and they are the ones that turn silky after hours in the pot. It is why my bigos card asks for chuck, skirt, leg or flank.
The cuts that are tender to begin with, sirloin, rib and fillet, do very little work and carry very little collagen. There is nothing in them to melt, so a long stew only dries them out. Cooking a good steak for three hours is the surest way to make it tough.
The animal’s age plays a part too. As an animal grows, its collagen becomes more tightly cross-linked and dissolves more slowly. Lamb, pork and veal come from younger animals than beef, which is part of why a lamb curry usually gets there sooner than a beef stew.
Tender but dry
Sometimes the meat falls apart but still tastes dry in your mouth. That is the muscle fibres, which will always be dry after hours of cooking. What stops a braise tasting dry is the gelatin and the fat running through the meat, which coat the fibres. It is another reason to choose a cut with seams of fat in it rather than trimming it lean.
Letting it cool in its own liquid helps as well, because the meat takes some of the liquid back up as it sits. That is a large part of why a stew is better the next day, and why my bigos recipe tells you to cool it overnight and reheat it.
In the slow cooker
A slow cooker suits stewing because it holds a steady, gentle heat for hours. If meat comes out of one still tough, it needed longer, exactly as it would on the hob. If you have the time, low for longer is gentler on the meat than high for a shorter spell.
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