Beef Stew Tastes Even Better With This One Ingredient Hiding In Your Fridge

If you love to prepare beef stew time and again during the cold season, you may be jonesing to give this dish a more complex flavor. Among the 12 ingredients you can use to make a better beef stew, next to incorporating mushrooms for their earthy taste and fresh herbs for some much-needed brightness, use bacon to give your stew additional texture and an extra savory flavor.

Inherently, bacon has a rich and smoky umami flavor that complements both the meat and vegetables in classic beef stew. Bacon also gives beef stew more texture. Each bite of this elevated flavorful meal is loaded with tender beef, soft vegetables, and crispy pieces of salted pork. Keep in mind, when choosing the right variety for the job, you can either use thinly sliced bacon, slab bacon, salt pork, or pancetta. While slab bacon can be cut to size, salt pork is unsmoked and mostly fat. On the other hand, pancetta is unsmoked, cured pork belly that's been seasoned with salt and extraneous seasonings. 

To effectively add one of these pork products to your next pot of stew, before browning your beef, cook the pork in your stew pot or a separate pan until cooked through and evenly crisp. Then, once your stew is ready to eat, top each bowl with a decent portion of crispy bacon. While the process seems simple enough, there are more ways to highlight the rich flavor of pork in your next pot of stew. 

Now that you know the basics of adding bacon (or pancetta) to this hearty dish, avoid a few common mistakes when making beef stew for a better end result. Next to starting with the right cut of meat, which is typically chopped chuck roast, utilize your bacon's leftover grease to give your beef a more flavorful sear. As a matter of fact, the first step in Martha Stewart's two-step secret for a better beef stew involves browning your meat in bacon grease for added flavor.

Simply crisp your bacon in your stew pot and once it's been removed, sear your raw beef in the leftover fat. Cooking stew meat in bacon grease builds the flavor of your stew in layers from the very start of the cooking process. Then, come mealtime, once you successfully garnish each complete bowl of stew with chopped bacon, feel free to balance the richness of this meaty dish with Martha Stewart's favorite topping: fresh horseradish mixed with a small amount of white vinegar.

Better yet, once you feel comfortable incorporating bacon into traditional beef stew, feel free to add bacon to other varieties of this comforting dish. For example, make your own version of carne en su jugo, which is a Mexican stew made with tomatillos, flank steak, bacon, and canary beans. Or, incorporate some crispy bacon into your next pot of Texas cowboy stew made with ground beef, smoked sausage, canned beans, and cut potatoes.