Show activity on this post. Browning your beef with some flour adds depth of flavor. The flour will act as a thickener, and by coating the meat with it you won’t have problems with it clumping and getting little flour balls in your stew .
Another frequent inquiry is “How do you add flour to stewed meat?”.
Measure out 1 tablespoon of the flour and liquid mixture and add it to the stew. “Add your slurry to the stew while the liquid is simmering, when you’re nearing the end of cooking,” advises Sidorenkov.
The flour will act as a thickener, and by coating the meat with it you won’t have problems with it clumping and getting little flour balls in your stew. However, unless you are browning the meat before adding to the cooker I would recommend you leave it out as uncooked flour might give your end dish a raw flour flavor.
Is it better to make stew without flour?
NO FLOUR; BROWN THE MEAT She used to dredge, but now Lucinda is a no-flour stew maker. She says you get more caramelization on the meat without flour; flour can make the meat more likely to burn than caramelize.
Is it better to cook meat with flour on or off?
This tends to work best if you brown the meat with the flour on as it gets the flour properly cooked. The downside is that it makes it harder to get good caramelisation on the surface of the meat without burning the flour, although for slow cooked stews etc.
When you flour meat, the meat itself gets cooked, but since it is insulated, it doesn’t necessarily brown. The flavors produced from the Maillard reactions in the flour will be slightly different than the flavors produced from browning unfloured meat, but there will still be complexity.
How do you thicken stew meat?
Flouring meat for a stew is a convenient way to thicken the gravy. This tends to work best if you brown the meat with the flour on as it gets the flour properly cooked.
What do you cook first in a stew?
Sear your beef first. Then, saute onions, garlic, carrots, and celery in the beef fat, scraping the browned bits up from the bottom as you go. This will layer in the flavor before your stew even starts simmering.