Level Up Your Beef Stew With A Squeeze Of One Classic Sauce

After cooking beef stew a few times, it becomes one of those recipes that you know by heart: brown the cubes of beef; saute onions, garlic, celery, and carrots in its wake; deglaze the pot and simmer everything together. When it becomes such a seamless routine, you often forget the benefit of shaking things up from time to time. So, for a delicious spin on beef stew, we suggest adding barbecue sauce.

Old-fashioned beef stew is hearty and deeply savory, with red wine, bacon, garlic, and bay leaves lending the dish its earthy, velvety taste. While you don't need much to make a good batch of stew, some people like to spruce theirs up with a few extra ingredients like tomato paste, balsamic vinegar, and Worcestershire sauce. These additional elements give the stew a tangy, umami twist that balances out the heady beef. Barbecue sauce does just that, making it a top choice of ingredients that will add more flavor to beef stew.

The condiment is made up of ketchup, vinegar, and brown sugar, and often features Worcestershire sauce, mustard, garlic, paprika, and onion powder. This blend of ingredients makes for a quick flavor boost for beef stew, imparting it with a rich, zesty flair. You can add a tablespoon or two of barbecue sauce to a simmering pot of stew for a subtle enhancement, or go with a ⅓ cup for a slightly more prominent taste.

Any standard version of the condiment, like Kraft's Original Barbecue Sauce, balances out the tangy, sweet ingredients to make a great addition to beef stew. Since it features a range of ingredients, there's not much you have to do in terms of tempering any overwhelming flavors. However, if the stew naturally leans a little too far in one specific direction, you can switch to other kinds of barbecue sauce.

A recipe that features a sweet red wine, for example, may become a little too saccharine with the addition of regular barbecue sauce. Instead, add a squeeze of East Carolina-style barbecue sauce. The condiment favors a tangy flavor, with two different types of vinegar as the foremost ingredients. While East Carolina sauce does have a hint of sweetness and depth from brown sugar, the zest of the sauce is what's mostly present, and it will have no problem uplifting the headiness of a red wine-rich beef stew.

If you're making Korean beef stew, then the sweet, tartness of Korean barbecue sauce is the best fit. The stew features soy sauce and rice wine vinegar, an umami and sweet blend that complements the fiery ginger, earthy garlic, nutty sesame oil, and spicy chili featured in typical Korean barbecue sauce.