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Brian Duffy

I probably have 45 recipes for Irish stew, but you don’t want to develop yours the way I did mine. As the chef at The Shanachie Irish Pub and Restaurant in Ambler, I first had to please two masters—in this case, owners Gerry Timlin, a native of County Tyrone, and Ed Egan, an Irish-American. Gerry grew up with a certain kind of stew, the kind his grandmother made. But Ed had a different idea about it.

So for months, this is how it went:

Gerry: It needs more onions.

Me: Okay, we’ll add onions and some onion powder.

Ed: I think the carrots are too big.

Me: Ok, we’ll do a 1 1/2 inch dice.

Gerry: The stew is too thick.

Me: Ok, we’ll add more stock

Ed: The stew is too thin.

Me: Ok, we’ll add more roux.

You get the idea. For weeks on end, all we did was play around with stew. Since this was one of the most important recipes in the restaurant, in my mind it had to be perfect. But we fussed with it so much that apparently restaurant staff wound up with a little post-traumatic stew stress disorder. When I recently visited our former sous chef’s new restaurant, (Dan Connelly at Copper in Northern Liberties) I ordered the Irish stew (which wasn’t on his menu) and he sent out a check with a little drawing of a middle finger.

So you’re getting the benefit of months of Irish stew recalibration from someone who makes 150 pounds of it a week. Though I’m also sharing our recipe with you, here are some rules of thumb for getting into a stew yourself.

• For every pound of beef, add one extra large carrot, 1 potato, and 1/2 onion.
• For better flavor, give prepared stew meat a pass and cut your own beef from a nicely marbled, but mostly fat-free piece of prime black angus. Make 1-1/2-inch cubes. It may cost a bit more but it will pay off in the end in more flavor.
• Don’t think of stew as a one-pot meal. Plan on cooking each element separately. I know some of you believe in the one-pot thing, but I don’t when it comes to this. I love the way the beef browns and retains its own flavor while cooking with the onions. And in the end you don’t wind up with a pot full of flavorless meat and vaporized vegetables. The next steps illustrate how to handle each part of the meal.
• In a large pot of lightly salted water, cook the potatoes and carrots until just tender.
• Braise the beef at medium high with one-half onion, and 4 bay leaves. Cook it dry with just a little salt and pepper. The onion will provide enough moisture so it doesn’t stick, burn, or dry out.
• Mix the beef with the carrots and potatoes in a separate pot. Add all the drippings from the beef pan to the carrot and potato water to make your stock. Cook for 15-20 minutes—just long enough to combine the flavors and bring the water to the boil.
• Add a packaged gravy mix. Shocked? Me too. But Gerry kept telling me that the stew I made didn’t taste traditional. After months of searching through recipes, I noticed that some mentioned Oxo Gravy Mix or Bisto. So we found some (you can find some too at my Web site www.chefduff.com; click on Celtic Foods). Gerry took one taste and jumped up. “There it is!” he said. “This is what I remember!”
• Make a roux from equal parts flour and butter in a separate pan. Once the stock water comes to a boil, add the gravy mix and a little of the roux at time until it reaches the desired consistency. Pour this gravy into the pot containing the carrots, potatoes, onions and beef and stir over low heat for 10 to 15 minutes. Season with salt and white pepper.

Now that you know the basics, here’s the recipe, all in one place.

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