Meat Stew with Mushrooms: Beef, Button Mushrooms and Potatoes

Name: Meat Stew with Mushrooms and Potatoes - Beef Ragout Recipe
Prep time: 30 min
Cook time: 1 h 30 min
Total time: 2 h
Cuisine: European
Ingredients: Beef (shoulder) 250 g; Button mushrooms 300 g; Onion 2; Potatoes 3; Carrot 1; Butter 20 g; Tomato paste 1 tbsp (or 100 ml tomato juice); Water 1 cup (200 ml); Bay leaf 1; Cloves 2-3; Ground nutmeg a pinch on the tip of a knife; Sweet ground paprika 0.5 tsp; Lemon juice 1 tsp; Salt, ground black pepper to taste

☆ Rate it

2 h

I’m going to try making a meat stew with mushrooms. I could never keep straight what a ragout is, what a sauté is, what goulash is… No wonder: I grew up in a time when there were two kinds of bread, black and white, two kinds of beer, the kind you can get and the kind you can’t, and two kinds of pasta, short and long.

And yet a meat ragout is as different from goulash as an apple is from an oyster.

Ragout, from the French ragoûter, means “to revive the appetite”. It is made from pieces of meat (fish, poultry or game), vegetables, mushrooms and root vegetables, usually in a thick, spicy sauce, like a vegetable stew with meat.

The distinguished master of the culinary arts, Father Lacina, a hero of Jaroslav Hašek’s novel about Švejk, claimed that a mushroom ragout comes out better the more mushrooms you put in.

But first the mushrooms must be fried with onion, and only then do you add the bay leaf. It all depends on the spices, on how much and which ones you use. Just don’t overpepper it, don’t over-clove it, don’t over-lemon it, over-spice it, over-nutmeg it… Švejk himself backed him up: the more onion, the better.

Let’s make a meat stew with mushrooms following Lacina’s instructions to the letter, but with a little twist of our own. You could of course make chicken stew, but the one with mushrooms is tastier. The basic recipe is a vegetable stew.

14 ingredientsTo the recipe

More with beef and potatoes

Hungarian Beef Goulash with Potatoes and Paprika

2 h

Rump Steak (Romsteak): Breaded Fried Beef

30 min

New Potatoes Stewed with Beef

1 h

Stewed Potatoes with Beef

1 h 30 min

Tatar-Style Beef Azu

2 h

Ingredients

2 servings

Beef (shoulder) 250 g
Button mushrooms 300 g
Onion 2
Potatoes 3
Carrot 1
Butter 20 g
Tomato paste 1 tbsp (or 100 ml tomato juice)
Water 1 cup
(200 ml)
Bay leaf 1
Cloves 2-3
Ground nutmeg a pinch on the tip of a knife
Sweet ground paprika 0.5 tsp
Lemon juice 1 tsp
Salt, ground black pepper to taste

Step-by-step recipe

Turn on cook modeKeeps your screen from turning off while the recipe is open

Preparing the meat and vegetables

Beef, or better still young veal, a piece of shoulder.
Rinse the meat and remove any bones and membranes.
Cut into small pieces about the size of a die.
Cut the onion into thick strips.
Peel the carrot and slice it thinly.
Peel the potatoes and dice them to the same size as the pieces of meat.

Frying the meat, vegetables and mushrooms

Right away I’ll say that there is one place where we depart from the “classic”: we won’t fry the mushrooms first and then add the onion, and we won’t do both at the same time. By the way, Lacina is being rather sly here. Perhaps the father is used to a ragout with wild mushrooms, which we don’t have at the moment, so we’ll use button mushrooms, which don’t really suit frying. They’re simply the “wrong” mushrooms. So we fry the onion first, and then the mushrooms right after it.
Melt the butter in a deep saucepan and fry the meat over high heat until golden brown, stirring constantly, for about 5-7 mins.
When the meat has browned, add the carrot and fry uncovered over medium heat for 10-12 mins. The carrot should become soft.
If you have wild mushrooms (porcini, bay boletes, honey mushrooms and so on), you can add them at this stage and fry them together with the meat and carrot, as Father Lacina advised. Then you won’t depart from the classic by a single step.
Add the sliced onion and fry it with the meat for about 10 mins, until the onion is soft and releases its juices.
Add the spices: one bay leaf, 2-3 cloves, a pinch of ground nutmeg on the tip of a knife, salt and ground black pepper, 0.5 tsp sweet ground paprika. And add 1 tsp lemon juice. Stir.
Here, following the father’s advice, the main thing is not to over…
Cut the button mushrooms into large pieces. Remember, they should be “plentiful”. If the mushrooms are small, you don’t need to cut them at all.
Add the mushrooms to the meat and fry for 10 mins over medium heat, stirring occasionally.

Stewing

Pour half a cup of hot water (100 ml) into the saucepan, cover with a lid and bring to a boil.
Reduce the heat to low and stew covered for about 30 mins. Make sure the liquid doesn’t evaporate completely and the stew doesn’t burn.
Add the diced potatoes and stir.
Add 1 tbsp tomato paste (17 g) diluted in half a cup of water (100 ml), or 100 ml tomato juice.
Stew covered until the potatoes are completely cooked, about 20 mins. The potatoes are done when a knife goes in easily.
There’s no need to worry that the potatoes will overcook and fall apart. The tomato won’t let that happen, and the potato cubes will stay whole.
Remove from the heat. And so, the meat stew with mushrooms is ready! Serve hot.

Calories and macros

625 kcal

Serving ≈ 660 g

Protein37 g25% of kcal
Fat27 g41% of kcal
Carbs52 g34% of kcal

100 g95 kcalProtein 5.7 gFat 4.2 gCarbs 7.8 g

Calculated from the recipe ingredients, excluding salt and spices. Data: USDA and Matvaretabellen.

How did you like this recipe?

Thanks for rating!