- Using a 6 or 8-quart larger size slow cooker, pour the olive oil into it, swishing it around until the bottom and side are coated good with it. Sprinkle the salt and black
pepper on the bottom of it. Turn the temperature on “high” and add the beef, making sure that all the chunks of meat have at least some contact with the cooking surface to pre-brown the beef. I usually leave all the grease that’s cooked off the meat in the pot, it’s needed to add flavor to the sauce.
- While you can simply dump and stir all ingredients into the slow cooker and let it all cook on low-temp for eight to ten hours, I have found that pre-browning the meat first and then adding the sauce ingredients to let cook on high-temp for three to four hours before adding the rest of the ingredients works best. When you can split the time for cooking the sauce before adding the ingredients, the canned pre-cooked vegetables don’t become as mushy while still picking up enough flavor from the sauce.
- When adding the good pinch of allspice, be careful not to add much more than that hefty pinch, because the flavor of the allspice will overwhelm the tastes of all the other ingredients, as well as bring the forefront the mild “heat” of the Texas Pete and black pepper. Without the tiny pinch of allspice the beef stew ends up tasting tangy to the point of bitter almost, so it’s definitely needed but you need to be careful not to add too much.
- Do not add the ¼ stick of salted butter until after the sauce is finished cooking and after the rest of the ingredients have been heated up, since this will allow the butter to coat the primary ingredients and balance out some of the tang from the tomato sauce, as will the sugar also.
- Some good folks also like to add a package of Lipton Onion Soup Mix to the base sauce recipe above, which is perfectly fine to do so though it will make it taste very “onion-y” of course and bring back a tangy and hotter aftertaste if you do so.
- Serves 6 to 8 adults with hearty appetites, it’s very filling and rich.
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