Classic and Easy Beef Stew (No Tomato)

This easy beef stew recipe is a favorite winter meal full of tender beef, nourishing vegetables, and mellow flavors. A simple way to feed a crowd or reserve leftovers, and free of gluten, grains, starches, and tomato, you can make this beef strew on the stove, in a slow cooker, or in an instant pot.

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Beef stew is a classic cool weather comfort food for many people. This recipe is no exception! Warm, mild flavors make a mellow but never bland meal.

Like most soups and stews, this beef stew recipe is adaptable to most special diets. Provided beef is on the menu, you can make a simple beef stew around any other dietary restrictions easily and deliciously!

While I love a good beef stew with tomato (like my super-easy Italian beef stew), this recipe is just as good without tomato. For some, tomato isn’t tolerable. If that is you, this recipe is for you!

Making beef stew without grains, gluten, or starch is easy. Many recipes call for some sort of flour or starch as a thickener, though. You could easily make a broth-y beef stew without thickening, but I include instructions for thickening it without resorting to starch or flour.

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How to Make a Simple Beef Stew

While I will give an exact recipe, feel free to tinker with it according to what you like, what you have on hand, and what you want to be eating. Keep scrolling for ideas on tweaks to make!

I started with 5 pounds of beef stew meat that was on sale. You could reduce the amount! Sometimes I make less, but I wanted leftovers to freeze. I used my instant pot to brown the beef. This in an unnecessary step. Sometimes I don’t do it, but I recommend it to give the meat that extra bit of flavor.

Just melt some fat in the pot, let it get very hot, add the beef, and stir now and then while you chop veg.

Chop up all the vegetables. I used 2 onions, about 2 cups of carrots, 1 cup of celery, and an 8-oz package of mushrooms. I added a tablespoon of minced garlic to round out the flavor.

Stir all the veggies into the browned beef. I got a late start, so I used the pressure cook setting for a couple of hours, then added bay leaf and switched to slow cook for for a few more hours until we were ready to eat.

You could slow cook for the whole time (I recommend that)– more like 8 hours– or simmer slowly in a big pot on the stove (also recommended). Pressure cooking is my last resort for nutritional reasons, but some days are last-resort-days.

Stir in peas or green beans, zucchini purée (keep reading for instructions), and salt and pepper before serving. (If you have trouble with the dreaded slow cooker taste, keep reading!)

Thickening the Stew without Starch or Flour

You don’t need to thicken the stew. It will be delicious without, and it will have a broth-like base without adding any broth. The meat and the vegetables will release plenty of liquid!

However, if you make beef stew on the stove, you will need to add broth or water. Even at a low simmer, the stew will lose too much liquid and burn unless you give it some liquid. You can keep the amount of liquid lower by covering the pot and checking and stirring it regularly. Add water or broth as needed.

If you want to thicken the stew with starch, simply wait until you are nearly ready to serve. Into a quarter cup or so of cold water, broth, or wine, stir a couple of tablespoons of cornstarch or arrowroot powder until smooth. Stir that into the bubbling stew; it will thicken as soon as it returns to a boil.

If, like me, you are not using much starch for some reason, or you just want to add extra nutrition, try this:

Peel, chop, and cook a few zucchinis in a half cup of water.

Cool and purée until smooth.

Stir the purée into your stew. It won’t be extremely thick (unless you started with next to no liquid, but it will be a little richer. This works best if there isn’t a lot of liquid in the stew when you add the zucchini.

Another way you could thicken the stew is to add tempered egg yolks to it. Egg yolks would make it even more nutrient dense. To temper egg yolks, follow these instructions. You want to temper them so you don’t end up with scrambled eggs in your stew!

A Word in Praise of Zucchini

I tend to think of zucchini as a sort of nothing-vegetable. Good for zucchini bread and maybe fritters, but kind of boring otherwise. I couldn’t be more wrong! Not only is the zucchini a fruit (it has seeds inside), but it is actually really good for us!

Zucchini provides plenty of antioxidants, fiber, vitamins, and minerals. You may support heart health, blood sugar stability, vision, and hormone balance by eating zucchini. Not only that, but zucchini is good for gut health and the immune system– good anytime, and even more so through the winter. Learn more here.

Plus, zucchini is readily available in stores, budget-friendly (even organic), and easy to grow yourself.

Some of the benefits concentrate in the skin, so consider keeping the skin for that reason. Either cook and purée with the skin, and don’t think too much about the color, or just cook the zucchini along with all the other ingredients, skin on, and don’t purée at all.

What about Yucky-Slow-Cooker-Taste?

If you have encountered the dreaded slow cooker flavor fail, I have help. I had the same problem as a newlywed slow cooker owner working 10-12 hour days. In fact, I all but quit using my pretty, new slow cooker at a time when it would have made life easier because of that stale, flat flavor that some slow cooker meals develop.

Later, I learned. Here are some ways to correct the problem:

Try a programmable cooker

You have to start cooking promptly for reasons of food safety, but you can set the cooker to shift to the “warm” setting so it doesn’t cook hard the whole time you are gone. This works better with some recipes than with others, and works best if it won’t be on warm for more than an hour or two. You may still need to rescue some dishes from the dread slow cooker taste, so keep reading.

Reserve half your seasonings at the beginning to add at the end

Sometimes this is enough to fix it.

Just add extra of the same seasonings after cooking

Or add something else that sounds good! That can work; many recipes are good with paprika (smoked or regular), onion or garlic powder, pepper, and others.

Add something acidic

This is the most reliable way to resurrect the flavor of a slow cooker meal gone blah, in my experience. I don’t know why this works– the chemists out there can tell us!– but you can sometimes see the color of the food brighten right along with the taste.

What you add depends on the dish, but I have had great success with adding cultured dairy (sour cream, yogurt, etc.), lemon juice, lime juice, wine, and vinegar.

If you need to repair beef stew, I would try either a quarter cup of red wine or a tablespoon of red wine vinegar or cider vinegar. No, you won’t taste the vinegar, and, no, your stew won’t taste like salad dressing. Try it!

Can I eat this beef stew on the GAPS diet?

Yes, this beef stew is ideal for the GAPS diet because it leaves out the typical potatoes and flour or starch. Skip the wine, and go with apple cider vinegar if you add any vinegar.

Managing Leftover Beef Stew

This beef stew recipe makes a lot of stew! If you are feeding a lot of people, you are going to be glad of that. If not, here are some ways to deal:

• cut the recipe in half.
• Serve half and freeze half– it is always good to have a meal to pull out for “those” days.
• Serve half for dinner, and keep half for tomorrow’s lunch or some meal in the immediate future. Beef stew gets better the next day!
• Serve what you need and freeze the rest in individual portions. It depends on your needs, but single servings of stew can be helpful for emergency lunches, dinners, and, for some, even hearty snacks. Invest in freezer safe containers for this purpose, or try souper cubes. Your investment could pay off! “Fast food” that is economical and nourishing!

Make Beef Stew Your Way

Beef stew is infinitely variable, and there is no need to make this recipe exactly as written, or the same way twice. Try different ingredients, increase or decrease quantities, use up odds and ends…

• add extra garlic– you can hardly go wrong, in flavor or nutrition. This recipe gets its flavor from meat and vegetables, so try more garlic.
• Reduce the vegetables if you are mostly meat based, or reduce the meat if you are mostly vegetable based.
• Add herbs and spices, either fresh or dried– Italian seasoning, herbes de Provence, oregano, rosemary, thyme, chili powder, smoked or regular paprika, cumin, curry, turmeric– so many flavors to try!
• Leave out any vegetable you don’t like or don’t have on hand.
• Add any vegetable you want– squash, beans, corn, potatoes, sweet potatoes, tomato, etc.
• Use a different meat– pork, for example. I would not recommend chicken breast or turkey breast– they may dry out too much.