Our beef stew game is strong.

By

Yasmine Maggio

Associate Editor

Yasmine is an Associate Editor at Serious Eats. Her work has been featured in Women’s Health and on L’Officiel USA, and she recently graduated from New York University with a master’s in journalism. You can find her at Bleecker Street Pizza on any given weekend.

Published December 09, 2025

Serious Eats / Fred Hardy

Over the years, the culinary team here at Serious Eats has covered a lot of ground in the stewing department. Beyond developing delicious recipes, we’ve done our best to explore the science behind stewing beef, and have conducted experiments to determine the best way to brown beef and whether marinating meat before stewing is worth the hassle. And of course, there’s the question of whether or not beef stew is actually better the next day (which former Serious Eats editor Kenji has tested thoroughly!).

Culinary experiments aside, our selection of beef stew recipes is substantial and varied—perfect for chilly winter months, when all you want to do is hunker down with a warm, nourishing meal. Below, you’ll find 15 deeply comforting beef stews—including classic boeuf Bourguignon, Indonesian beef rendang, and a rich and flavorful Guinness stew—to keep you warm from head to toe.

Serious Eats / Greg Dupree

Kabab halla translates simply to “meat in the pot,” and consists mostly of inexpensive stew meat and yellow onions, two widely available and affordable ingredients. Cooked in just enough stock or water to cover, the beef and onions simmer for two hours until the meat is falls apart and the onions collapse into a velvety sauce. For many Egyptians, kabab halla is considered the ultimate comfort food.

Serious Eats / Greg Dupree

A blend of chiles and spices provide this classic Texas-style chili with maximum depth of flavor. The chili is prepared on the stovetop before going into a low oven for a leisurely three-hour simmer—perfect for a lazy Sunday. If time is of the essence, Kenji adapted this recipe for the pressure cooker, which cuts the cooking time down to one hour.

Serious Eats / Maureen Celestine

Bold and full flavored, this beef and root vegetable stew from the Gascogne region of France is country cooking at its best.

Serious Eats / Liz Voltz

Pepperpot, a national dish of Guyana, is a delightful meat-based stew, rich with braised beef and infused with cinnamon, clove, thyme, and wiri wiri peppers, a small red Guayanese pepper that’s prized for its bright and spicy punch. Our recipe combines oxtails with bone-in chuck and cow foot, which potentially makes it the beefiest stew in this collection.

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Serious Eats / Qi Ai

Beef rendang is an iconic Indonesian dish of beef slow cooked in coconut milk with turmeric, coriander, and other Southeast Asian aromatics until meltingly tender.

Serious Eats / Fred Hardy

This French classic is revered for good reason: Well-browned beef, red wine, mushrooms, and onions are perfect companions. Daniel’s recipe gets a boost from two additions of aromatic vegetables, as well as a healthy splash of Cognac and dashes of soy and fish sauce.

Serious Eats / Maureen Celestine

This interpretation of beef stew combines Western stewing techniques with some of my favorite flavors of Moroccan cuisine: succulent chunks of beef stewed with fresh collard greens, chickpeas, and fragrant ras el hanout. It’s not a dish that’s purely Moroccan or European, but a mixture of both.

Serious Eats / Maureen Celestine

When discussing "stew" in Nigeria, the term doesn’t refer to a general recipe category but instead a specific group of pepper-and-tomato–based dishes made with meat, seafood, or poultry. This recipe from Ozoz Sokoh opts for beef chuck and a combination of sweet and hot peppers, which results in a stew with an intense, savory flavor.

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Serious Eats / Qi Ai

This coveted dish from Chittagong, Bangladesh, traditionally involves a good amount of elbow grease—but using the oven makes it a little less labor-intensive. The beef is dark, rich, and so tender it looks frayed, and needs little more than plain white rice, sliced cucumbers, red onions, and a hot green chile to become the perfect meal.

Serious Eats / Nader Mehravari

Khoresh-é-ghormeh-sabzi, or simply ghormeh-sabzi, is the most famous and popular Persian meat braise: tender chunks of meat in a luscious, thick sea of deep green herbs dotted with red kidney beans and softened brown Persian dried limes.

Serious Eats / Qi Ai

As Kenji notes in the introduction of this recipe, all claims to chili perfection are provisional, as improvements can always be made. Nonetheless, this chili checks all the right boxes: a rich, complex chile flavor, robust meatiness, beans, and a thick, deep red sauce.

Serious Eats / J. Kenji López-Alt

Kenji’s thoroughly tested and upgraded recipe for classic beef stew delivers the goods: juicy chunks of beef and vegetables coated in a rich, intense sauce. For the same delicious results in a fraction of the time, try this pressure cooker version.

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Serious Eats / Karina Matalon

This deeply flavorful Jamaican stew is loaded with oxtail, butter beans, and broth-thickening dumplings. Served over white rice with a side of avocado, ripe plantain, and salad or coleslaw, this is a meal you’ll want to relish slowly and deliberately.

Serious Eats / Vicky Wasik

Our recipe improves upon this pub classic by amping up the flavor of Guinness stout with an ounce of bittersweet chocolate and a quarter cup of strong coffee. Dashes of fish sauce, soy sauce, and Worcestershire sauce deepen the savory flavor of the stew.

Serious Eats / J. Kenji López-Alt

This rich, hearty, rib-sticking Hungarian-American goulash is made by stewing big chunks of beef, carrots, and potatoes in a broth flavored with onions, garlic, peppers, and a generous half-cup of sweet Hungarian paprika.