Stop Checking On Your Beef Stew! You're Ruining It

A beef stew is one of those amazing dishes that delivers layers and layers of flavor while relying on a fairly basic set of ingredients: onions and garlic, carrots and potatoes, beef and wine, salt and pepper — you probably wouldn't even have to make a shopping run! In fact, the most demanding ingredient when it comes to cooking a stew is patience: our old-fashioned beef stew sits on the flame for two and a half hours. And tempting as it may be to keep checking on it, you might want to avoid doing that. According to Dagan Lynn, executive chef of Beef. It's What's For Dinner, each time you open the lid, two things happen: the cooking time goes up and the flavor goes down.

"Don't lift the lid," he insisted when previously talking to us about 10 mistakes to avoid when making beef stew. "This will help keep the stew warm and lead to a more flavorful stew." Whether it's meat or the vegetables, the cooking process comes down to a combination of temperature and time. The lower the temperature, the longer your food will take to cook. Now, every time you pop the lid open, give the stew a stir, and take a little taste, it results in some of the heat escaping. When this happens, the temperature inside the pot comes down, increasing the time it'll take for the meat to cook. As for its impact on taste, keeping the lid on means the liquid and flavors stay locked in, leading to the stew developing a more rounded depth.

This tip doesn't apply to just a beef stew either. There are a whole bunch of dishes where the best thing to do is to get the pot going, put the lid on, and carry on with the rest of your meal prep. For example, the simple lid mistake has also been ruining your pot roast (in case you're wondering, the difference between a beef stew and a pot roast goes beyond just the size and shape of the meat).

When it comes to a pot roast, your entire cut of meat goes into the Dutch oven along with an assortment of vegetables. If you end up cooking this large cut of meat under less heat, or for less time than required, you won't get the desired fall-off-the-fork consistency you want from your pot roast. This is why it's important that you avoid taking the lid off every few minutes. Feeling too fidgety? You can use this time to bake some bread to go with the stew using one of our 10 beginner-friendly recipes.

The only reason you would cook your stew or pot roast with the lid off would be if you find that your meat is almost cooked but the gravy isn't thick enough. In this case, you can cook the dish with the lid off for the last 10 to 15 minutes, until you get the consistency right.