We've even tried using cuts of meat that are good for braising—like sirloin—and they just didn't break down in the same way in a stew. You're left with chunks of tight, dry meat rather than meltingly tender beef. The only cut you should use? Scraping up those caramelized brown bits from the bottom of your pot is going to give your stew a deep, rich flavor. Another important tip: make sure to cook your beef chunks in batches, giving each piece enough room to get really browned.
Otherwise, they'll steam, resulting in gray lumps. Beef stew doesn't need to be super, super thick. You'll most likely be using potatoes, and their starch will naturally thicken your stew.
It's not a gravy—you shouldn't be adding a roux or flour or cornstarch. If you do prefer your stew on the thicker side, though, you can toss your beef in flour or cornstarch before you sear it—the bits left behind will thicken your stew and add deeper flavor. However, unless you are browning the meat before adding to the cooker I would recommend you leave it out as uncooked flour might give your end dish a raw flour flavor.
You can thicken it up at the end if you like with a cornstarch slurry. Flouring meat for a stew is a convenient way to thicken the gravy. This tends to work best if you brown the meat with the flour on as it gets the flour properly cooked. The downside is that it makes it harder to get good caramelisation on the surface of the meat without burning the flour, although for slow cooked stews etc. This is rather subjective and comes down to personal preference.
If you aren't going to brown your meat it may be more convenient just to add a roux which you can make in bulk and chill or freeze to use as needed. This is better than flouring the meat as the flour in a roux is pre-cooked. You need a fairly high temperature to trigger the chemical changes in the starch which makes it thicken the sauce and slow cookers might not reach that temperature.
That would give the dish a raw flour taste and won't work as well as a thickening agent as a roux. Some cuts of beef like shin and oxtail produce a perfectly good sauce without flour, especially when slow cooked.
There are also plenty of other thickening agents. I quite like pearl barley in beef stew but peas, lentils and potatoes also work as does tomato paste, but that has a significant impact on flavour not bad but not necessarily what you want. There are also various flavour-neutral thickeners. Also, adding a starchy staple near the end of cooking such as rice, pasta, noodles or part-cooked potatoes will thicken the sauce and make a complete one-pot dish.
A thick gravy in stew tends to bring the flavours together well but a thinner broth-like sauce can work as well, especially if you like quite punchy Asian-style flavours. Flour will help to distribute the seasonings more uniformly over the meat, and they'll stick more easily in the beginning of the cooking process. It will also help thickening the stew later on. You can probably skip that step, since it's a long cooking time 6 to 10h and there's no browning in the beginning.
No, you do not need to. As an example, here's a google translated traditional recipe on a food site: Matprat Norwegian site, translated. It's not properly translated sos is a local word for sauce as opposed to saus , so it's literally called sauce-meat. There are many variations on this recipe, which is not surprising since it's a very simple idea: let meat simmer in sauce until it's delicious.
Variations of this recipe includes browning the meat in flour, simmering with and without vegetables, how thick you want the roux, etc. There's a thousand variations on this simple and delicious Sunday dinner dish. While I have tried both variations the only real difference I have found is that the sauce gets thicker when you make roux AND brown the meat in flour.
I suspect that this may have been part of the reason why people like to flour up the meat before frying. Part, not all! So if you're frying steak, namely chuck, to make any of the above, you can omit the flour-dredging step. If your intention is to fry a steak as for country-fried or chicken-fried, you definitely need flour. The flour serves as the first layer in a series of starchy layers that when fried form the crispy, browned crust.
Dredging the steak in flour reduces surface moisture on the meat, allowing wet ingredients such as egg and batter to adhere and form a light paste. It's rather difficult to achieve this crust without a flour-dredge step. If gluten is a concern, use alternatives to all-purpose flour, such as garbanzo flour, fava flour or tapioca flour. It's also quite acceptable to fry a plain steak lightly seasoned in a tablespoon of olive or canola oil. The sugars present in the meat caramelize, forming a golden, crispy exterior.
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