Greek meat stew prepared with little onions. Every Fall, without fail, you could smell this dish boiling in the kitchen because it was my mother’s recipe. Serve it alongside a sizable serving of mashed potatoes. Of course, a Greek salad, some feta cheese and olives, as well as some crusty bread, complete this lunch. When your family sits down to dine, the work spent cleaning the onions will be well worth it.
| Prep Time: | 20 mins |
| Cook Time: | 3 hrs |
| Total Time: | 3 hrs 20 mins |
| Servings: | 18 |
| Yield: | 18 servings |
Ingredients
- 6 pounds chuck roast, cut into large chunks
- ½ cup olive oil
- 1 teaspoon white sugar
- 6 pounds small white onions, cleaned and scored
- 1 (6 ounce) can tomato paste
- ½ cup red wine
- ½ cup red wine vinegar
- 6 cloves garlic
- 1 teaspoon whole pickling spices
- 1 bay leaf
- 1 cinnamon stick
- ½ teaspoon dried rosemary
- salt and pepper to taste
Instructions
- In a large soup pot, cook beef in oil until beef is browned. Remove beef, and set aside. Mix sugar into the drippings, add onions, and cook until golden. Remove onions from pan.
- Return beef to the pot, and place onions on top. Mix the tomato paste, wine, and wine vinegar together, and add to saucepan. Place the garlic, pickling spices, bay leaf, cinnamon, and rosemary in a spice bag; add to the pan. Season with salt and pepper. Cover, and simmer for 2 to 3 hours, adding more liquid if necessary.
- The onions let out liquid as they cook, so be careful not to add to much water at the beginning. When stew is done, remember to remove the spice bag.
- If you prefer, you can cook this in a roaster in your oven at 275 degrees F(135 degrees C). Watch the time though; it may take longer.
Nutrition Facts
| Calories | 357 kcal |
| Carbohydrate | 25 g |
| Cholesterol | 63 mg |
| Dietary Fiber | 1 g |
| Protein | 21 g |
| Saturated Fat | 6 g |
| Sodium | 262 mg |
| Sugars | 7 g |
| Fat | 19 g |
| Unsaturated Fat | 0 g |
Reviews
WOW an Army lives at your house! The recipe is delicious I cut it down for “two old folks” and used Marzetti cocktail onions in the jar adding a little of the vinegar juice in which also lends more flavor. The recipe is delicious and we thank you very much!
This was a nice addition to switch up the standards in my kitchen! The family found it very tasty and enjoyed the different flavors. Adding a RF Crumbled Feta was a nice surprise to the taste buds on top of the beef.
I am Greek and have had this dish many times as a child. I always remember this dish having a tomato base which was rich with flavor and thick. This recipe gives you a beefywatery base – no red tomato color. i am questioning the picture as it looks like there are tomatos in it. My family thought this tastes pretty good, but question the color. Maybe I can add some tomato sauce to see if this will improve the flavor/appearance. I used my crockpot on low for 12 hours. Easy recipe to follow. Would I make it again? It’s missing something. It might be the addition of tomato sauce.
this recipe is delicious, soo savory. I was looking 4 a recipe for skirt steak, but used this instead and it came out wonderful. I used regular yellow onions because I didn’t have the pearl ones, otherwise I followed the recipe as written. I highly recomend this one!
Are we talking about pearl onions or shallots??
I thought this was very savory and yummy. My hubby isn’t a fan of cinnamon…so I may leave that out of it next time. I just used a coffee filter and some string for a spice pouch and it worked wonderful!
Kathy, Thank you for posting your mom’s Stefado, I think it is wonderful. I made a batch with half the amount of meat and onions, but left the rest of the ingrediants as written. It was fabulous with the fresh french bread for soaking the sauce. I have made this stew for years with all kinds of meat such as lamb, venison, rabbit, chicken and of course beef. From a 65 year old greek man that cooks better than most…Bravo!
Good recipe! If you don’t have pickling spice, you can make it yourself. The main ingredients are: cinnamon, mustard seed, bay leaves, allspice, dill seed, cloves, ginger, peppercorns, coriander, juniper berries, mace, and cardamom. So put a bit of all this, and you’ve got it!
Great recipe from Dorothy! She’s got more than 200 others – Greek & American – in her book, From Our Hearts to Your Table – Recipes from a Greek American Family.
Personally I found it was too oniony for my taste. My boyfriend thought it was to die for though, ate it cold. I replaced the cinnamon stick with several tablespoons of cinnamon.
Good! Very interesting… it’s a sweet soup, and it tastes like tomato and cinnamon. I made a ton of changes though: I didn’t have any pickling spices, so I used the extra bay leaf, 1 tsp cloves and pepper corns like another reviewer had suggested. I didn’t have a spice bag, so I just put everything in and took out the bay leafs and the cinnamon stick once it was done. That all turned out well. I didn’t have 2-3 hours to let it simmer, so I cooked it on high for about an hour, and it made the meat taste overcooked. Lower heat and longer simmer time is always better. This recipes would work really well in a crock pot over night.
The smell while cooking was devine !! I also cut down the meat (almost half), but used about double wine/water mix… even though I was cooking it on very low heat ?! To cut the acidity of the tomato paste and wine I added about 2 tsp of sugar. Will definately be making this more often. Note: If you don’t have whole pickling spice use: 1ts whole cloves, more bayleaves (2), whole peper corns. It’s not the same, but will add a bit more flavour.
This sounds like a great recipe, but i live in Australia and would like to know what are whole pickling spices, never heard of them here, maybe the greek version of them will help me understand. Thanks Ele
Our favourite Greek restaurant is closed for refurbishment at the moment. So I wanted to try and recreate my husbands favourite dish for his birthday. I managed it with this recipe. I scaled down the meat and onions for 6 people but kept the sauce the same. I’m glad I did as I still had to add a little more wine mixed with water even though I was simmering on very low.Thankyou to my Quality Cook friend CC who explained to me what a spice bag was and thankyou Kathy W for a recipe that my husband really enjoyed.
this is the identical recipe i’ve been using since getting back from greece a year ago – fantastic flavour, and the aroma is beautiful. The shallots can be a pain, but thats the only tedious part. Hard to mess up, easy to love
I don’t know, maybe I did something wrong, but my family and I did not care for this. I omitted the bay leaf since my family does not like and also thought maybe the cinnamon could be cut down some. Thanks for the post.
I made this recently and can’t believe how good this was. I always stayed away from this recipe even though it was one of my favorite greek meals. I thought it would be too much work, but boy was it worth it. Kathy is right, the smell of this simmering is so inviting! My family enjoyed this a lot and all you have to do is add a salad and some mashed potatoes! No more ordering this out at Greek restaurants. Now I can have even better at home!! Thanks!
This is a GREAT recipe!!! I am Greek and this is just like my mom used to make. Don’t be afraid of the work, your family will love this!