OK, made another beef stew in the crock pot and again, it has a bitter flavor. No tomatoes, only 2 T canned tomato paste and 1 C cabernet. Thinking maybe a lighter wine to fix this and/or eliminate the tomato paste? Add brown sugar?
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1What spices and herbs did you use and when did you add them? Some will turn bitter is overcooked, sometimes even if they are not scorched. In sweeter dishes, nutmeg can be notorious for this, and I have had issues with some fresh herbs as well. Many are better left until late in the process both for bitterness and because many lose much of their flavor under heat.– dlbJan 30, 2019 at 16:39
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Added crushed garlic and a bit of fresh thyme before cooking. Will try your recommendation to add towards the end and thankyou so much!!– CMLJan 30, 2019 at 19:06
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1With thyme and garlic, as long as the garlic did not have green sprouts and was not charred they likely are not the issue. I personally would probably not add until fairly late, but I like strong garlic. The paste is more likely to be the source.– dlbJan 30, 2019 at 23:12
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7 Answers
It's the tomato paste. Many brands of tomato paste can have a bitter, almost metallic flavor if it isn't fried off first. I don't use it in crock pot recipes for that very reason unless I saute it in some oil for a minute before adding it. You can add some sugar but that doesn't counteract the bitterness.
Also you are adding too much of it, 2 tbsp for 1 cup of wine is very, very tomato pastey for lack of a better term. You could try half that and see how you get.
So try a bit less paste, fried off first or use a good thick canned tomato sauce instead.
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Had no idea how powerful tomato paste is, so will use your idea to eliminate it altogether. Hummm ... will try saute in oil too - great idea! Thanks so much!– CMLJan 30, 2019 at 16:38
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1..having fried off the tomato paste, you might as well reduce your wine a bit in the same pan, which will also heat it up to give the crock pot a head start, and deglaze the pan, if you browned your meat in it, too? Jan 30, 2019 at 17:01
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If you want to tomato flavor, but reduce the bitter risk, you might consider adding some tomato juice to your reduction to replace some of the paste.– dlbJan 30, 2019 at 23:14
Hmm, what are other veggies you ad? Or only canned tomatoes? I usually add a spoonful (teaspoon) of sugar to around 1 cup of tomato sauce. Sometimes less when using sweet peppers. You can try to salvage with adding sugar (just slowly). If you oversweet use vinegar to balance the taste. Cabernet is definitely a wine you should balance with something sweet as it have a lot of tannins. If I use any wine I just macerate the meat in it beforehand and not add during process.
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Pearl onions, carrots, red potatoes. No canned tomatoes, just the tomato paste. You make a great point re: the wine. It absolutely does need something sweet to balance it out. Like your suggestion of not even adding wine for the cooking process, only macerating the meat in it. Thankyou so much!– CMLJan 30, 2019 at 16:42
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@CML Oh tomato paste! Sorry I've read that wrong. If it was paste than definitely to much of it and it need something sweet. Paste itself is usually bitter on itself as it's made form skin and seeds. Jan 31, 2019 at 8:32
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@SZCZERZOKŁY Where do you get your tomato paste? All canned tomato paste that I've had tastes quite sweet.– gnickoJul 21, 2022 at 12:15
Totally agree with GdG about too much tomato paste. But I'd also say cabernet is too heavy a wine. And what else are you putting in there? A regular beef stew would have a lot of onions, which sweeten the pot a lot, especially if you pre-saute them as you really should to develop taste. Carrots are another traditional sweet vegetable. I think you may be tasting bitterness more because of a lack of other flavors?
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Used a package of frozen pearl onions & carrots, small red potatoes. Yes, think a lighter red wine is in order. Thankyou for your suggestions!– CMLJan 30, 2019 at 22:59
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It could also be a particularly bad bottle of cabernet :-)..– user57361Jan 30, 2019 at 23:29
Just wanna say that mine was bitter BEFORE I added any tomato paste or tomatoes. I'm guessing it was either the morels or the beer that did it.
I manage to solve my bitter issue by putting the content of the stew in a colander, rinsing the solids off, flushing the gravy, & making a new rue & broth from scratch with a tweaked recipe & then dumping the solids back in.
But I know from experience that the wrong tomatoes can ruin a sauce or stew, so I tell you you gotta use Plum tomatoes, San Marzanos, or fresh cherry/grape tomatoes. Makes a world of difference.
it is mostly the alcohol making it bitter. Add sugar and/or ketchup to the stew to reduce the bitterness. Butter and salt also help to reduce the bitter taste.
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Welcome to SA! When you say "mostly the alcohol" do you mean the actual alcohol, or other flavors in the wine? Jul 22, 2022 at 16:54
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@FuzzyChef From the fact that the ethanol evaporates off when you bring the stew to a boil, I believe he meant the flavors in the wine. Oct 7, 2022 at 11:14
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I have made beef stew a number of times that have gone bitter, and it didn't have wine in it. I think it might be something that overcooked, as other posters have suggested. Feb 4 at 0:45
Perhaps the beef fat has been cooked too hot and too long. All animal fats, when cooked very hot and very long, start to taste non optimal. It is often the reason reheated meat tastes bad, even when it isn't spoiled. Chicken and turkey fat are notorious for this.
It is the reason that most commercially canned chicken soups have almost no fat in them, and when you make chicken soup with frozen left over already baked chicken, you often skim off the bitter tasting fat and throw it away. That fat used to be delicious once, but it's just been heated high too many times.
Apparently the same thing can happen to beef fat eventually. Yesterday I re-braised my beef three times in the instant pot (1 hour high pressure each time) over the course of 15 hours, and while the beef meat came out amazing --- the beef fat had that same bitter weird taste that leftover overcooked boiled chicken fat does.
I'm not a chemist, but I think it has something to do with forcing the fat towards becoming rancid. It's the reason that when people render animal fats (eg beef fat into tallow, pig fat into lard, etc) you do it for a long time but at a low temperature. Animal fat can stay good for a very long time as long as it was heated for a long time at a low temperature. Conversely, animal fat can be absolutely delicious if it is heated for a short time at a very high temperature (for example, oven pan roasted chicken with skin at 450 Fahrenheit). But once you start heating the fat at high temperatures for a long time, it starts to get that bitter rancid taste. Sometimes immediately, and sometimes in a matter of days, because it "speeds up the clock" on when the fat will go rancid (an example of this in non-animal fat is the fact that roasted almonds will go rancid in half the time that raw almonds will).
The reason this took me years to figure out, as this usually shows up only when the meat has been reheated many times, so I assumed it was "just too old." Because generally if you tried to heat it high for a long time it would have just burned and you never would have gotten to that bitter fat stage. But this is only the case for dry heat. With wet heat cooking (e.g. stews or pressure cooking), it's now possible to accidentally drive the fat too hot for too long. This is what I did with my triple instapot braised beef.
I wonder in the future, if we either took the fat out, or cooked the beef stew for a shorter period of time or at a lower temperature, if this would solve the problem. One thing worth trying is to put the beef stock in early, but not put in the beef with its fat until nearer the end of the stewing. Perhaps the order we add the ingredients matters.
If you like tomatoes and beef in the slow cooker use V8 juice. I think it is a little much for drinking straight, but it is awesome for slow cooking stew and chili.
Even if you use high end good paste, pure wine as the only cooking fluid is a lot and you might get bitterness just from that. Beef bourguignon is the classic and it uses half and half wine and beef stock. You could go half and half wine and V8 and then you will have some wine left to drink while you wait.
