Slow Cooker Beef and Guinness Stew with Dumplings
This slow cooker beef and Guinness stew is the ultimate comfort food. It’s rich, hearty, and perfect for those chilly winter evenings. It’s packed with tender, slow-cooked beef, sweet carrots, and a deep, savoury flavour from the Guinness. Paired with easy-to-make dumplings, it’s a satisfying meal that warms you from the inside out. Serve it with crusty bread to mop up the delicious gravy, and you’ve got a dish that’s perfect for cosy nights in.
The recipe is split into 2 parts – the stew and the dumplings. The stew requires a little bit of upfront work in the pan, to brown the beef and bring together some of the other ingredients.
For the dumplings, make sure you plan your timings so you can drop them in with an hour to go. If you’ve never made dumplings before, you may not be familiar with suet. It’s usually found in the baking section of supermarkets and the most common brand in the UK is “Atora”, which comes in a blue and yellow carboard box.
We recommend using self-raising flour in your dumplings, to make them light and fluffy. If you’ve only got plain flour, that’s OK but they will be much denser and firmer. You can enjoy this stew on it’s own, with a little bit of crusty bread, or with mashed potatoes.
Slow Cooker Beef and Guinness Stew with Dumplings
Equipment
- Slow Cooker
- Frying Pan
Ingredients
- 800 g Diced braising beef
- 2 tbsp Plain flour For coating the beef
- Pinch Salt
- Pinch Pepper
- 440 ml Guinness
- 3 cloves Garlic Minced
- 150 g Shallots or pearl onions Chopped, or whole if small
- 200 g Chantenay Carrots Trimmed and quartered
- 200 ml Beef stock
- 3 tbsp Tomato puree
- 5 sprigs Fresh thyme
- 2 Bay leaves
- 2 tbsp Olive oil
- Hanful Fresh parsley Chopped, to serve
For the dumplings
- 50 g Suet
- 100 g Self-raising flour
- 1 tbsp Wholegrain mustard
- 4 tbsp Warm Water
- Pinch Salt
Instructions
- Dust diced beef with plain flour and add a pinch of salt and pepper.
- With a little oil in a hot pan, lightly brown the beef on all sides.
- Remove the beef then sauté diced shallots for 2-3 minutes, add in minced garlic for a further 1-2 minutes, then stir in tomato puree.
- Transfer the beef, shallots and garlic to the slow cooker. Add in chopped carrots.
- Pour in Guinness and add a beef stock cube.
- Add fresh thyme and bay leaves.
- Cook for 3 hours on high or 6-7 hours on low. (Remember you need another hour for the dumplings later!)
For the dumplings
- Mix suet, self raising flour, salt, wholegrain mustard and a little warm water in a bowl. Mix into a dough with your hands.
- Split the dough into 8 small dumplings.
- Add to the slow cooker and set to high for 1 hour.
Notes
Nutrition
Nutrition note
Nutrition calculations only account for the ingredients stated in the slow cooker recipe. Serving suggestions such as rice and potatoes are not included. Remember to account for the nutritional values of anything you choose to accompany the recipe with.
Why not try?
Want a slow cooked beef recipe, but don’t fancy this one? Then take a look at all of our beef recipes here. Or for all our recipes, use our recipe finder to narrow down a recipe choice!
You can also check out our YouTube page for all of our video recipes, including some longer form follow-along recipe videos.
