Healthy Beef Stew Recipes

For a fall open house, make this beef chili in the slow cooker. As guests arrive, set out chips and cheese and let them help themselves to a bowl.

This warming slow-cooker stew has all the flavors of corned beef and cabbage but with much less sodium, plus it's ready in half the time of traditional corned beef and cabbage. Rather than curing the beef in a salty brine for at least a day, we just throw the beef and veggies into a crock pot with pickling spice for that delicous briny flavor without the long soaking period.

Anything but dainty, this healthy cowboy beef and bean chili recipe is hearty with the addition of mushrooms and beer. To keep the saturated fat low, we use one pound of ground beef and add whole-grain bulgur to boost the volume and fiber in this chili recipe. After all the ingredients are added to the pot, we like to slowly simmer our chili for close to an hour to develop the best flavor, but if you're in a hurry, reduce the liquid by half and simmer for 20 to 25 minutes.

This filling black bean chili recipe is loaded with protein and ready in just 45 minutes. We've provided several variations for this recipe to suit your flavor and dietary preferences.

This warming beef stew simmers in a Dutch oven and gets classic flavor from red wine.

Ingredients matter for this traditional French dish. Wine is a crucial component of beef bourguignon (you'll use a whole bottle of it!). Pinot noir is a medium-bodied wine that won't overwhelm the stew, but has a good amount of tannins that help tenderize the beef as it simmers. Be sure to choose chuck roast to trim and cut into chunks yourself, versus buying pre-cubed stew meat—those pieces of beef can come from any part of the cow and may vary in taste and fat content. Tomato paste is a super-concentrated ingredient that adds umami—or savoriness—to the stew.

This is a popular dish of the Yoruba, one of the largest ethnic groups in Africa. In the Yoruba language, dodo means fried plantains, and efo means leafy green vegetables, commonly spinach—here, the sweet plantains are a foil to the spicy spinach stew. Essential to Nigerian cuisine, unrefined red palm oil gets its color from naturally occurring beta carotene. For a vegetarian version, substitute 1 pound sliced mushrooms for the beef and use vegetable bouillon cubes. In Step 3, simmer the mushrooms in the sauce for 5 minutes.

Turnips lend an earthy flavor and a texture that is similar to potatoes--but with fewer carbs--to this rich and flavorful beef stew.