Guinness Irish Stew and the Instant Pot

Today Becky made a project dinner. We got out the Instant Pot and set it up on the counter. She had decided a few days ago to make some Irish Stew with Guinness in the pot. She's done it before and it is always a long project but the dinner is always unique and delicious tasting. 

Last week we brought home a four pack of Guinness draft from Target with the intent of saving one can for the Irish stew. 

Making this meal is a lot of work that includes spending time prepping meat and vegetables. She uses a recipe titled "Irish Beef and Root Vegetable Stew" taken from the Essential Instant Pot Cookbook which they say contains fresh and foolproof recipes for your electric pressure cooker and is authorized by Instant Pot. It's still a lot of work.

The recipe in the book has several of Becky's notes written in the margins where she has adapted the recipe to her style and taste like adding more thyme and parsley. She also likes to put in her herbs in large chunks that can be removed at dinner time rather than cutting it all up into small pieces and leaving them in the stew. 

The prep includes cutting up the beef into small cubes. She also cuts up lots of carrots, mushrooms, and rutabaga. I really like the rutabaga which adds some nice sweetness to the stew. 

She cooks it all in the Instant Pot for 5 minutes. We don't use the Pot much and it is always a little trial and error but it the end it works well for us. This time Becky was struggling a little with the settings on the screen and I went online to check. I couldn't believe how much confusing information there was out there because of the different variations of the Instant Pot with each one having different screen settings. It seems like the company tweaked the product over the years. We got it working and it cooked the stew well. It was delicious and well cooked. No burn errors on the screen this time which has happened during previous uses. 

The recipe calls for cubed parsnips in the stew but Becky has opted to use baked potatoes and instead of cutting them up and cooking them in the stew we put the potato in the bowl first before adding the stew. We take the potato and cut in into quarters the add a little butter. Then we pour the stew over the potatoes and dig in. The stew is juicy and covers the potatoes. We mix them up into the stew where they absorb the other flavors. Although I have a fork handy I mostly eat this stew with a spoon.

We also eat the stew with some nice bread from the co-op. There is usually a small glass of Guinness left over from the stew recipe which goes down nicely.

Eating this dish always reminds me of having some Guinness beef stew in a pub in Dublin. It was the Old Storehouse Temple Bar and there was some great live music we could watch from the balcony as we ate our dinner. I previously wrote about that night in Dublin here.