 Meat Boy is kind of back because today we are making a beef and barley stew. The reason I like this so much, it's a more nutritious and delicious culinary take on something like chicken and rice, a basic protein and carbohydrate. By using higher quality ingredients, you not only add plenty of flavor, you're packing it full of balanced nutrition. And this kind of replicates how a lot of recent indigenous people ate. I know a lot of you guys are familiar with Weston Price's work. To me, this embodies their local harvest depending on the protein and grain source and then they could have added whatever seasonings, spices, extra stuff they had on hand from that harvest. So let's take a look at the ingredients and go over their nutritional properties. There isn't really a concrete recipe for a beef and barley stew. So it's your own take, it's what you have access to and also what you would like to do, you know what type of seasonings and spices you enjoy eating. For instance, a mirepoix, which is celery, carrot and onion, is sometimes added, but I don't really like celery and carrot that much so I'm just using onion and from a nutritional perspective onions aren't really that great, probably the only thing here that doesn't have anything to offer besides the garlic, which is what we're using just to add some flavor. Again, every single thing here is organic. We try to remove as many negatives as possible, especially the plant foods for the meat. It doesn't have to be organic as long as you know it's grass fed decent quality. These are the chuck steaks we have on Frankie's Syri range meat. You could throw these on the grill, sear them, sear them in a pan today. We're going to kind of dice them up, brown them and cook them for an hour or two in this stew. The other plant components, I have some mushrooms and some seasonings. These are in a box because I got them from my restaurant supplier, Shiitake are actually really, really high in copper, magnesium, some B vitamins. But before I brag about the nutrition of mushrooms, I don't digest them. They kind of come out the same as they came in so although the paper value nutrition is great, I'm not really sure the body is utilizing it. The main component, the barley, we have organic pearl barley. This is actually reasonably nutritious and it digests and it's calorically dense. You have some B vitamins more importantly compared to other grains. This has magnesium and copper, small amounts of the other minerals as well, manganese which is really, really missing in things like white rice. And that's also reflected in the flavor, it's nutty, it's more complex. This is pretty cheap, I think it's like $1.50, $2 a pound depending on what supermarket you get it from. The other main component, the beef broth and I haven't been making my own broth lately, ideally that's what you would do but since this is a stew, a soup, we do need quite a bit of liquid. A lot of recipes do call for using water so don't feel the need to spend 10, 15, 20 bucks on high quality beef broth, you know, you could actually buy some meat to make it yourself with that much money but this is what we're using today. Substitutions could really be any kind of beef you'd like, any flavored seasoning vegetables you'd like, again you could use water but the quality of the ingredients, what you're putting in is going to determine the nutrition as well as how it tastes and although the base being beef and barley you're not going to alter the, you know, the mineral and vitamin component that much but you can add or subtract a little bit especially when choosing the broth because using water is obviously going to be way lower in the vitamins than beef broth. I'm using bay leaf thyme and just salt and pepper, some really simple seasonings, something I've always enjoyed the flavor of, you might see a lot of other stuff added ranging from like soy sauce to Worcestershire which, you know, from a quality and taste perspective I don't really like and that garlic we mentioned earlier, you know, this again was just some stuff from my restaurant supplier that was pretty cheap and I was doing some pickling so I have a little bit of extra garlic to throw in here. All we have to do is dice up this chuck steak, we need to dice up these shiitake mushrooms and this is obviously, you know, way too many mushrooms, way too many onions, way too much barley for one recipe. The actual ratios are going to be for every one pound of meat you put in here you want about three quarters of a cup of barley and for the flavorings I'm just kind of guesstimating the onions, the mushrooms, the seasonings, the garlic, that's not too important the amount you put in, you just want enough to add flavor and for the broth you want like two to three cups of broth at least for every cup of barley and then you can always add more liquid to give it that soup like consistency. So let's get everything prepped out and we'll show you guys. So we have everything all prepped and for that two pounds of grass fed chuck steak that we kind of chunked up I took a proportional volume of onions and then I did roughly double that of mushrooms so I'm kind of like looking at the plate of meat I eyeballed that amount of onions and then the reason I did double the mushrooms is because these shrink down a lot just some cloves of garlic and again we have our seasonings one and a half cups of barley two pounds of meat the two significant measurements so on the stovetop you can do this in one pot I do think it's a little bit nicer if you use two because then you can really caramelize and brown those vegetables really well so what I'm going to do is take you know our main pot put it on high heat coconut oil in both the pot and I also have stainless steel pan that we're going to use for the vegetables now if you do use pork lard beef tallow whatever fat that's animal based butter would be delicious as well you're going to add a lot more flavor to this the reason I'm using coconut is because it's antimicrobial it helps against things like candida you know what the gut issues I've been having since the iron overload coconut oil has kind of helped me out a little bit so after we get this initial 10 15 minutes of cooking done then it's basically just hang out for an hour or two until the barley is done cooking so we sear the beef in the pot get it nice and brown then we're going to add our beef broth and our barley to that pot in the other pan we're going to sear off the onions the garlic and the mushrooms until they're nice and caramelized and then add that to the large pot with the beef and the barley then we're going to add the spices and seasonings and everything's going to kind of mold together and build and develop flavor so let's put the beef in and the most important thing to do here is don't overcrowd the pan otherwise it's going to steam and you're not going to get brown color this is just about right just want to kind of spread it out evenly in the bottom of that pan so each piece has contact with the heating surface so that it gets brown now onions in the pan over here mushrooms as well so after about five minutes on high heat our beef is looking about done really brown really caramelized a lot of bits in the bottom of that pan I want to really deglaze that with some beef stock to get those brown bits up and to stop the beef from burning so we'll get our first carton of beef broth in which is four cups for you reasonable people out there that's about one liter our veg is starting to brown nicely probably needs another 10 minutes just because it's so much and this is the most important part you know if your beef wasn't really really deeply caramelized like that if you don't get a lot of deep brown color on your vegetables hey this is still going to taste pretty good but it's not going to be like oh my god this is the best thing I've ever had in my life is what we always aim for another carton of beef broth and this is just a brand I prefer you know from any ingredients and quality perspective so three cartons of broth in here what I want to do is I want to go with my spoon and kind of scrape up the brown bits on the bottom of the pan I'm doing this by feel which is pretty easy then we'll add our one and a half cups of barley and this is how you would kind of normally cook barley to it's just a lot less liquid you know you would still bring it to a boil simmer it for a couple hours and the barley would be done in this case since we want to soup the volume of liquid is just you know two times higher now as this vegetable starts browning you know we do have the brown bits on the bottom of the pan kind of want to scrape that up so they don't burn too much now I'm going to take a little more coconut oil put it in the bottom of the pan here which I kind of emptied out and that's where I'm going to put our garlic you know the garlic the garlic's a lot easier to burn than the mushrooms and the onions so the garlic's nicely browned the rest of the vegetables actually getting a little too dark so I'm gonna take some more beef broth and all that brown caramelized vegetable flavor is coming up off the bottom of the pan we're gonna really scrape that up get our nice flavorful mixture into our soup now if you really want to you could put these spices in here with some oil just to like activate them a little bit but it's really not necessary so we have two bay leaves two teaspoons of thyme maybe a teaspoon of black pepper and a teaspoon of salt and we can always add more seasoning afterwards this is just the initial batch so this has been on high for you know about 10 minutes it's almost at a boil but this is basically where you know we bring this to a boil and then let it simmer for maybe an hour an hour and 15 minutes and then the barley should be cooked now we're gonna go for a moderate simmer for maybe an hour and then we'll test the barley and we'll see where it's at you know everything's really done here we're just tenderizing the chuck a little more we're cooking the barley and we're letting all the flavors meld and incorporate so our soup has been simmering for and maybe an hour and a half I haven't really been keeping track but it looks like it's done so we're going to assume so and take a bowl we have that barley it's kind of all nice and puffed up now there's not actually a crazy amount of liquid in here you know you could definitely add some more we got those chunks of garlic mushrooms some beef this looks good although I just had a cheeseburger so I don't know how good it'll taste so depending on you know how liquidy you want this to be if you want it to be warm like a soup definitely and more you know this is a lot of grain a lot of meat a lot of veg compared to a lot of soups that people usually used to I will say when I've made barley in the past with just water and salt I don't really like the flavor like if I make some white rice even brown rice I can kind of scarf it down but the barley not as palatable I kind of don't like the natural flavor of barley but let's get a spoonful with a little bit of everything so let's get some meat let's get some mushrooms a little bit of onion very hot the garlic I usually add for flavor because what I've noticed is if I physically eat the garlic it does give me brain fog and that seems to happen with a lot of people there's certain compounds and garlic that do that I feel like this is something my girlfriend Victoria would like a lot although ever since she went vegan you know she's making like mushroom barley soup now she's omitting the beef but you know we get her some beef in some other ways that's really good this is exactly what I expected you know it's good it's not like the most amazing thing you're going to ever have but the flavors are balanced it's complex it's delicious you couldn't eat it with every meal there's not a crazy amount of fat so it's almost kind of like palatable and light what I really like about this is you can't overcook that barley if you've ever had barley before it has almost like a chewy texture naturally so even if you cook it for like five ten fifteen minutes extra it still has that texture and that chew to it and despite just eating two cheeseburgers liking this a lot it's really good mushroom onion beef seasoning spices really simple but if you do it right really amazing that Chuck got so tender it's so tender you know I didn't think the the choc roll would be that tender after just an hour of cooking but you cut it small enough that it really does so if you guys haven't had beef and barley soup before definitely try a recipe like this even if you don't want to use barley just try to mimic those ingredients with really any type of grain I mean even pasta I think it's going to be completely delicious so thank you guys for joining me today I think my sister is really going to enjoy that for her lunch tomorrow I've done recipe videos every single week for like as long as I've been on YouTube so you guys can go back check you'll be really surprised about what you see and I think I'll do a playlist update in the very near future so you guys can navigate my thousand videos a little bit easier you could please leave a comment down below drop a like on the video make sure you click that notification bell so Frank he doesn't get sad when he looks at his view count after posting his video every day and Frank dash the follow calm for anything else you guys would like to see so thanks again for joining me guys I will see you for tomorrow's video and we're going to do a live stream later on Frank to Fano check it out