Beer & Chicken Stew with Biscuits: A Recipe Review
It’s December! In Canada, this means temperatures below 0°C are here to stay, the ground is covered in snow, people forget how to drive, and the Christmas moose is going to soon visit and give all of the kids toys at Christmas. If they’re bad, they get moose poop in their stockings. (We aren’t going to confirm or deny if that last part is true.)
One of the best ways to combat the subzero temperatures on a chilly winter night is to have a big bowl of stew. Traditionally it would be a hearty beef stew with carrots, potatoes, and other root vegetables — you know, things that are good at growing and living in the cold climate. However, when we stumbled across this recipe for Beer & Chicken Stew with Buttermilk Biscuits from our boi Adam Ragusea, we knew that we had to give it a try. (Technically the recipe is from his friend Ben Harrison, but Adam made the video so we’re crediting him as well.)
Ingredients
If you want to make this at home, here are the ingredients you’ll need:
Beer & Chicken Stew
½ lbs of thick cut bacon
2 cups total of diced shallots, fennel root, and carrots*
8 oz sliced mushrooms
4 boneless, skinless chicken thighs lightly coated in flour
355mL (12 fl oz) can of beer**
Thyme to taste
*The measurements are guidelines as are the types of vegetables. Feel free to swap in onion and celery for shallots and fennel respectively if that’s all you have.
**Opt for a lager or brown ale. Stay away from IPAs.
Buttermilk Biscuits
2 ½ cups cake flour
3 teaspoons baking powder
1 teaspoon salt
1 ½ teaspoons sugar
1 stick of salted butter, frozen
1 cup buttermilk
Making The Stew
This was honestly one of the easiest recipes we’ve ever had to tackle. (Maybe we’re just getting better at this whole cooking thing?) First thing you’ll want to do is to combine all the dry ingredients for the biscuits into a bowl and whisk them together until everything is combined.
After that, take a frozen stick of butter out of the freezer and shred it using a cheese grater. Yes it sounds super weird, but it’ll make your biscuits super flaky! Take all of your shredded butter and dump it into the dry ingredients. Mix until everything is evenly incorporated and place the bowl in your fridge.
🍲 Mediocre Tip: The key to making great biscuits is to not let the butter melt! Cold butter makes better biscuits, as you’re better able to better incorporate the butter evenly.
Now it’s time to move on and make the stew.
Begin by taking your bacon and cutting it into thick chunks. We used a pair of kitchen shears, although a sharp knife would also do the trick. Put your massive bacon bits into a giant oven safe pot and turn the heat to medium-high on your stove. Allow the bacon to cook until it’s been cooked to your level preferred level of doneness. (We used applewood smoked bacon, because it’s delicious.)
Mmmm, bacon!
Remove the bacon from the pot with a slotted spoon (leaving the bacon fat behind) and carefully place all the flour coated chicken thighs in the fat to fry up. You’re not going to be cooking the chicken all the way through at this point — you just want to brown it so it develops a nice flavourful crust.
Once the chicken has browned, remove it from the pot and dump in your vegetables — minus the mushrooms, those come later. Allow the vegetables to sweat down in the bacon and chicken fat until they’ve gone a little soft, then add in the mushrooms.
The base for any good stew or soup.
🍲 Mediocre Tip: In the video, Adam’s friend Ben removes about half of the fat from the pot before cooking the vegetables. Adam says that he would just keep all the fat in and we have to agree. We didn’t find that the end result was overly greasy and the flavour from all that fat is next level. Mmmm!
Once the mushrooms have had a chance to soften up, put the bacon bits and the chicken thighs back into the pot. If you feel like you need to, you can cut up the thighs into smaller chunks at this point, but realistically the thighs get so tender that they’ll be falling apart anyways.
Leftover beer from a party. Thanks, Kevin and Billy.
At this point you can dump in your can of chosen beer and deglaze the bottom of the pan with a wooden spoon. Add enough water to cover everything with liquid and season lightly with salt, pepper, and the herbs of your choice. We went with thyme, however, rosemary and/or sage would work well also.
At this point it was starting to smell real good.
Bring the stew to a boil and then reduce the heat until it is just barely simmering. Let it simmer uncovered for 35 minutes.
While the stew is stewing, take the bowl of biscuit ingredients out of the fridge and pour in one cup of cold buttermilk. Mix everything until just incorporated and turn the dough out onto a heavily floured surface. Knead until the dough just comes together, roll the dough out into a 1 inch thick sheet and fold it back on itself. Repeat the rolling and folding 2-3 more times.
🍲 Mediocre Tip: Biscuit dough is a little more forgiving than other types of dough, but it can be overworked. You don’t want to laminate it too much or the biscuits won’t rise. Remember that the butter still needs to not melt entirely, so work quickly otherwise the biscuits won’t have that super flaky texture.
Once you have your final biscuit dough rolled out, cut out as many biscuits as you can while trying to minimize trimmings. You can collect and roll out the scraps to make more, but they won’t turn out as nice. Place them back in the fridge until the stew is done simmering so the butter stays cold. Make sure that your oven is preheating to 475°F as well!
They don’t look like much, but these biscuits are A++.
Once your stew has finished simmering, place the biscuits on top of the liquid ensuring to cover as much area as possible. Brush the tops of the biscuits with melted butter mixed with pepper and herbs to help give them a wonderful colour and flavour. Put the pot in the oven and let them cook for 20-25 minutes, or until the biscuits have rose and are a nice golden golden brown.
To serve, make sure everyone gets one biscuit and a healthy helping of stew.
The best stew we’ve ever had.
And there you have it, you just made your very own chicken stew with buttermilk biscuits.
Our Mediocre Thoughts
👨🍳 Trevor: I enjoy a good stew — always have. Unfortunately, most of the stews I’ve consumed were of the boring beef stew variety (or they were made with a stew pack… I’m looking at you, Dylan). Nothing against traditional beef stew, but it gets real boring year after year. I’ve always wanted to try a chicken stew but I was never able to find a recipe that wasn’t either glorified cream of chicken soup or coq au vin. But then this YouTube video fell into our laps and well, the rest is history.
I was a little on the fence about this recipe since the main liquid involved was beer (well, water too). I’ve cooked with beer before and sometimes it turns out, sometimes it doesn’t. I am very glad that this one turned out. By the time you have all the aromatic vegetables, thyme, pepper, bacon, and chicken you can barely smell the beer. Once the stew has been simmering for 35 minutes you definitely can’t taste it unless you’re reaaaaaaally looking for it.
This stew is surprisingly filling and just the right amount of richness for those cold winter days, and I will likely be making it my go to stew from now on.
👩🍳 Brittany: I don’t like beer. I have tried to like it but don’t really. (I have come to love a few sours, though.) When I saw that this recipe used beer as the main liquid, I was skeptical that I would like it. No beef broth? Wild. Well, I’m glad the skeptic in me was wrong. This stew turned out to be super light and earthy, with enough heaviness that it wasn’t in soup territory and it felt like a true stew. Now I know that I don’t hate all food cooked with beer! (I’m looking at you, Guinness.)
This was also my first time cooking with fennel — it really gave this stew a different flavour profile which I appreciated. The only thing I’d do differently is add a bit more liquid next time, as the biscuits do soak up a fair amount of liquid (but don’t get gross and soggy, surprisingly).
Adam Ragusea blew up on YouTube this year and I’m really glad he did — he deserves it. All of his videos are great and informative, and it was a fun experience bringing one of his YouTube videos to life (although it was his friend’s recipe, props to Ben!)
I don’t think I’ve ever had chicken stew in my entire life, but I’m glad that has changed. (Also, stew + biscuits = an awesome pairing.)
Our Review
Taste: 5 warm bellies out of 5 🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥
Presentation: 4 big bowls out of 5 🍲🍲🍲🍲
Affordability: 5 icanaffordthisstewafterbuyingchristmaspresents out of 5 💸💸💸💸💸
This stew hit the spot! It was everything we wanted it to be. As this stew cooked it filled the air with a light, earthy aroma. Then when it was finally time to eat we dived in and devoured it. The wait was worth it! (And it took less time than other stew recipes we’ve tried before, so that’s a plus.)
From a presentation standpoint, it looks great for a stew. Despite having fennel in it, it was missing a bright pop of green — maybe some chopped parsley or fresh thyme added at the end would brighten it up? But overall, it was a warm and inviting bowl of stew. The biscuits definitely make it stand out from your standard stew recipe!
We’ve done many recipe reviews in the past, and this is probably one of the most affordable recipes we’ve tackled in a while (which was nice because our credit cards are crying after all of the Christmas shopping we’ve done). Andy’s Herb Rice With Saffron and Scallions (one of the last recipes we made) was delicious, but damn, saffron is expensive AF. The ingredients in this recipe are wallet friendly, and we appreciate it. Good food doesn’t have to be complicated! It can be simple and cheap too.
Did we have a lot of faith that a guy from California would know how to cook stew? No. We thought Californians ate a strict diet of kale, cauliflower, and avocado down there. We were wrong — they know how to cook a good hearty stew too, despite having amazing weather where one wouldn’t really want to eat stew. (We’re only a bit jealous of their climate.)
Thanks for reading! We were so close to making Beef Bourguignon, but we’re glad we didn’t.
Support Adam Ragusea by watching his Beer Chicken Stew with Biscuit Topping video here:
We still have one more post coming out before the end of the year, so be sure to watch out for it. We’ll be making and taste testing a very controversial Christmas dessert… fruit cake!
What veggies do you like to put in your stew? Let us know in the comments below!