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Here you will find recipes from beef Wellington to beef stews & ragùs. 150 step-by-step recipes tested and photographed by our editors.

About beef

With beef especially, the attention should be on quality, not quantity. Buy the best cuts that you can afford. Beef should be a rich red colour, not brown. The fat should be creamy coloured and well marbled into the flesh. Beef should not have a strong smell. The flesh should be firm to the touch, not soft and mushy. If the meat is pre-packaged, check that there is no excess liquid and that it is within the sell by date. The most tender cuts of beef are loin and fillet. These cuts require very little cooking and if sliced thinly, can be eaten raw as with steak tartare. Prime cuts are best for roasting and quick cooking methods such as frying and grilling. Tougher cuts are best cooked slowly and for longer.

Before cooking, trim any excess fat, especially on cheaper cuts of meat.

See also steak haché

And the following gems from Food in England...

"Beef is good meate for an Englyssheman so be the beest be yonge... Olde beef and cowe flesshe doth ingender melanclye humoures. (yet)--if it be moderately powdeyd and the grose blode by salte be exhawtyd it dothmake and Engylssheman stronge.

Martylmas beef, which is called hanged beef, in therofe of the smoky howse is not laudable...if a man have a peace hangynge by his side and another in his bely tha which doth hange by his syde shall do hym more good!"

Rib of Beef

"A good honest fellow had a spare rib on which he intended to sup with his family after a long and hard day's work with his two little boys, each with a swich of wood that had been carried four miles, cheered with the thought of the repast that awaited them. In he went , and found his wife, the methodist parson and a whole troop of sisterhood, engaged in praye, and on the table lay scattered the clean polished bones of spare rib...."

Cooking times

We have an interactive meat cooking time calculator here.

How much does one cup of beef weigh?

Estimated US cup to weight equivalents:

Conversion notes:

Every ingredient has a cups to ounces or grams conversion table. Search for the ingredient, cup to weight conversions are at the end of each ingredient page.

We also have a generic conversion table and a portions per person lookup.

See also

BEEF RECIPES