Browning Beef in Beef Stew?
Making a stew without browning is relatively safe since the prolonged cooking should kill off most pathogens. This is especially true if you are careful about your kitchen cleanliness and cut the meat down from a larger piece yourself instead of buying pre-cut &quot;stew meat&quot; or ground meat. Whole cuts of meat such as steaks or roasts usually only have E. coli on the surface, which makes the E. coli easier to kill by cooking. When the meat is ground or mechanically tenderized, E. coli on the surface can be transferred to the inside of the meat. This is why ground meat and mechanically tenderized meat are more likely to cause illness than whole cuts of meat. Like ground meats, prepackaged &quot;stew meat&quot; can contain tissues from multiple individual animals, thereby increasing the chance that there is E. coli present in the package. Each additional surface is another place for E. coli to grow while that package is sitting at the store or in your fridge.
Browning, however contributes a significant amount of flavor to the stew, which will be lost.  The good news is that you don't have to brown every single piece... One alternative that I use is to buy the quantity of meat I plan to use as a whole roast (instead of pre-cut &quot;stew meat&quot;) then sear the entire roast before cutting it down to stew-size chunks.  You get the flavor benefit of the Maillard browning with less time spent browning little pieces and less overcooked meat.  If you use a lidless, oven braise technique, as suggested in Harold McGee's On Food and Cooking, you will get further browning on any pieces that aren't totally submerged as well as flavor concentration from evaporation.
Check out these previous posts on similar topics:

Should I brown meat for stew?

Can I put raw ground beef in the crockpot when making chili?

Chili/Stew - Is it necessary to cook all the meat before adding to the rest of the ingredients?

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