Slow-cooker beef Trinchado

Layer chopped tomatoes and onions in your slow-cooker, top with marinated beef cubes, cover with a mixture of stock and spices and come home to a mouth-watering meal of spicy slow-cooker beef Trinchado.

You won't believe the delicious aromas coming out of your slow-cooker!

Jump to:

• What is Trinchado?
• What is peri-peri?
• Equipment
• Ingredients
• Recipe Steps
• What to serve with beef Trinchado
• FAQ
• Save for later
• Related recipes
• 📋The recipe

What is Trinchado?

Trinchado is simply a spicy beef stew, which you will find on the menu at any of the numerous Portuguese restaurants in South Africa.

It's made with tender chunks of stewing beef in a spicy tomato and onion gravy, flavoured with red wine and peri-peri sauce. Trinchado is traditionally served with chunky bread to mop up all the delicious sauce, and a side helping of French fries.

I've got another recipe for quick and easy beef Trinchado which uses slices of steak and is very popular with my readers. However as this recipe involves some hands-on cooking, I thought I'd adapt it for those of you who prefer using a slow-cooker.

Because of the long, slow cooking time, you can get away with using cheaper cuts of stewing beef, such as chuck or flank rather than the more expensive cuts of steak. But believe me, you lose absolutely nothing in the flavour department. This slow-cooker beef Trinchado turns out tender, juicy and succulent, with all the fabulous peri-peri flavour, but with minimal effort on your part.

Red wine adds a richness and depth of flavour to the Trinchado and I recommend adding it. However, if you don't want to add alcohol you can substitute the red wine with extra stock, or even use red grape juice.

This slow-cooker Trinchado recipe is the ultimate one-pan meal. You don't even have to brown the meat first. Just marinate it in a mixture of cornflour and Worcestershire sauce for 30 minutes, layer it with tomatoes and onions in a spicy sauce and forget about it for a few hours until you are ready to eat.

You end up with pieces of beef that are so tender you could cut them with a fork!

You can even serve it directly from the inner liner of your slow-cooker, so you save on loads of washing up! How convenient is that?

What is peri-peri?

Peri-peri is a small red chilli, similar to a bird's eye chilli, grown in South Africa and the neighbouring Mocambique. This chilli gets its name from the Swahili word for pepper, which is peri, but because it is so hot the name has been doubled to be peri-peri or pepper-pepper.

The most popular use of the peri-peri chilli is in the famous Nando's peri-peri sauce, which I have used in this recipe. If you'd like to try a Nando's copycat chicken recipe, why not take a look at my recipe for oven-baked peri-peri chicken.

Equipment

To make this dish you will need a slow-cooker.

You will also need a small glass bowl, a sharp knife and a chopping board.

Ingredients

**You can get the exact quantities of ingredients for this slow-cooker beef Trinchado recipe on the printable recipe card at the end of this post**

This recipe serves 4 people.

Ingredients for the beef and the marinade

• Stewing beef - this can be chuck, flank or any other tougher cut of beef that benefits from long slow cooking. It should be cut into bite-sized pieces. In the UK, most supermarkets sell packets of ready-cubed stewing steak, which is probably a mixture of various cuts of beef and is ideal for use in this dish.
• Worcestershire sauce - you may think that the amount of Worcestershire sauce that goes into this Trinchado recipe is too much, but it does contribute to the robust flavour.
• Cornflour - marinating the beef in a mixture of cornflour and Worcestershire sauce starts to break down the fibres in the meat and helps to tenderise the meat. For US readers, cornflour is also known as cornstarch.

Ingredients for the gravy

• Tomatoes - I like to use fresh tomatoes rather than canned. If you don't have fresh tomatoes you can substitute with an equivalent amount (which is about half a can or 1 cup) of canned chopped tomatoes.
• Onions - these should be coarsely chopped and separated.
• Garlic - you can use fresh garlic, which should be finely minced, or ready-chopped garlic from a jar.
• Balsamic vinegar - along with the red wine adds an element of tartness.
• Peri-peri sauce - this is Nando's peri-peri sauce which is sold in most large supermarkets in the UK. I believe it is also available at Safeway, Kroger and Walmart in the US. For this recipe, you will need about half a cup (140 ml) of sauce. Depending on how hot and spicy you want to make this dish you could use a mild, medium or hot variety. You can buy Nando's in both a sauce and a marinade. I only had the marinade in my cupboard so that's what I went with. If you use the sauce you may need to use less as it will be more concentrated.
• Beef stock - if you have proper beef stock, then, by all means, use that. Otherwise, dissolve one beef stock cube in 1 cup of boiling water.
• Red wine - this should be a good-tasting wine that you would actually drink. A wine that doesn't taste good when you drink it won't improve in flavour when you cook with it, and might even spoil the overall taste of the finished dish. My motto is 'if you wouldn't drink it, don't cook with it'.
• Salt and Sugar - this is for seasoning and to your taste. I've found that half a teaspoon of salt is about right for my taste. I like to add a teaspoon of sugar when I cook with tomatoes as I find this mellows the tartness of the tomatoes. Both the salt and the sugar are optional.
• Cornflour or cornstarch (not pictured) - for thickening the gravy.

Recipe Steps

Step 1 - Marinate the beef

• Cut the beef into bite-sized pieces and place it in a mixing bowl with the cornflour and Worcestershire sauce.

• Mix thoroughly to coat the beef completely.
• Cover the dish with plastic wrap and place in the refrigerator for 30 minutes to marinate.

Step 2 - Prepare the gravy

• Peel the onions and chop them coarsely. Separate the pieces into individual petals.
• Peel the garlic and crush.
• Chop the tomatoes. I don't bother peeling them, but if you want to peel the tomatoes first, here is how you do it.
  • Score the skin of each tomato on the bottom with a cross.
  • Place the tomatoes in a bowl and cover the tomatoes with boiling water.
  • Let them stand for two minutes.
  • Remove the tomatoes from the boiling water and plunge them into a bowl of cold water to cool them down so that you can handle them.
  • Peel the skins away.

Step 3 - Assemble and cook

• Layer the tomatoes, onions and garlic on the bottom of your slow-cooker and top with the marinated beef. Tip in any remaining marinade.

• Combine the stock, red wine, balsamic vinegar and peri-peri sauce with salt and sugar, and pour the mixture over the meat and vegetables.

• Set the slow-cooker to medium and leave for 5 to 6 hours.
• If you want to speed things up a bit you can cook it on high for 4 to 5 hours.
• If you want to leave it to cook while you are at work, set it to low and leave it for 6 to 8 hours.

• To thicken the gravy, make a slurry with 1 to 2 tablespoons of cornflour (or cornstarch) and 3 tablespoons of water, set the slow-cooker to high and mix the cornflour slurry into the Trinchado in the slow-cooker. Leave for 10 minutes until the gravy has thickened.
• Transfer the Trinchado to a serving dish (or leave it in the slow-cooker dish), garnish with parsley and serve.

What to serve with beef Trinchado

Beef Trinchado is traditionally served with paprika-flavoured French fries and crusty bread or garlic bread, with slices of fresh tomato.

However, there's nothing stopping you from serving it with a pile of creamy mashed potatoes and a selection of your favourite vegetables.

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FAQ

Save for later

If you'd like to try this recipe for slow-cooker beef Trinchado, why not save it to one of your Pinterest boards so you can find it easily? Just click on the image below.

Alternatively, you can save the recipe by clicking on the floating heart icon on the right-hand side of the screen.

Related recipes

If you enjoyed this slow-cooker beef Trinchado, perhaps you'd like to try some of my other meals made in a slow-cooker:

For more meals cooked in a slow-cooker, visit my slow-cooker recipes page.

📋The recipe

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