Today I’m bringing on another round of homemade comfort food, loaded into a bowl over a fluffy cloud of creamy mashed potatoes. My homemade beef tips are a family favorite. When things are going a hundred miles per hour over here on weeknights, I need to get dinner on the table without having to babysit it. So I make a round of beef tips with mushroom gravy and serve it over a bed of fluffy, garlicky mashed potatoes and somehow, with every bite the troubles of the day slowly dissipate. Hubby is happy because it’s man-food and I’m elated because fewer dishes! Although to be fair, hubby does dinner dishes. So my happiness stems more from the fact that this recipe requires minimum prep but produces maximum flavor? Yes; let’s go with that. That’s it.
Video for the Best Beef Tips
It always makes me laugh when I share an instant pot recipe. Immediately I’ll get messages asking how to make that recipe in the slow cooker or on the stove. And the reverse proves to be true when I make recipes in the slow cooker/stove top. So this one goes out to all of my slow cooker AND instant pot fanatics. Let’s let our kitchen gadgets make us dinner. The inspiration for today’s beef tips with mushroom gravy comes from a Mississippi pot roast. I love what happens to brown gravy after it’s been mingling with pepperoncini pepper — one problem. I like to avoid using store-bought gravy mixes as much as possible. So I’m making a from-scratch gravy mix using simple ingredients that you can find in your own pantry. All except one are a pantry staple in most households. So you can quickly put this meal together on the fly.
Ingredients for instant pot beef tips
Butter: we’ll season the beef with flour, kosher salt, and black pepper before we sear the meat in the butter to help create a layer of fond in the bottom of the fish. This will help flavor the rest of the beef tips ingredients.Beef: For beef stews and beef tips, I prefer to use a well-trimmed chuck roast or round roast that’s cut into 1-inch cubes. Sometimes, I’ll purchase ‘beef stew meat’ from the grocery store, which saves the time of having to trim and cut the meat into cubes. It all depends on what the grocery store has to offer; either would work for this recipe. Essentially, and tougher cuts of meat that require a longer cooking time will work for this recipe.Flour: will help thicken the stew and create a crust on the beef when we sear it.Chopped onions: adds flavor to the dish.Mushrooms: gives the recipe a bit more bite. The umami present in mushrooms works beautifully with beef. We aren’t using a can of cream of mushroom soup. So this and the mushroom powder essentially make up for that.Seasonings: we’ll use garlic powder, sugar, onion powder, dried thyme, and mushroom powder. A lot of these ingredients are actually what is present in a store-bought dry onionsoup mix.Worcestershire sauce: bumps the umami in the dish.Pepperoncini peppers: adds a peppery acidity to the dish which helps cut through the richness of the beef and butter and gives you a satisfying flavor. Trust me, leftovers taste even better! The meat is melt-in-your-mouth delicious on day two!Beef broth or stock: is the liquid portion of the dish. The meat and veggies will cook in this.cornstarch: we’ll mix a few tablespoons of cornstarch with water to create a cornstarch slurry that will help thicken the gravy at the end. A thickening agent is usually present in brown gravy mix, but since we aren’t using a packet for this recipe, this does that for us!
Making easy crock pot beef tips (or instant pot)
