"Stew beef" is slightly cheaper than buying a whole roast and cutting it up, because the stew beef is made up of bits and pieces that were left over after the prettier roasts had been carved.
If it's not to your taste, spring for a whole roast and cut it up yourself.
WARNING: Fat content in meat that is supposed to be cooked for a long time is a good thing. Keeps the meat from drying out. It's more efficient to simply cook the stew in advance, and then skim the rendered fat off the top, before you reheat it.
This question has become blown out of proportion. I was just curious- then I started getting answers that quickbreads and cake are the same thing- which they "obviously" aren't. So I started doing my own research.
Wikipedia says that the term quickbread was probably invented in the US after the discovery of chemical leavening. The Wikipedia references and some dictionaries corroborate this definition. Basically anything leavened with soda is quickbread.
This doesn't work. There are a great many things leavened with soda that can't be called quickbread. A good example is plain old white cake. Obviously this is a semantic issue but one that needed solving.
Two American cookbooks that I consider canonical recipe resources, The Joy of Cooking, and the Better Homes and Gardens cookbook, both have a separate quickbread section. In it are a variety of fruit breads as well as some biscuits and scones.
On Food and Cooking muddied the water a bit by differentiating between quick breads such as biscuits and batter breads such as banana bread. These were grouped together, however, and contrasted against cakes. This book says that cakes are higher in fat and sugar and have a more delicate texture.
Ratio, as linked in this answer, confused the terms a bit more also including a term "quick cake" but it differentiated between the different products with distinct ratios for the flour, fat, and sugar.
With several competing definitions I decided to take an unscientific poll. I called 6 friends in Washington, Utah, Georgia, and Texas. I tried to find a variety of American cultures. Obviously it is biased by the fact that I know all of them.
When asked "What is quickbread to you?" without exception all of them replied "banana bread"
When I followed up with: "What is the difference between that and cake" I received the following answers:
"It is eaten at breakfast"
"It has less sugar"
"It is loaf shaped"
"It is more dense"
"It has a more open texture"
My conclusion is that the historical definition of "anything with soda" is no longer useful. In cookbooks it seems to now be applied to chemically risen baked goods that:
- have as a rule of thumb a particular ratio of flour, fat, and sugar
- have less sugar than cake
- refers in particular to fruit breads, biscuits, and scones
- generally has an irregular vs uniform texture
The popular definition (among my extremely limited, unrandom sampling) adds:
And now I can sleep easily again.
Best Answer
There really is no practical difference; the dictionary definition of a soup is:
Which also applies to any stew you can conceive of.
The technical, highly-nuanced difference is that of emphasis and intent. Stewing is a method of cooking the solids (specifically, a slow, moist-heat method). When you make a beef stew, you are stewing the beef, which says nothing about what you're stewing it in. On the other hand, when you make a chicken soup (or a chicken stock or broth which is the base of a chicken soup) then your objective is essentially to make chicken-flavoured liquid - to extract the flavour of the solids into the liquid. If some flavourful solids remain, then that is incidental as opposed to intentional.
In practice, some flavour extraction is going to happen with a stew as well, it just so happens that the principal aim is to cook the meat/veggies. A soup is more likely to contain raw or barely-cooked ingredients, and a stew is more likely to preserve the original flavour of the solids and/or liquids, but that's a very broad generalization and what it boils down to (ha ha) in practice seems to be largely dependent on the culture and the dish itself.
A stew is not simply a thick or chunky soup, despite the fact that a lot of people think of it that way. As above, that seems to be more common with stews, but it's not part of the definition, and the French have half a dozen categories for thickened soups that could easily be described as having the overall consistency of a "stew".