Beef and Barley Soup
A long soup with one timing decision in it, and getting that decision wrong is what makes bad barley soup.
Use a tough cut. Chuck, cubed, or proper stew meat; not beef tips, for the reasons in beef tips against stew meat.
| 2 lb SB Dry-Aged Chuck Roast, cubed | 1 brown hard, in batches | 2 simmer gently, 2 hours | |
| 2 Tbsp beef tallow | |||
| 2 onions, diced | 3 soften in the same pot | ||
| 3 carrots, sliced | |||
| 3 sticks celery, sliced | |||
| 8 cups beef stock | |||
| 2 bay leaves | |||
| 1 cup pearl barley | 4 add for the last 40 min | ||
| 5Brown the beef in batches. A crowded pot steams and you lose the browning the soup is built on. | |||
| 6The barley goes in at the end. Added early it absorbs all the stock and turns the soup to porridge. | |||
Numbers show the order to work in. Each cell spans exactly the ingredients it uses.
Why the barley goes in late
Pearl barley takes about forty minutes and keeps absorbing liquid the whole time it sits in the pot. Added at the start it swells through two hours of simmering, drinks the stock and leaves you with a thick gray mass rather than a soup.
“I like to go with something a little more economical. And so either something like a chuck roast or a sirloin tip, maybe in the crock pot or some short ribs this time of year. Or, I like taking out maybe some skirt steak, some fajita meat, and making some tacos, making some fajitas, getting something that you can just kind of chop up and mix up whatever.”
Gray Shipley
Brown in batches
Two pounds of beef dropped into a pot at once drops the temperature and everything steams. Do it in three batches, accept that it takes ten extra minutes, and the finished soup tastes like it.
“Get the moisture off the surface.”
Gray Shipley
“And I think people enjoy kind of getting to figure out what am I supposed to do with a sirloin tip? What am I supposed to do with a picanha or a tri-tip? I get to go learn and experiment in the kitchen some and figure out how to cook something.”
Gray Shipley
A homemade stock makes a real difference here: how to make beef stock.
Chuck, cubed. Tough on purpose, which is what two hours is for.
View ProductHow do I make beef and barley soup?
Brown stew meat hard, simmer it until tender, and add the barley only for the last 40 minutes.
- Cook to a Safe Minimum Internal Temperature, FoodSafety.gov
- “Danger Zone” (40°F - 140°F), USDA FSIS
Food-safety temperatures and storage times on this page are cited to the agencies above rather than to us.
Written at Shipley Farms in Vilas, North Carolina: a family cattle farm raising and dry-aging beef in the Appalachian Mountains, now in its fifth generation. No shortcuts since 1872.
Every quote on this page is Gray Shipley talking, the man who runs this farm. We sat down with him, turned on a recorder, and kept his own words. Hesitations are trimmed so they read on the page. Nothing else is added or reworded, except where Gray revised his own words in review.
Nobody knows this beef better than we do. On food safety we leave it to USDA FSIS and FoodSafety.gov, and we have linked their pages above. Reviewed 3 October 2026.
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