Bacon, Beef & Blue Cheese Stew

I see I haven't been particularly diligent about my promise to follow up here with dishes from the bacon book I got a while back. Well, time to do at least something about that.

Browsing aforementioned book, a beef, bacon & blue cheese stew caught my attention, and decided to have a go at it - with some minor modifications.

Ingredients:
- 125 g (4.4 oz) bacon
- 3 large onions, coarsely chopped
- sunflower oil
- 1.13 kg (2.5 lbs) beef cubes
- 8 tbsp flour
- 2.5 dL (1 cup) Bedarö Bitter^[1]
- 5 dL (2 cups) beef broth
- fresh thyme
- dried rosemary
- 3 leaves bay laurel
- 1 tbsp white wine vinegar
- salt & pepper
- blue cheese^[2]
- bread for serving

In a large pot, the bacon was fried over medium/high heat till crisp, then removed from the pot. The heat was reduced to medium/low and the coarsely chopped onions were added. The onions were cooked with occasional stirring for over an hour till caramelised - actually I think this part need some optimisation: the recipe said to caramelise the onions at low heat for 20 minutes, but this appeared to be far too little for proper caramelisation - then onions were removed and the heat upped to medium/high and oil was added.

The beef cubes were coated in the flour, and browned in the pot after removing the lightly caramelised onions. Then the beer and beef broth were added. After stirring well (to ensure that no lumps of flour were still stuck to the bottom and sides of the pot) the thyme, rosemary, bay laurels, vinegar, salt and pepper were added and the were onions returned to the pot. Contrary to the recipe I was following I did not return the bacon to the pot at this point. The pot was brought to a boil, covered and let simmer for two hours.

The stew was then served with crumbled bacon and crumbled blue cheese on top - and a piece of bread on the side. The reason I didn't add the bacon before simmering for two hours, but instead afterwards was that I wanted to retain some crispness in the bacon.

It was truly delicious - very intense flavours and quite a heavy dish too. I'm strongly considering trying this again with some mashed potatoes and a green salad on the side.

^[1] Obviously not essential which ale - I'd go for any good, strong IPA.
^[2] The original recipe recommended Maytag (from the US) blue cheese, and I used Swedish Kvibille Ädel (30%), but any good blue cheese sufficiently hard to crumble should work.