I'm making Beef Bourguignon for the first time, and I'm wondering if I overcooked the beef stew meat.

When reheating stews and sauces containing meat, I was taught that a slow and long reheat keeps the meat from toughening up . It works. Give yourself time to do it slowly. The way these stews can congeal when cold would make for a disgusting job removing the meat.

I'm afraid I'm going to disagree with Susan W here.

Stews and braises do not need to be chewy, and can be easily over cooked. And the most common cause of over cooking is over heating. If you cook a stew at a temperature over 180f, unless the cut is very gelatinous, you're going to dry it out. And if the Garten recipe referred to is the one on the Food Network site, she calls for an oven temperature of 250f and covers the pot when it goes in. That's a very, well above boiling point, high temperature for a stew and, if followed, will result in dry chewy meat. (Her recipe also has several other problems for me so I'd very much hesitate to use her recipes as a resource in general).

When reheating a stew I remove the meat first, bring the liquid to a boil, remove from heat and put the meat back. This helps to avoid drying the meat out when reheating.

I LOVE beef bourguignon! I usually use a large beef roast, which I cut up into smaller pieces. If you want another go at the recipe, Oui Chef's recipe (a fellow Food52er) is absolutely fantastic. It's the only recipe I use now. It's not a cheap dish (2 bottles of wine, and you can't use crappy wine since you're reducing the sauce so much and the quality/flavor of the wine really shines, for better or worse), but it's a real treat. http://www.ouichefnetwork.com/oui_chef/2010/03/beef-bourguignon.html

It's exactly how stew meat works, but you can taste it as it cooks and decide how well cooked you want it. It's very different than a steak cooked medium rare for sure. Make sure you eat it with plenty of that sauce.