Serious Eats  Canned Beef Stew Taste Test: Is Dinty Moore As
Good As I Remember?   [Photographs: Will Gordon]  I speak often
of my excellence as a soup-maker, and for good reason: I'm a
delusional braggart. I also make a lot of soup, some of it good,
some of it not, and most of it suffering from a classic and
confounding soup-stew identity crisis.  The only fully smooth
soups I make are lentil-based, because whole lentils are creepy;
every other wet meal born on my stovetop features a varying
percentage of solid matter, sometimes enough to qualify as stew
(unless it contains hot pepper and beans other than garbanzo, in
which case I call it chili). For years I've wasted precious
energy trying to establish a comprehensive spoon-food taxonomy,
energy that would have been better spent simmering and pureeing
and remembering to fish out bay leaves.  Well, no more. It's
high time I put an end to the infernal soup-stew debate once and
for all by declaring that for the rest of my life, or at least
for the rest of this