Boeuf Bourguignon
November 20, 2008 4:10 pm GeneralI don’t cook often, so when I do, it’s an occasion worth marking.
Boeuf Bourguignon
Boeuf Bourguignon (for 6 people)
Ingredients:
- 1.5kg decent beef, cut into nice sized chunks
- 6 big onions
- 6 carrots
- About 250g of mushrooms
- 100g chopped rashers (lardons, for the frenchies out there)
- About 50g of butter
- 3 soup spoons of plain flour
- A few leaves of bay leaves (thanks J5 for the translation of laurier) and a few twigs of thyme, 12 whole cloves, 12 whole peppercorns, salt to taste
- 1 bottle of drinkable red wine (I used a cheapish bottle of Côte du Rhône)
Preparation:
Cut the onions up into big chunks, and lightly fry them with the rashers in the butter. Remove them, and then brown the meat in the same pan (fairly high heat, just for a minute or two). Sprinkle the flour on and keep going until it’s turned kind of golden. The flour & butter will do the same job as a roux and thicken the sauce.
Move everything (beef, bacon, onion) to a big pot, add the red wine, peppercorns, salt, cloves, and herbs. Leave it cooking on a really low heat (the wine must not boil, or your beef will be leather) for about 2 hours.
Peel & cut the carrots into biggish chunks, wash & chop the mushrooms (again, I like chunky), and when the sauce is nicely reduced, add them to the pot. Leave the lot cooking (still on low heat) for another hour at least.
Serve hot, with boiled or steamed potatoes (you can add them to the pot for a few minutes after boiling and before serving if you like that kind of thing) and a nice Burgundy red.
Best thing about this? You can prepare it in about 20 to 30 minutes at lunchtime, and leave it cooking all afternoon, when it’s done, take it off the heat, and reheat it when your guests arrive. This works best if you work at home.
November 20th, 2008 at 4:36 pm
I think laurier = bay leaves.
Looks delicious – I want to cook it immediately 🙂
November 20th, 2008 at 5:10 pm
leaves of laurier – Bay leaves – I use them in all my soups, braises and stews.
Cheap fatty meat is great here since the braise will make it fall apart tender at half the cost (and usually the most flavour because of the fat). Just look for a big hunk of meat with a lot of marbling, cut it into cubes and trim the excess fat.
To avoid the boiling problem throw your pot into the stove at 163C (325F) covered by aluminium foil and a tight lid.
To get a bit more fancy this should be a braise not a stew which means the liquid should just about cover 2/3rds of the height of the meat leaving the last 1/3 to steam. Cutting a round of parchment paper which sits above the meat and using a reverse dome aluminium foil cover (push the aluminium foil into the pot so there is less air pockets while still being able to crimp the foil on the pots lip) helps the braise.
This is one of my favourite dishes (and so easy to make). You can also create a bunch of variations. My favourites are cherry braised short ribs – substitute short ribs, perl onions and dried cherries – and the Belgium equivalent of Boeuf Bourguignon – substitute the red wine for Chimey beer and serve over egg noodles.
November 20th, 2008 at 5:24 pm
Americans and Canadians are unlikely to know what “rashers” means; we say “slices of bacon”.
November 20th, 2008 at 5:41 pm
J5: Thanks for the translations and variants. I have a really good butcher near here, and to be honest, while I do like some fat on my meat, you can’t beat some tender beef for this.
I’ve heard of people baking this in the stove, but having the sauce reduce over a light heat really is the best way to go about it.
Nice tip for the Chimay! Will try it on another occasion.
Joe: For the Canadians, I left the French up there 🙂
November 20th, 2008 at 5:59 pm
Yes, the French helped.
This American has studied a bit of French, so I knew that lardon meant bacon but had to look up “rashers”.
BTW: my high school French teacher was an Irishman from Belfast, and managed to teach us all to pronounce our French with an Irish brogue (actually, he really wanted to be a Latin teacher, so we practiced grammar and verb conjugations and hardly learned to speak or understand spoken French at all). But at least when I go to Quebec or France I can read the menu.
November 22nd, 2008 at 2:39 pm
Did yu know that it was originally made with rat?