Beef Bourguignon
Date Completed: 1/30/2021
Bonjour!
I think it’s time for a little French cooking. I turned to The French Chef Cookbook by Julia Child for my ninth recipe - her infamous Beef Bourguignon!
This cookbook arranges the recipes chronologically by episode which makes it tricky to break into chapters for my project. I’m using the Subject Guide instead. This recipe from her ninety-sixth show falls under Beef, Veal, Lamb.
Julia Child’s first episode of The French Chef also featured Beef Bourguignon. I learned from the cookbook’s introduction that the first thirteen episode recordings were actually lost at one point. The cookbook starts at episode fourteen. Julia Child eventually repeated those lost recipes in later episodes of The French Chef, explaining why such an iconic recipe doesn’t appear in the cookbook until episode ninety-six.
As you may already be able to tell, we did quite a bit of homework to prepare for this recipe. Thanks to PBS Passport we watched the episode. How delightful to learn from Julia herself! Someone must have eventually recovered those original thirteen episodes because we found the original as well. I loved comparing the two episodes!
After all that research, we needed to pick up some additional ingredients. The grocery store did not carry pork belly or the right wine. To get the pork belly we checked out a local butcher shop in the River Market area called Local Pig. For the wine we turned to my favorite local wine store, Cellar Rat. The people always give wonderful recommendations!
Once we had everything we needed (and I had read the recipe out loud a few times), we got to work on the first step: lardons. These are chopped up pieces of bacon fat with a more-than-adorable name! Interestingly, the lardons did not appear in the Episode One version of this recipe.
Once chopped you throw them in a skillet to render the fat and then set them aside. Use that fat to brown the beef, which should be cut into 3-inch cubes and thoroughly dried. Julia said to turn it frequently in the pan. We went with America’s Test Kitchen method instead and let the beef sit, only turning once. The browned beef gets transferred to a casserole dish (a Dutch oven in our case).
Next, the wine makes its debut. The recipe calls for 3 cups of full-bodied burgundy wine to deglaze the pan you just used to brown the beef. Happily, after pouring the required amount in the pan there is still enough wine left for a little chef’s toast.
Just enough to enjoy while prepping the dish to go into the oven!
With the beef already in the casserole, throw in the lardons and pour in the wine. Next add garlic, tomato paste, bay leaves and other seasonings. I have to say that this might have been the moment it smelled the best! Everything simmers on the stove and then it’s time to say goodbye to it for a few hours as it enters the oven.
Wish you could smell this!
When the beef had been cooking for about an hour, we got started on the garniture. French for garnish. In this case: mushrooms and baby boiler onions!
All the mushroom step entailed was chopping them, sautéing them briefly in oil and butter, then tossing with salt. Very straightforward.
The onion step proved itself significantly more interesting and only marginally more difficult. I had never worked with boiler onions before. It turns out you start by boiling water and tossing in the unpeeled onions for just a few seconds. This loosens the skin. As you peel them, Julia also recommends you cut a little cross shape into the root end. That apparently prevents them from bursting while cooking.
After the prep work, you can throw the peeled onions in a pan with (you’ll never guess…) more butter! Add water to cover them halfway and salt, cover the pan, and let that simmer for about 30 minutes.
Once they finished, I threw them in the bowl with the mushrooms to hang out until the beef finished. The recipe also tells you to keep the onion cooking liquid so you can add it to the sauce later.
At this point it was time for a quick rest while we waited for the beef. We let it cook for a total of 3 hours. It’s possible we could have taken it out after 2.5, but I’m going to pretend that we absolutely had to have that last 30 minutes!
Deep breath.. almost done! We kept powering through to make the sauce. After the beef comes out, you have to set the lid askew and drain all the liquid into the sauce pan. No easy feat!
The recipe says to skim the fat off the liquid. We watched Julia do this with a spoon on her show, but that didn’t work well in real life. We also tried a method I’d seen where you use ice cubes to get the fat to solidify. Also not overly effective. At that point I called it a lost cause and we moved on. Now accepting all your fat-skimming tips!
Julia recommends checking the seasonings at this point. We added a little salt and a fair amount of pepper.
You also take three tablespoons each of butter and flour to make a Beurre Manié that will thicken the sauce. I used a whisk to combine them and wound up with a temporary mess. Once I had scraped enough butter out of the whisk I used the butter knife to mash it together sufficiently with the flour. I later realized Julia recommended using a rubber spatula - she’s so smart!
I then added a ladleful of the sauce to the butter mixture and whisked that together. Finally using the right tool for the job! It basically looked like the thickest gravy you’ve ever seen!
That gets dumped back into the sauce along with the onion cooking liquid you saved. This gave the sauce a completely new level of flavor.
Before we finally got to try a bite, we poured the garniture and the sauce back into the pot with the beef. That simmered for a few minutes and then we were done! Happy dance!
Shout-out to that one especially photogenic onion in the top right corner.
Taste Report:
C'était délicieux! I had high expectations for how this would taste! Even considering all that build-up, I thought this tasted amazing. The sauce especially had a wonderful, warming flavor. We served it as Julia recommended, with potatoes and French bread.
I’m also happy to report that this holds up great in the freezer! You can easily bring it back to life in a covered pot on medium-high heat.
Mess Report:
Mon Dieu! This recipe has so many steps which means so many dishes! I had originally thought of making this for a Sunday dinner. Then I actually read the recipe and decided this had to be made on a day when I wouldn’t be going to work the following morning.
You do have the opportunity to cook multiple steps in the same pan. Since everything goes back together at the end anyway, I didn’t bother washing that one pan between each. Example: browned meat, simmered red wine, sautéed mushrooms, steamed onions, and finished sauce all in one pan.
There was also a good amount of down time while the meat cooked when we were able to get a head start on dishes. That helped me enjoy the meal more because I wasn’t sitting in a kitchen full-to-the-brim with dirty dishes.
My impression of this recipe mess-wise is that you have to look at it as a day-long project. Do it on a day when that’s okay with you and actually seems fun! You’ll be very proud of yourself in the end!
