Beef Bourguignon is a French beef stew, cooked with onion, garlic, carrots mainly, braised in red wine and cooked until super tender.
This recipe is as close to authentic as I could find, and it blew me away.
Beef Bourguignon
Ingredients
- 1 kg Beef (Shin or Shoulder, Braising Steak) Cut into chunks, I like larger chunks
- 1 Bottle Red Wine Quality is your choice, but it shows in the end.
- 1 ltr Rich Beef Stock
- 2 Carrots Chopped
- 2 Onions Chopped
- 6-8 Slices of thick good quality Bacon cut into lardons
- 350 g Button mushrooms Stems removed
- 20ish Pearl onoins Silverskins will work
- 2 tsp Sugar
- 1 tbsp Tomato Puree
- 1 Cup Flour To coat meat
- 4 Sprigs Thyme
- 3 Bay Leaves
- 1 Celery Stalk
- 1 Bunch Parsley
- 5 Cloves Garlic Peeled and gently crushed (keep intact)
- 2 cubes Cooking Chocolate
Instructions
- Pat dry your meat and season with plenty of salt, Place in a large bowl/pan with the carrots, onion and garlic.
- Tie all your herbs together in a little parcel (this is called a bouquet garni) and add to bowl also.
- empty the whole bottle of red wine into the bowl and mix, ideally we want it to cover everything, if not add water and mix together.Place in the fridge for an hour.
- After an hour, remove the beef, pat dry season again and coat in the flour.Then were going to sear the meat in a large dutch oven or lidded pot to create a nice crust. Add butter also, this flavours the meat and helps with the crust.Once you have a nice crust, remove excess butter/oil leaving the flavoursome fond on the bottom of the pan.
- Now re add everything (veg and Wine) to the dutch oven and scrape the fond off the bottom of the pan with a wooden spoon, and stir well.Bring to the boil to cook off the alcohol
- Add your stock and the puree, and mix well. all the components should be just covered in liquid.
- Pop on the lid and place in an oven for 4-6 hours, at 190c/375f, checking every couple of hours and stirring gently. Keep an eye on the liquid level here, and adjust your oven if needed.
- After 4-6 hours and the meat is super soft, the liquid should be almost syrup like, remove from heat and set aside.
- Now with your pearl onions we add them to a pan with butter and sugar, once they start to caramelise, add half a cup of water and whilst the liquid sizzles, give them a good toss, the idea here is to get them tender, but keeping their form.
- Set onions aside and place your bacon in a cold pan, bringing them up to heat until the fat renders and you get some nice crispy salty lardons.
- Now for the Mushrooms, its simply a case of browning these in butter and a little stock, once done you can set them aside with the onions and bacon.
- This is optional, but I add half of the garnishes to the pot also and mix in, with a couple of cubes of cooking chocolate.
- Now plate up, I serve mine with buttery mashed potato, then scoop a couple of ladles of the stew on top, followed by some of the onions,mushrooms and bacon…Delicious!
