Boeuf Bourguignon

Ann has been asking me recently to make dishes for her that she has never had before. It's great for me in that I don't have to come up with an idea about what to make for dinner and I get to revisit some dishes that I haven't cooked in a while, a while extending to decades in some cases.

A couple weeks back, she asked me to make her the classic boeuf bourguignon, braised beef with bacon, mushrooms, and onions. It's a dish I know well, but not a dish that I have cooked very often (or eaten in restaurants) because it is quintessential French home cooking and not something that one eats out at restaurant.

At my own restaurant, we couldn't sell beef bourguignon because customers considered it too familiar and not soigné enough for a high-end fine dining restaurant. So we often made rabbit bourguignon rather than beef. Even so, we couldn't serve the rabbit bourguignon as the braise that it was. We had pull the meat off the bones and use that as a sauce for pasta, a filling for puff pastry or ravioli, or some other creative take on the dish. 

That's a long-winded way of saying that I love beef bourguignon and haven't cooked it all that much (and not at all in recent decades) because I couldn't sell it. And an even longer way of saying that I was very much looking forward to making it for Ann.

Boeuf Bourguignon avec Spätzle

Boeuf bourguignon is a classic slow-cooked braise of beef, a method of cooking meat that breaks down tough and less expensive cuts. That said, the point of braising beef is not so much for the resulting unctuously tender meat, but for the thick, glossy sauce. The long, slow cooking in a moderate oven breaks down the collagen in the meat and gristle, thickening the sauce, and at the same time giving it both a delightful mouthfeel and a velvety sheen. It is that sauce that makes braises so delicious and comforting.

In France, boeuf bourguignon is not served by itself, but with a starch designed to trap and intermingle with the silky sauce. Most commonly, it is served with potatoes of some fashion, often mashed, at times steamed or boiled, or prepared in other ways. Rather than potatoes, I prefer a more Alsatian approach and so I decided to serve my boeuf bourguignon on spätzle, which come to find out, Ann had not had before either.

You see the dish above, chunks of beef and pearl onions sitting atop spätzle, all napped with an unctuous sauce laden with porcini mushrooms, bacon, onions, and carrots. My only regret about making this dish now in the middle of winter is that I had no baby carrots with which to garnish the dish. For a primer on prepping pearl onions, see this post. For making spätzle, see here.

While the movie Julie & Julia did a lot in this country to popularize Julia Child's specific version of boeuf bourguignon, there are other versions out there, and I have developed my own method over the past 40 years that I'll outline below.

Browning Beef Chuck in Bacon Grease

Step one in almost any braise is to brown the meat well on all sides. In this case, I am browning a pound and a third of really nice looking beef chuck (shoulder) in bacon grease left from rendering bacon lardons. I chose this particular chuck because it is really well marbled.

Traditionally in France, the dish incorporates lardons, little bits of pork belly akin to bacon. It is often found plain and less commonly salted or smoked as is American bacon. Consequently, American bacon is often parboiled to help rid it of smoke, but I use a lightly smoked bacon and I don't mind the tiny bit of smoke that it introduces to the dish. It is hardly noticeable in the heady mix of flavors from the beef, mushrooms, and copious red wine in the dish.

I started by cooking in my cocotte three large thick slices of bacon, cut into lardons, to try out some grease in which to sear the cubes of beef. It took a good 15 minutes or more to brown the beef. You want to take your time when searing the beef, because this is what starts to develop really great flavor. Also at my house, browning more slowly on medium flame keeps the damned smoke detector from going off.

Brown the Beef Well on all Sides

You Want this Buildup ("Fond") on the Pan Bottom

Mise en Place

On the cutting board above, you see most of the other ingredients that are going into the braise: porcini mushrooms that are rehydrating, rendered bacon lardons, pearl onions, tomato paste, two carrots, and an onion. Once the porcini rehydrated, I chopped them into bite-sized pieces and saved the mushroom stock for the braise.

Deglazing with Aromatics

Once the beef is browned, remove it from the pan. You'll see a dark buildup on the bottom of the pan, which we call the fond, literally "bottom" in French. This is the point at which you add your aromatic vegetables to the pan. In this case, you can see that I have diced an onion and two carrots, the traditional vegetables for boeuf bourguignon. These go into the cocotte along with a few sprigs of parsley, a bay leaf, a little thyme, a tablespoon or so of thyme, three minced cloves of garlic, a tablespoon or so of tomato paste, and a bay leaf.

The steam generated from searing the vegetables should loosen the fond, all the good bits on the bottom of the pan. Scrape well to help loosen these flavor builders. Once the vegetables are cooked to the point where the onions are translucent, sprinkle a couple of tablespoons of flour on the vegetables and cook another couple of minutes, stirring well and frequently. This flour will help give the sauce its unctuousness.

At this point, I added the bacon lardons, the chopped porcini, and the porcini broth (making sure not to include any sand or dirt from the bottom of the bowl). Next, in went the better part of a bottle of red wine, local Petit Verdot if you must know, enough to come about 2/3 of the way up the sides of the beef cubes. When braising, you don't want to totally submerge the meat; that would be more technically a stew than a braise.

It is traditional to use Pinot Noir in this braise, but as I'll get into at the bottom of this post, my palate says that beef wants a more substantial wine than Pinot Noir. And I happen to have some inexpensive local Petit Verdot that will fill the bill admirably. I'll save the expensive Pinot to drink at some other time. I would never cook with a great wine. At the end of the day, you'll end up with a dish that tastes identical to that cooked with a passable wine and will have wasted an opportunity to drink a great wine.

Ready for the Oven

Out of the Oven at Three Hours

After adding the porcini stock and the wine, bring the braise up to a boil, cover it, and put it in a moderate (350F) oven. After 90 minutes, I pulled it out to check the liquid level which had evaporated to just about the level that you see in the photo above, about halfway, just where I wanted the finished dish to be. But I wanted to cook it about another 90 minutes to really bring out the best in the beef, so I added water to the cocotte to bring it back to the original level.

After another 90 minutes, I pulled the cocotte out of the oven. The beef cubes, as you see in the photo above, were really caramelized on the top. I flipped them over so that the tops could rehydrate just a bit as they cooled.

Browning the Pearl Onions

At dinner time, I put a bunch of prepped pearl onions in a skillet with a teaspoon of butter and cooked them slowly for 8 minutes, rotating them every couple of minutes. It is traditional when cooking pearl onions to add a touch of sugar to caramelize them, but adding sweetness is not my thing. If I had baby carrots, I would have done the same thing with them as with the onions.

In another pan, I reheated the spätzle with another tiny bit of butter, stirring now and again to prevent as much sticking as possible. While the onions and spätzle were cooking, I rewarmed the beef cubes in the sauce, then removed the beef and held it warm while thinning and seasoning the sauce to my liking.

All that was left was to put the beef cubes and onions on top of a mound of spätzle, then nap it all with the sauce. It was incredible eating!

It's Not Burgundy, But....

For wine with our boeuf bourguignon, Ann requested an older Bordeaux. The traditional wine for boeuf bourguignon is Burgundy, but we live in the Burgundy of the United States and we drink the local Pinot Noir all the time. Burgundy is therefore pretty much our day-to-day wine. I know: poor us! I also believe that in general, beef pairs just a little better with Bordeaux grapes than it does with Pinot Noir.

So I selected a bottle of Léoville Barton from 1990, one of the very best vintages of the last century. This is a bottle that was part of a case that I got on release in 1993 or 1994 for $240, less than the price of a bottle today! This wine never ceases to amaze me. Even though it was probably bottled sometime in 1992, it appears to be a much younger wine. Visually, it looks to be about 10 years old.

On the nose, the aromas of cassis and black fruits are still vivid, but they have a really pretty and funky (in the best sense of the word) background of secondary bottle bouquet, that unmistakable aroma that we all look for in an aged wine. On the palate, it is still going very strong, leading with black Cabernet Sauvignon fruit combined with still vibrant acidity. Further along in the palate, the older wine flavors of tobacco and leather come in, framed with extremely pleasant fine-grained tannins. It is by all measures a gorgeous wine.

This is a wine that, as good as it is today, is still improving. At thirty years old, it tastes like a wine of a mere ten years. I would love to be able to taste this wine in another thirty years. Given that another thirty years is not guaranteed, I think I will drink the last of it long before then. I don't want to leave this gorgeous wine behind.

It was great to revisit one of the classic dishes of French home cooking. Although I am well schooled in classic French cuisine, I don't cook it all that often and so this was good fun. More than that, I was really happy to introduce Annie to both boeuf bourguignon and spätzle, two dishes that she never had the chance to eat, growing up in a full Italian family. And that Léoville Barton really made the experience for us!