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!

Thanksgiving 2014

And another Thanksgiving is in the books, for Ann and me, our 6th, this one a good bit smaller than in years past. But though it was smaller, it is always a pleasure to gather with friends and family at the table to celebrate another year. It was really easy this year. With it snowing on Wednesday, there wasn't any business at the restaurant and I was able to prep most of the meal at work, letting us go slow and relax on Thanksgiving itself.

Ann and her Parents

Who is That Photo Bombing the Girls?

Appetizers: Turkey Rillettes, Galantine, and Cornichons

A Really Nice Right Bank Bordeaux

Ann Always Sets a Beautiful Table



Apple Cider-Brined Turkey Thighs Only This Year; No White Meat for Us

Ann's Bread and Saltine Cracker Dressing

Ann's Bistro Mash: Half Sweet Potatoes, Half Red Skin Potatoes

Sweet and Sour Brussels Sprouts with Pork Belly

The Obligatory Cranberry-Orange Sauce

Sweet Potato Tart with Cassis Cream and Black Walnut Streusel

And a 1991 Port to Finish off the Meal

Comté and Ham Risotto

It's official now: we had our first frost yesterday on the 21st of October, not particularly early and not particularly late, but certainly signifying the start of the cold weather comfort food season.

The comfort food that I was craving yesterday was risotto. And after thinking about it for a few minutes, I wanted to do my risotto in homage to a great croque monsieur, the awesome French ham and cheese sandwich, so I picked up a nice piece of city ham (as opposed to country ham) and a block of Comté cheese on the way home. Comté is one of the great nutty melting mountain cheeses of France, similar to the equally delicious Gruyère from just across the border in Switzerland.

Comté and Ham Risotto

The risotto is a really simple affair of very few ingredients: butter, olive oil, onion, Arborio rice, dry white wine, ham, chicken broth, and Comté. Because there are so few ingredients, they need to be of the highest quality for the dish to really succeed and this is especially true for the stock that you use. We try to keep chicken broth in the freezer for occasions just like this. Whenever we have a chicken carcass left over, we make chicken broth.

What to Drink? Bordeaux is a Fine Choice!

You should have heard Ann and me scrapping about when the rice was done! You might find it odd that I wanted the rice less done than the full-blooded Italian! She might be Italian but I make risotto just about every day of the year at work! Throw a few glasses of wine into the mix and.... ;)

Eiffel Tower Cafe, Leesburg VA

Sunday, we didn't have any plans until the theater at Shenandoah University at 7pm and Ann wanted to go to brunch, so she looked into a bunch of places and decided she'd like to visit the Eiffel Tower Café in Leesburg, a place that we've never been to together before.

Owner Madeleine Sosnitsky was working the floor while we were there and in between her rounds at other tables, we got to chat with her a little about the business, about exactly how unglamorous and how demanding that it really is, and about how hard it is to find good employees. That was a little more shop talk than I wanted, but when two restaurant owners get together, shop talk will ensue.

Barreyres Always Makes a Good Value Red

We were seated at a table for two in the very comfortable dining room, with its many pictures of the namesake tower and light peach walls, and had to ask for the wine list. Apparently, so few people order off the wine list as to make the list a special request. The wine list is extremely small, so it took no time to narrow down to one of the handful of red wines on offer, a 2010 Haut-Médoc from Château Barreyres, well known for producing typical wines at good prices.


Calmar Provençale

Ann ordered first courses for us: squid provençale and mousseline of duck liver. Both were well done though I wonder if the duck mousseline was made in house.

Mousseline of Duck Liver

Ann surprised me by ordering the bavette (flank steak) and ordering it rare. She's a medium rare kind of girl generally, but she fessed up later that she was worried it would be overcooked. Not to worry, the steak was cooked perfectly as ordered. The fries were decent, but I prefer honest, house-cut potatoes to the coated commercial fries that we were served. That's just me: I want to know that my fries were once potatoes.


Bavette Frites

Me, I wasn't intrigued by any of the main dishes on the menu, so I just ordered merguez frites because I have a soft spot for merguez. This merguez didn't do it for me though: it was cooked to the point where it was tough and dry. And laying in a pool of demiglace didn't help either. Lamb sausage and veal demi: that's a mixed metaphor if I ever tasted one.

Merguez Frites

Our server brought around a dessert tray of desserts that looked industrially made and though I don't usually order dessert, I did want an excuse to linger over coffee, so I ordered a slice of the pear tart, forgetting that my wife doesn't like pears. Sorry, baby!

Tarte aux Poires

I like the well-appointed restaurant, the food is decent, Madeleine is charming, and the prices are extremely reasonable.

Glen Manor Vineyards

After having eaten brunch at Claire's in Warrenton, we took a leisurely drive out 211 west towards Washington, VA and then headed north on 522 up through Chester Gap to get on the west side of the mountains so we could visit with Jeff and Kelly and talk about a party that is coming up in a couple of weeks. But that was just really an excuse to go find a chair in the warm sunshine and a nice glass of wine and enjoy what will likely prove to be the final outdoor day of 2012.

Sadly, everyone else was out enjoying the day including hundreds of motorcyclists including one who, after driving quite insanely recklessly, dumped his crotch rocket in the middle of 522 between Flint Hill and Chester Gap. We waited for 45 minutes at a standstill while they sent the medevac chopper in for him. That put a bit of a damper on the day.

We finally got going and skirted around the north end of the mountains and down to Glen Manor just before 3pm. The tasting room was as busy as we have ever seen it and Kelly said that everyone who visisted that day bought wine. A lot of times people come to taste and move on. But why wouldn't you buy wine at Glen Manor, which is on my very short list of the best wineries in the state?

South Side of the Winery

After tasting with Jane and visiting with Kelly and Jorge as much as we could while they were busy with other guests, we took our bottle of Cabernet Franc outside and comandeered two Adirondack chairs. Compare this view with the one just before harvest.


The Vineyards in Late Fall

Doesn't This Look Like a Jigsaw Puzzle Photo?



It's a Rough Job but Someone Has to do it!



With My Beautiful Wife

Towards closing time and just before we had to run to Berryville to get Carter, Jeff showed up and then Randall and we all stood around the tasting room catching up. Jeff went in the back and brown-bagged a bottle and poured it all around. Just smelling it, I thought old school Bordeaux. And judging from the deep color, abundant black fruit with dried raspberry leaf highlights, good acid, and fine firm tannins, I figured mostly Cabernet Sauvignon. I am proud of Ann for saying that it was a Bordeaux! It proved to be a 2004 Cos d'Estournel and a very nice bottle of wine in the classic Claret style. Jeff, many thanks for letting us share the mystery wine!

Downey Tasting/Lyon Hall

We look forward to the Downey Selections portfolio tasting in Arlington each spring, partly because it is a great time, partly because the Downeys make you feel like family at a big reunion, and partly because it affords us a once-a-year opportunity to sample some of the great restaurants in Clarendon.

I always have a short list of wines to try at these big portfolio tastings. It's just not feasible to taste all the wines being shown. This year, I was looking for a solid Bordeaux Supérieur and perhaps a Tannat for our list. With a mature list, there's not a whole lot that we're actively seeking. Both wines found and ordered and business being complete, Ann and I headed out for happy hour and an early dinner while waiting out rush hour traffic. As much as we would have loved to throw down with the Downey crew at the after party, we get so very few opportunities for alone time, just the two of us.

After the last tasting we attended, we ended up at Liberty Tavern thanks to a tip from Brennan Downey. That marked the end of a many year run at Willow, also a fine restaurant, mostly because while I enjoy the food at Willow, the food at Liberty Tavern speaks to my inner chef. Despite craving the food at Liberty Tavern, we decided to branch out and try sister restaurant Lyon Hall, an Alsatian brasserie concept. And we were so not disappointed!

Happy hour sees a bunch of the 20 or so by-the-glass selections marked down to half price, $4-$5. Ann had a Premières Côtes de Blaye, Château la Rivalerie, a reasonable Bordeaux blend. I started with a Blanquette de Limoux sparkler because I had never had this wine before. I've had sparkling Mauzac (the grape they also call Blanquette) before from AOC Gaillac. This Limoux was much more refined than the extremely rustic Gaillacs that I have tasted in the past, with only hints of the ripe pear and apple flavors that I have come to expect from Mauzac. In any case, it was delicious.

With our drinks we ordered mussels and fries and both were done well. Our mussels were prepared Moroccan style with tomatoes, chickpeas, tiny black olives, preserved lemon, garlic, ras el hanout, and finished with a sprinkle of fresh mint. Way delicious! The fries were hand-cut and everything you would hope for save being fried in duck fat.

After our aperitifs, we ordered a bottle of Gigondas and while were slurping away on mussels, owner Mark Fedorchak came over and introduced himself to us. While we were chatting, a runner brought us small samples of the pâté maison (photo below) which was unctuously delicious because of the liver it contained, something my customers would hate. It was a very nice gesture for Mark to send us the pâté. And I have to say that as good as the pâté was, the pickled vegetables were even better. Nice touch!

We asked Mark for menu recommendations and he insisted that we order the steak tartare. No offense but steak tartare I can get anywhere. Our server said that to get a real taste of the restaurant, we should get the sampler of their house-made sausages. That sounded more like the ticket to me so we ordered that and also a sampler of all five cheeses that they either make or age in house ("frommage maison"): ash-ripened goat crottin, goat ricotta, Calvados chèvre, a Roquefort St. Maure-styled blue goat, and a Cabécou-styled goat-cow double-cream bloomed rind cheese.

When the cheeses and sausages arrived, the runner also brought an order of steak tartare. Our server said that Mark really must have wanted us to taste it and I can see why. Made from skirt steak and topped with an egg yolk, it was both really flavorful and beautiful and texturally so much better than when made with filet. Mark, once again, thank you for your kind generosity. You see the remains of the tartare at the top of the photo below, above the cheese plate.

The sausages were really good and I appreciate that they were made in house, as our server Becca said, "with care and love." I think I enjoyed the small smoky Thuringian the best, but the big fat brat with cheese was delicious, and the duck/foie gras sausage was sinful. The big brat with chunks of Gruyère inside was a new form of sausage for me; I've never had this so-called Käsekrainer before. Really delicious!

After this smorgasbord, we could barely waddle to the car.

"Super Bowl" Supper

On Super Bowl Sunday, during the day, we went to visit friends Jeff and Kelly White at Glen Manor Vineyards and taste some of their delicious wine along with a picnic lunch that we cobbled together from whatever we had laying around. That meant we would not be home to cook for dinner and naturally we wouldn't be cooking during the game either. What to do?

Slow cooker to the rescue! I just love slow cookers—plug them in and forget them! What to make? After our mystery basket dinner the previous Sunday, we had some quail, rabbit sausages, and andouille in the fridge, unused during that dinner. It's not a big leap from these ingredients to gumbo, a dish that with a little advance planning could cook itself while we were away.

On Monday, I browned the rabbit sausages, the quail, and some leftover ground pork which together with mirepoix and a ham hock became stock after simmering for a couple hours. I removed the sausages after about 20 minutes because I wanted to slice them into coins to go into the gumbo at the last minute. The rest of the meat, I picked after it cooled and returned it to the stock, which went into the fridge for the coming weekend.

During a lull on Friday afternoon, I prepped a big batch of trinity—onions, celery, and poblano peppers—and cooked it down with garlic, thyme, and my Cajun spice mix that we refer to as "magic dust." At the same time, I cooked a batch of dark brown roux.

With all this prep ahead of time, on Sunday all I needed to do was put trinity, roux, and stock in the slow cooker and walk out the door. On arriving home from the winery, I put on a pot of rice, added the andouille and rabbit sausages to the gumbo and corrected the seasoning. I thought it was a fitting "super bowl" of gumbo to go with the Super Bowl.

And what to drink? Preston gave us this bottle of 1983 Grand-Puy Ducasse, a Pauillac that was one of the original fifth growths in the 1855 classification. Although 1983 wasn't a super vintage, it wasn't a bad one either and was certainly a much better value than the preceding blockbuster 1982 vintage. The wine as you can see is holding its color well and the tannins are softening. The black currant and the dried blackberry leaf flavors are forward now. I don't imagine this wine getting any better now that the fruit is fading, but I imagine it will hold on for a few more years. It paired just fine with the not too spicy gumbo. Not the ultimate pairing, but not bad either.