Beef Bourguignon – an Umami Bomb for the holidays | Vicki James

Who doesn’t love umami?   The deeply savory flavor found in beef, mushrooms and wine?  This recipe delivers in spades.  It’s a bit of a project, so make it on a lazy Saturday or Sunday.  And definitely make it a day before you plan to serve it, so the flavors can “marry”, making it even richer, deeper and more savory.  Yum! 

My mother used to make Beef Bourguignon and had a fantastic recipe.  I thought it had it, too.  I started rummaging through my recipe cards, so many written in her exquisite penmanship, but couldn’t find my card with the recipe on it.  I wanted to cry.  My mother passed away this year, and losing the recipe card made me feel bereft and grief-stricken.  I almost abandoned my project. 

But I decided to carry on and starting looking for a similar version of the stew.  Julia Childs developed a gold-standard recipe for the stuff, but I decided it was a wee bit complex.  I finally found a recipe with a preparation like the one my mother used to make on Epicurious.com.  It turned out to be a wonderful version and the results were absolutely to die for.  I’m going to share what worked and what didn’t so you will be able make it much more easily than I did – and with less anxiety when things do not seem to be happening as they should. 

Ingredients 

8 ounces of bacon, coarsely chopped 

3 pounds of well trimmed beef chuck (get the butcher to cut it up for you into 1 ½ inch cubes)  

1/3 cup all purpose flour 

1 ¼ pounds boiling onions, peeled (save yourself a good hour by purchasing frozen pearl onions instead) 

¾ pounds large carrots cut into 1 inch pieces 

12 large garlic cloves, peeled 

3 cups canned beef broth 

½ cup Cognac or brandy  

2 750-ml bottles of red Burgundy wine 

1 ¼ pounds mushrooms 

1/3 cup chopped fresh thyme or 2 tablespoons dried 

1 tablespoon dark brown sugar 

1 tablespoon tomato paste (get the kind in a tube so you don’t have to open a new can for just one tablespoon) 

Preparation 

1.  If you are a masochist, peel the teensy tiny boiling onions.  This takes forever, even with a hack.  The hack is that you can cut the root end off of each onion, drop them into boiling water for about two minutes, then arrest the cooking by dumping them into ice water.  Then, the peel pops right off the onion.  Yeah, right.  With my husband and me working together, it took a full hour to do this and we stopped short of preparing the full 1 ½ pounds.  And the peel did not pop right off. The peels were stubborn and hateful.  Moral of the story: next time I will buy a bag of frozen pearl onions.  Even with the time it takes to shop for them, you’ll waste less time and you will be in a happier mood.  Because of those stupid onions, our preparations started at 11:00 a.m. and did end until nearly nine o’clock.  I have to say it was worth it. 
2. Okay, now that we’ve dealt with that little problem, preheat the oven to 325 degrees.  Remove all but the bottom racks of your oven, because you are going to be putting a BIG pot in there. 
3. Using a large oven-proof pot or Dutch oven, sauté the bacon until crisp and remove to a paper-towel lined plate. 
4. Season the beef generously with salt and pepper and toss in 1/3 cup flour.  Working in 3 batches, brown the beef in the bacon drippings over high heat, about five minutes per batch.  Transfer meat to a large bowl. 
5. Add onions and carrots to the pan and brown until golden and tender, about 6 minutes.  Add garlic and sauté one minute.  Remove the vegetable and add to the bowl with the beef. 
6. Now comes the boozy part. Add cognac and 1 cup of broth to the pan, boiling until reduced to a glaze, scraping up the brown bits on the bottom of the pan, about 8 minutes.  Add back the meat and vegetables.  Add wine (yes, two full bottles of drinkable wine), mushrooms, thyme, brown sugar, tomato paste and two cups of broth.  Bring to a boil, stirring occasionally.  Cover the pot and place it in the oven.  Cook until the beef is tender.  Now here I must depart from the recipe, which optimistically states that the beef should be tender in about 1 hour and twenty minutes.  Wrong, wrong, wrong.  It took 3 hours before the beef was tender.  And it’s not just me, others who reviewed the recipe on the Epicurious website also said that the beef took much longer to cook.  I recommend you start checking on it after about 2 ½ hours. The trick is to cook it the point where it’s fork tender and almost shreddable, but not dried out. 
7. Remove the pot from the oven.  At this point you will need to separate the solids from the sauce.  You can try spooning them out, but after it became apparent that would be a rather slow and unsatisfactory process, we placed a very large strainer (a colander would work, too) over a large bowl, and carefully poured the solids and liquids into the strainer.  We then put the liquid in the bowl back into the pot.  The solids were then put in the bowl until needed. 
8. Place the pot of liquid on the stove.  Spoon off any fat.  Boil the liquid until it reduces to 2 ¾ cups.  For us, this step took exactly one hour, which was twenty minutes longer than the recipe recommends.  This step is extremely important because this is when the magic happens.  The brown brothy liquid reduces and reduces until it is a thick, rich gravy.  Season with salt and pepper.  One person who reviewed the recipe did not like it because they thought the sauce was too brothy.  The sauce will not be brothy if you boil it for an hour.
9.  Because we planned to serve the dish at a small dinner party the next day, we kept the solids separate from the gravy.  Many reviewers were uncertain about what to do with the bacon cooked in the first step.  Crumble the  bacon over the solids and cover and refrigerate. Cover and refrigerate the gravy separately.  Then, when it’s cold the next day, you can easily remove any excess fat from the gravy. 
10. To prepare for serving, we combined the gravy and the meat and vegetables, and warmed it very slowly on the stove. 

We served the stew over homemade mashed potatoes and got rave reviews from our guests. Why wouldn’t we?  It tasted fantastic and felt like a warm hug for your insides. 

The recipe makes 8 servings and my husband and I were happy to have leftovers the next day, which we served over egg noodles.  After all that work, we wanted to enjoy it for more than one meal! 

Try this recipe and you will feel like a real French chef – maybe not Julia, but close. 
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Bon Appetit!