Last week my friend Barb and I played hooky and went to the movies. We saw, “Julie and Julia,” which is about one woman’s quest to cook her way through Julia Child’s “Mastering the Art of French Cooking” in one year’s time and keep a blog detailing the experience. One of the classic French dishes we watched “Julie” cook during the course of the movie was Boeuf a la Bourguignon, and I think both Barb and I left with our mouths watering for a taste.
Normally my recipe for Beef Burgundy is one of those 5-ingredient crock pot deals that uses jarred mushrooms, cream of mushroom soup, and burgundy cooking wine from a little bottle I find in the salad dressing aisle at Meijer. It’s not at all fancy, and I know a lot of people would cringe at the very idea that I consider this a tasty meal. But it’s one of my favorites. In fact, I serve it to company and take it to friends when they are laid up!
But sometimes it’s worth it to go all out, and that’s what I did today. I started with the following ingredients and 5 pages of recipes for the overall dish as well as for the mushrooms and onions:
The first step is to cut the bacon every quarter inch and throw the whole mess into a saucepan, then simmer it in water for 10 min. I have no idea why this step is necessary, unless it somehow helps to rid the bacon of some of its saltiness. The next step is to brown the bacon, and what I noticed when I browned it was that the little bacon pieces fried up almost like pork rinds. Wish I knew if that was what I was supposed to be going for!
After removing the bacon from the pan, I began browning the beef. You know what? It does brown up a lot nicer if you pat the pieces dry before adding them to the skillet. I have been cooking for decades, and I never knew that!
After browning the meat, I removed it from the skillet and added in my carrots and onions. I’m not clear on how this was supposed to go, and I may need to go back and review the directions again to see if I did this part right. I ended up browning a bunch of baby peeled carrots and about 4 small onions that I had peeled and sliced. At the time I thought they were to go into the dutch oven with the beef, but later I was honestly pretty confused about the whole veg deal. I couldn’t seem to see any step in the directions where it said to cook them any further than just the browning. So I ended up putting the carrots in with the beef about 45 minutes before the end of the cooking time.
I also prepared the mushrooms in butter at this point, and Oh Holy Crap, did they look delicious. Don’t tell anyone, but I had a little “Julia Child” moment while I was working and dropped a few mushrooms on the floor, but I just rinsed them off and used them. I think she would have been proud of me for that.
While I was doing this, I was also preheating the oven to 450 in anticipation of adding a bit of flour to the meat and popping it into the oven for a couple of 4-minute doses to get a bit of a crust to form on it. And that’s where my second “Julia Moment” occurred. You see, last night I cubed up some stale bread, put it on a cookie sheet, and popped it into the oven. My mom always has bread cubes sitting in her oven. She lets them sit and dry out, sometimes popping them in after baking something so they can toast a bit in the warm oven. Then she crushes them for breading or saves them to make stuffing. She always remembers they’re in there though. I don’t.
So there I was, ready to pop that casserole dish in. I pulled open the oven door and a cloud of black smoke rolled out of there and hit me in the face, such that I was pretty much blinded. I could see just well enough to pull the tray of bread out of the oven and dump it into the sink. Prettiful!
After the smoke alarm stopped chirping and the windows had all been thrown open, I was able to finish up the assembly of the dish and get it back into the oven for its 2 1/2 hours of slow cooking. All that was left was to warm the onions and mushrooms and thicken the sauce. And voila!
Was it worth it? Well, the meat was gorgeous and tender. The carrots were nicely flavored and still just a teeny bit firm. The onions and mushrooms were magnifique. The flavor of the sauce was a bit bland, though, I have to admit. Most of us added a sprinkling of salt. I’m not convinced that the full-out version of beef burgundy would be worth all this trouble on a regular basis. Most days, I’ll probably still stick with my crock pot version. But I’m really glad I tried the real deal at least once in my life.
Oh shoot, I forgot to shout, “Bon Appetit!” when I served my masterpiece. Darn it, maybe I will have to make this again!
Filed under: Misc. Journaling, Recipes Included
I am so jealous. I want to make it too. And I will.
You simmer the bacon to rid it of it’s smokiness, so you get the bacon flavor and not the smoke flavor. A weird tip that I picked up. And I never knew about the drying meat either!