Beef Bourguignon - The Most Comforting Classic French Stew

Today we're gonna make beef bourguignon. Here are all those ingredients. Let's get into it right now. Okay, so beef bourguignon or beef burgundy, this is a classic dish. It's a really popular dish. First thing I did was I cut up a half a pound of bacon, cut them into like one inch thick pieces. The beef that we're using is chuck roast. I have a three pound chuck roast. This is like any other stew. You're starting with a fat, in this case it's bacon, then we're doing the beef, and then you just kind of like do all your other ingredients. What are those ingredients? We have onion. I took one large white onion. It was so big that I didn't even use it all. I'd say there's probably about one and a half to two cups of diced white onion there. Recipe calls for two large carrots. Those carrots were kind of on the medium side, so I used three. Just cut them into equal sized pieces, about two inches, one and a half to two inches in length. We have garlic. I did six cloves of garlic minced. If you like more, use more. If you like less, use less. Really personal preference. Tomato paste is gonna be a quarter cup of this. That's gonna give it great flavor. What's also gonna give it great flavor is the thyme, and it says eight sprigs of thyme, but I probably have like 14 here. It's gonna be okay. I want a lot of thyme in it today. I have two bay leaves. This will give it nice flavor as well. After all that's done, we get all this into a pot. We're gonna put our liquids in. So we have three cups of Pinot Noir, which is Burgundy. Okay, Pinot Noir and Burgundy are the same thing. Basically it's equal parts. Three cups of this, and then three cups of beef stock. So then all that's gonna go in. It's gonna be braised. It's gonna get a wonderful flavor. And then after that is all done, then we're gonna put pearl onions and mushrooms on. So this is like kind of like the signature ingredients in beef bourguignon. Lots of butter in there with them. First thing we need to do is to chop this beef up into cubes and sear it. Recipe calls for three pounds of chuck. Now, if you don't have chuck, you could also use other things like bottom round, top round. You could even use brisket in here, but chuck roast is great. I just wanna get rid of these really large sections of fat. It's just too much. So you can just kind of just cut it here to start. A lot of times the easiest way to do this is just to pull it apart where the fat area is, and then you can just kind of follow it. But you see how much fat is here. Like this is just way too much to use. It'll be liquid fat in there. Some fat, great. And there's plenty of fat with just within the beef itself. If you don't wanna do this, you don't have to. You'll just remove a ton of fat later on when you do it. So what I wanna do now is I wanna cut these into very relatively large chunks. So about here, and then about here. So about this much will be the size of it. These are pretty clear, you know, not perfect. I patted the whole entire chuck roast dry, but I wanna pat it again now. This'll help get a little bit better sear. But what we're gonna do next with flour, and I think that's the one ingredient I forgot to tell you about. I have a half a cup of flour here, and we're gonna put salt and pepper, a good amount. We want the beef seasoned well. Pat it all in real good, and then turn them all over, and then do the other side. Pat that all in. And then I have a parchment paper lined baking sheet. This is gonna be nice. It's gonna allow us to dredge these. So what I'm doing is I'm just getting every side coated, and then I'm gonna go like this. I wanna get it all on, like covering the whole thing, then I wanna get every bit of it off. When I shake it all off, it's all gonna go right back into my flour thing, because we're gonna need this flour. That's what's gonna help thicken our sauce. I got a big Dutch oven here. This is an eight quart Dutch oven. You could probably do this recipe in a six quart, but it might be a little tight. I'm turning it to medium heat. If you don't have a Dutch oven, you need a heavy pot with a lid that's oven safe. So that means the pot, the lid, everything can go in the oven. At this time right now, you can set your oven to 350 degrees, make enough room that it will be able to accommodate both this pot with the cover. And then we're just gonna add the bacon in. Break it up a little bit so like all the little pieces will hit in a little bit better area. We wanna get this till it's pretty brown, the bacon. It's gonna take, depending on how high you are, anywhere from like five to 10 minutes. All this fat we're gonna use to sear our beef. So our beef is just sitting here. We prepped it ahead of time. This makes it easy. I try to do things to show you how to make it easy for yourself, not hard. All right, this has been about three minutes. So we wanna keep, let that keep going. If you make it too high, all you're gonna do is you're just gonna burn everything. So you don't need to do that. Now you can see all the liquid fat in here. So I'm just gonna take this and put it off on a paper towel. You use a slotted spoon here if you want to. You wanna keep the fat in your Dutch oven. So now we're about medium. Let's just get it in. Let's not crowd it. And probably take three batches to do this. We're just gonna let this brown for a couple minutes per side, get some color on this, remove them, do the next batch, and then we'll move on to our next step. That took about two minutes on that first side, maybe three. Just try to hit all the sides. Don't worry if you're perfect here. You don't have to be perfect. I'm just going to put all these off in this plate to drain. Do the next batch. If you want color on the carrots, you gotta do the carrots first. I know I'm breaking a Chef Jean-Pierre rule here by not doing the onions first. We're gonna put the carrots in for a few minutes, get some color, then we'll remove them, and then we'll continue on with the recipe. Just a little bit. Let them go longer if you want, but that's good enough for me. I'm gonna take them out, and we're gonna throw the onions in. Now, you can throw the onions right in with the carrots here, but you have a little bit more room for the onions, and we wanna get those onions nice and soft. That is definitely a big part of this recipe. Here's the onions. Honestly, we don't have any fat left in here from doing the beef, carrots, everything, so you can put a little bit of olive oil in here. There's a lot of brown stuff at the bottom of that pot. Let's let these go for about five, six minutes to get soft, and we'll put a little salt on them to speed it up, speed up the water release. If they get burning, you can put a little bit of water in there, just a splash, and that'll allow you to remove a lot of the brown bits at the bottom there. Let's give it another four or five minutes. Okay, so my onions are soft enough. I'm gonna add those browned carrots back in there too. Let's let this go for a couple minutes together, then we will add the garlic in. So that's a couple more minutes. That looks really good. I'm gonna add all that garlic into the pot. Quarter cup of tomato paste. You don't have to be exact here. You wanna stir this the whole time. It's really gonna build up that base flavor. If you feel like you're burning it all, put a little bit of water where you had your garlic, just put it right in the pot. That's all you have to do. Let's let this go for like four or five minutes. Stir it a whole time. If you start to burn, a little bit more water. That's it. I wanna show you, see how the really dark spots right here on the pot, bottom of the pot? We wanna remove all that now. Ton of flavor there from the bacon, the beef, everything. The recipe says if you had too much fat when you were doing your onions and stuff, you could remove it down to about a quarter cup to do it, but we had barely anything there. I actually had to end up adding a little bit of oil. Before we remove the four-letter word, let's put all the remaining flour in here, okay? Let's just get it in, cook it until it's no longer white. You know, we're not like cooking it really at all. We're just gonna do this for about a minute. And don't worry if you get lumps or anything, you're gonna be cooking this in the oven for a long time. So that's good. See all the flour's in there now, so it just kind of all clumped up like that. Okay, this is Burgundy or Pinot Noir. Like I said, we wanna use three cups, so we're gonna use down to about here. So I'm gonna pour that in. Don't worry if you're exact. I mean, you can measure it. So you can turn your heat up, and then I recommend you use a straight-edge wooden spoon like this, and that's gonna allow you to remove all of the brown bits from the bottom of the pot. If it feels like very gritty and stuff, you're not successful yet. Once it feels very smooth again, then you know you removed it all. Three cups of the beef base, all right? All right, we're just gonna bring this up to a simmer. Here's all that thyme. I just tied it up, butcher's twine around it, two bay leaves, all of this beef, and the juices right in. Okay, there's a ton of flavor there, and all of the bacon. This is just gonna be a long, braised, delicious beef stew that we have here. Feel the bottom again. Everything's good, and it is. We're ready to go. Okay, I'm gonna turn it off. Cover it. You can wipe off all the grease on your edges, which you'll have a lot of from all the bacon and the beef fat, and then we're gonna take this pot, okay, and we're going to put it in a 350-degree oven. We're gonna cook it until the beef gets tender. It's gonna take around 2 1⁄2 to three, maybe 3 1⁄2 hours. That's gonna depend on your exact oven, you know, convection, conventional, maybe your oven temperature isn't right, how big the beef pieces you cut up were, the actual cut of beef that you used. All you need to do is, at about the two-hour mark, take the pot out of the oven and check your beef. You want it to be pull-apart tender, but not complete mush. If you cook it for like six hours, it will turn to complete mush. It's been 2 1⁄2 hours exactly. The amount of liquid we used for this size pot will have the beef kind of sticking out a touch as it reduces, and it does reduce a little bit, even with a tight-fitting lid. What I often do is I'll take all the meat, I'll strain it, and then put the sauce just in a pot and turn it up if you want to get it thick, but get it thick enough to coat your spoon. You're gonna be able to tell, you can tell by looking at this before I do anything, that this is clearly thick enough. What you can do now is you can degrease it a little bit. Okay, so you can remove your thyme and your bay leaves. Okay, right there. The fat is gonna rise to the top. Now, it's gonna rise more the longer you let it sit, but if I just put this paper towel on top of it, it's gonna pull a lot of that fat. You can also kind of bundle it up like this and then just go searching for your spots. You'll see the fat, it'll be a little bit different looking. Now, really, the best way to do this is to let this cool and to put this in the refrigerator overnight, 24 hours. Then the next day, put it on the stove again, you warm it up, and then you do your mushrooms and your pearl onions. We're gonna do it right now in one shot, but trust me, if you can do that, overnight is 100% the way. Now, let's also check our beef. You need to tell if your meat is done. So, look, let's grab a piece of meat right here. If I can just start pulling this apart, and do you see how this breaks away very easily? That is ultra tender. Let's keep it warm, and let's do our mushrooms and pearl onions. How do you keep it warm? Just put your cover back on. You can turn your oven off at this point. You can stick it back in the oven. It'll be fine. I'm gonna use a stainless pan here to brown the pearl onions and the mushrooms. I'm gonna heat this pan up on medium heat for three minutes before I do anything. All right, it's been a couple minutes. Let's check our pan. It's gonna take water. If it goes like that into little balls that dance around, it's good. If it just incinerated immediately, then it's too hot. And in that case, I would just back off the heat a little bit and wait a few minutes. I'm just gonna put olive oil in here. We're gonna do the onions first. I dried the onions. These were frozen onions. I dried them off as best I could. In about two minutes, got some nice color on them. Just gonna pop them out, and we'll throw them back in in a second. These are all our quartered mushrooms. The really small ones I just cut in half. They're gonna soak up all the oil if you put down oil. You don't need any more oil. It's enough here. It's been about three minutes. I'm just kinda weaving them. I pushed them around as best I could to make them hit the pan, and I don't wanna really touch them yet. What'll happen is, as the heat hits them, and I have it probably a touch more than medium heat, maybe like a six out of 10. Okay, you can start to see a little bit of water coming out of them, a little bit, so now I can start moving them. And now they're a little bit more browned in spots. Just gonna let them go another minute or two. Gonna add those pearl onions. Let's add our butter in. You could also put more thyme on these too. Like, we put a lot of thyme in it. And don't worry, your beef bourguignon is hot because it's in the pot. It's nicer to serve your beef bourguignon and then to put a couple, because you don't have that many pearl onions, so you wanna distribute them into your four or six bowls. That's how I'm gonna do it right now, but feel free to mix it into your pot. This is probably one of my favorite meals ever. Like I said before, I love French cuisine, and I have made this before using Julia Child's recipe. So I'm letting you all know that I'm biased towards beef bourguignon. By the way, I didn't tell you, but I did it. You gotta taste for salt and pepper at the end, but this didn't need any extra salt. From the beef stock, the reduction, and the amount of salt I put on the beef. We'll see what Tara says. Are you speechless in a good way or a bad way? Honestly, I think it's perfect. Thank you. Just perfect. I think this might be one of the best things that we've made on this channel. I agree. I mean, you saw how it looks. The way I present things to you is really important to show you if it's good or not. Unfortunately or fortunately, whatever way you wanna look at it, if it doesn't look good, you're probably not gonna think it is good. Now, this on the other hand looks downright insane. Yeah, so the beef is perfect. It's not, you don't want it to be mushy, but you absolutely wanna be able to eat it with a fork, and you want it to break apart. So to me, this is cooked perfectly. I'm glad you added the thyme to the mushrooms and onions because you didn't do that last time. And I felt that that was missing. I think this is a 10. The only thing maybe I would say is if you like more carrots, use more carrots because I really do enjoy the carrots. I think it's one of the best parts of the dish. No, I agree with you. It could have maybe another carrot. I mean, you know, it's not, I don't think you put potatoes in beef bourguignon and then you're like getting more towards beef stew. And you're supposed to serve it with potatoes, mashed potatoes or bread. This is a baguette that we have, so that's what we did. Yeah, I'm gonna give this a 10. Thank you. Again, the only thing I think I would do is maybe add more carrots. I shouldn't deduct any points for that. Well, thanks. I really appreciate it. Thank you. Thank you for making one of my favorites. You're welcome. We'll see you next time.