Beef Bourguignon

This season I was lucky enough to take a trip of a lifetime to Burgundy, France, where I jumped aboard a beautiful barge named La Belle Epoque to sail down the glorious canals and enjoy the finest French cuisine. Today on the canals it's picture perfect. Look at what I get to see every single day. Along the way we stopped off at markets and restaurants, sampled produce from the finest French artisans, visited stunning medieval towns and of course I got to cook up some of my favourite French-inspired recipes. When I first planned my trip to Burgundy the first dish that came to my mind would have to be Boeuf Bourguignon or Beef Burgundy. It's a beef stew that's cooked in the wine of the region and it really captures all of this area. Not only is the wine from the region but you've got gorgeous smoked speck that's made from local butchers here, mushrooms, little onions and local vegetables. So usually when you're cooking Boeuf Bourguignon you want to marinate your meat for 24 hours. I'm going to do mine a little different but the results are going to be just as delicious. So I've heated up a pan and I'm going to grab my beef chuck and I'm just going to add a little bit of flour to it. This is going to help thicken our delicious red wine sauce. This is a dish that every household in Burgundy cooks and of course everyone has their own way of doing it too. Okay, pan is nice and hot. I'm going to add a good plug of extra virgin olive oil and just to give some extra flavour some butter. So I'm going to seal it off in my pan first, get some really good colour. I love this first part of the Boeuf Bourguignon because you start to caramelise that meat and it smells so good with that butter. We also need to season this so pinch of salt just on each piece of chuck and some pepper. Oh look at this, what a kitchen that I am working in here. Tiny little canal and you can see it's just so still. All right, while that's cooking our classic vegetables in a stew, any stew, you need your celery. So I'm going to cut this into about six pieces, one carrot. These three vegetables that I'm using are like the holy trinity. You have to have these in a stew because it's going to give some sweetness and body to our stew. Of course some onions, I've just cut them into quarters and lots of garlic. I'm just going to bruise them so they're ready to go into the pot. Also this is a crucial element to this stew, it's called a bouquet garni. It's just a combination of bay leaves, some thyme and some parsley. I've picked the thyme just over here on the barge. There's loads of thyme so I'm going to use a lot of it. All right, so once I've got a lovely crust on the beef, I'm going to pop my other pot on and start sealing off my veg. Now I'm going to flambe with some cognac. So step away for after. We're just cooking off that alcohol and then we're leaving that gorgeous perfume. Okay, that smells fantastic. Veggies, I've caramelized. I'm going to pop the pot back on and what I like to do is add all of this now to the pot of vegetables. Scrape down any of those caramelized bits so it all goes in and we'll just give that a lovely stir. Fantastic. Okay, while I've still got some heat there, a little bit of tomato paste and now for the red wine, the all-important red wine. So a nice burgundy wine here. Now you may notice that that wine looks a little thicker. What I've done is placed the wine, almost a bottle, onto the stovetop and reduced it by a third. I want to cook off that alcohol so we're again just left with the beautiful flavor of the red wine. It's all those little touches that makes a good birth bourguignon into an amazing birth bourguignon. Okay, that's come up to the boil. Now look at that rich color and now the stock. So we just want enough beef stock to cover it. Okay, that's about right. Finally, the bouquet garni goes in, lid goes on and I'll turn the heat down and this is going to cook for about two hours or until the meat is super tender. Two hours on the barge, easy, just going to slow down and take in this beautiful view. The beef is almost cooked so I'm making a garnish to go with it. I'm slicing some speck into some small strips and frying that in some butter. I have some small onions which I've boiled and peeled and they go into the pan too, along with some button mushrooms which will cook down until they've got a bit of color. Now you may have noticed on the canals that we go through a lot of these locks. We need to do that so the water levels come up so the boat can go through and you'll see there's lock masters behind me too, making sure that everything's done properly. Now back to the Boeuf Bourguignon. Oh the smell, the smell of burgundy right here and I know that this is cooked when I can grab a spoon and a fork and just pull the meat apart. Look at that, it's so soft and tender. All right, we'll add a few generous chunks of this meat and look at that sauce. It's thick but not too thick. If your sauce is too thin, all you need to do is take the meat out and just reduce it a little longer. I'm going to add some of the carrots, a few generous chunks of meat, just place that there. Finally our garnish, those onions, that smoked pork there and our mushroom and we'll just pop them on top. Should do it. Pop of color from some freshly chopped parsley and that's my version of Boeuf Bourguignon. Now I cook this a lot because it is one of my favorite dishes of all time. It doesn't get better than this, cooking Boeuf Bourguignon with a real burgundy wine in Burgundy on this canal.