Beef Bourguignon 🍖✨ | Elizabeth Haigh

I could bathe in that sauce. It just keeps on giving. I'm really excited for this episode. We're going to be making beef bourbon, which is one of my favourite dishes. This is one of the dishes that inspired me to be a chef and I got this absolutely stunning piece of bavette. Now I know you're probably thinking bavette for beef bourbon, traditionally you'd use chuck steak or brisket, but this is a really affordable piece of meat and I really wanted to use it. So I'm going to cut it up into smaller pieces because it's quite a tough piece of meat. Now beef bourbon is how I describe it as like a bougie beef stew. I mean if you're cooking for somebody, say like a date night and you say oh I'm making a beef stew, well I think beef bourbon sounds a little bit more, a bit more sexy right? I'm going to save the rest of that for some steaks. Bavette steak frits is wonderful. Now I've got my hunky pieces of meat. This is about 1.5 kilos. I'm making a big batch of beef bourbon because when I do like these slow braised, slow cooking dishes, they just get better over time and obviously it means that we can freeze some, get ahead and some meal prep. Let's get cooking. First up you want to heat up your pan with some olive oil or traditionally you could use clarified butter. Now first we're going to fry off the bacon lardons. Get a nice colour all over the bacon and pancetta. I'm going to keep it moving. There's a lot of fat that's going to render off this but don't worry we're going to basically cook the rest of the meat and the veg in a little bit of fat but we can strain off the excess fat if you don't want to use it all. I'm just going to take it out, set this aside for later and now we're going to fry off the beef in that lovely pork fat. I'm going to do this in batches. You want to get a nice even colour all over the meat. You want to get a nice brown colour all over the meat. Unfortunately this will take the longest amount of time. It was getting a little bit dry in the pan so I just add in a little bit of that reserved fat. Julia Child, an American chef that worked and lived and cooked in France, is famous for beef bourbon and in her recipe she would clean her casserole at this point but I disagree with her because this fonze is where the caramelisation, the maillard process of the meat has contact the pan. That is flavour unless it's black and burnt then of course wash your pan out because that's going to then transfer to the rest of the dish but this brown, dark brown flavour is going to be glorious when you're sautéing the next part which is cooking the vegetables. First up there's onions and garlic are going in along with the carrots. What will happen is a little bit of the liquid moisture will come out of the onions as you sauté them and that's going to help pick up all that fond and all that flavour that we just talked about. Keep it on a moderate heat and constantly stir it so you can see there it's been sautéing for a couple of minutes and it's completely deglazed the bottom of the pan there. I've not let it burn or let any of the vegetables or the carrots, onions get too dark so it's ready for the meat to go in now. Give this a good stir. Now a crucial step is adding in your herbs and seasoning. So we're going to season it really well with some pepper, salt, flour now, a couple of tablespoons would be plenty, we'll just dress it over. This is going to help thicken the sauce. I'm going to put the herbs into like a Bokeh Ghani bag, this is actually what I use for my herbal soups or you can tie this with some string and add it in and red wine. I'm just going to turn the heat up and add in an entire bottle. Next will be the beef stock and I'm just going to add in enough to completely cover everything, perfect. You kind of want enough liquid so that everything is submerged, give it a little poke around. Now two generous tablespoons of tomato paste, give it a little stir in, that's going to give it a nice umami tomato hit and next up we're going to add in our bone broth or beef bouillon, make sure that is well mixed in. I'm going to bring that to a gentle simmer. Now it might not look that attractive or that delicious right now but trust me it's not about what it looks like, it's about how it tastes and this is a dish worth waiting for. Now if you're really stuck on time you could put all of this into a pressure cooker, that will definitely speed up the cooking rate or if you need to head out you can put it into a slow cooker or maybe something like an instant pot. I'm going to show you how to cook this in the traditional way in the oven. I preheated my oven at 160 degrees. Now we're going to add in some soy sauce. I'm kidding. Now that is coming to a nice simmer, put a nice tight fitting lid onto it. If you don't have a tight fitting lid, put some parchment and double foil it so that nothing escapes otherwise it'll dry out really quickly. Oh that's heavy. In it goes. In it goes for two to three hours, I'm going to check it after two. Now it's time to do some washing and have a cup of tea. See you in a bit. So the beef bourguignon's been in the oven for about two hours, two and a half hours now. I checked on it, it's smelling gorgeous. The whole house smells like autumn or like a French bistro right now. So it's time to finish some of the garnish. I've got my pearl onions, now if you're using fresh pearl onions make sure they're peeled. These are frozen so they're slightly a little bit soft and I've got some mushrooms, let's just quarter them up, a teeny. You can cut the stems off if you like but I'm feeling lazy. Then what we're going to do is fry and colour these off in some oil and butter, get them a really nice colour on them, really release a lot of their flavour and then we're going to add it back to the beef bourguignon. You can add all these in at the same time when you put everything in, say if you had a slow cooker and you were in a rush or you didn't have time to colour these but again all these little things contribute to making a really excellent beef bourguignon. So I'm using small like chestnut mushrooms, you can use white mushrooms or any mushroom really that you get hold of and I'm just going to cut them so they're like really even size so that they will colour roughly around the same. I'm going to heat up some oil, I just used the last of my olive oil so I'm going to use some avocado oil here. I'm going to get that really nice and warm and then we're going to fry our mushrooms. I'm going to do this in batches because you don't ever want to overcrowd a pan when you're browning mushrooms. I think they'll all fit in here though because what will happen is the moisture from the mushrooms will just release and then you'll end up just sort of steaming away whereas we want a really nice colour on these mushrooms. They are a bit like a sponge so they're going to soak up a lot of oil. Alternatively you could use clarified butter or ghee to fry this part off in, it'll also be delicious but the aim is that we're going to get really nice colour and then finish it off with some foaming butter. So you see how my mushrooms they're not overcrowded, they've got enough room that they're not sat on top of each other and they'll get a real nice colour. You're looking for that golden rich colour all over the mushrooms. Don't be tempted to add in the salt right now because salt will draw out more of the liquid and water from the mushroom, the juices, whereas what we're aiming for is getting a really good colour, that heat and contact with the pan and the oil to get that really nice malleable effect on the mushroom. You ever think you've been making so much effort in just browning mushrooms for a dish that's going to go into a casserole but it's worth it, it's worth it. I promise you it's going to be worth it. All right now I'm going to add in my pelt onions. Now I'm going to get the beef bourbon out of the oven. Look how soft that is, that's just like barely need to give any sort of squash that meat down and it's just falling apart. This smells so good, it's going to make a fantastic dinner. Worth the effort. Now in goes our mushrooms and onions. So we put the mushrooms and the bourbon on and we're going to pop that onto the stove now just to cook through those onions and mushrooms a little bit more, just on a fairly low heat and that will give us enough time to prepare the garnish which will be some finely chopped parsley. Make sure I choose the correct knife and with the parsley I'm just going to finely pick the leaves and then roughly chop it up. All right, I finally chopped some parsley. Make sure you save those stalks for stocks and sauces later another day. I just bang mine into a freezer bag and then pull it out whenever I need them. Right, done. Now let's finish up the bourbon where we're just going to make sure that the sauce is the right consistency. All right, wow. Look how rich that looks. I'm just going to carefully take out as much of the bourbon as possible without breaking up too much of that beef and the onions because what we're going to do next is reduce the sauce to the consistency that we like and I like mine quite rich and thick and glossy so there's different ways you could do this. You could add a roux, so flour, butter, whisked in or you could just reduce it until your desired consistency or you don't have to do anything at all and eat straight from the pan like this. I'm just being really careful not to break it up. Now with that big pouch of herbs just give it a good squeeze. Now with the herb bag we're just going to discard it. Now I'm scooping this all out into a pan that's got a colander in because I want to get as much of that sauce out as possible but don't do what all my chefs did and basically forgot to put the pan underneath the colander and left and we lost all that sauce underneath. Fantastic. So very carefully because this will be hot, just pull the remaining out and just put that on top there just so that it's safe. What we're going to do is you're left with this gorgeous sauce but like I said I like it a little bit thicker so I'm just going to reduce it a little bit more until it's the right consistency. You're going to get this layer of fat on the stew which you can discard. It's much easier if you put the entire bourbon in the fridge to rest for a day and what will happen is this will solidify and it'd be much easier to just take off. I'm just adding a little cheeky roux to the sauce because there isn't that much sauce in the end so I want to thicken it without reducing it too much otherwise there won't be enough sauce to go around for everyone. So a little bit of flour and butter. If you're not sure how to make a roux, check out one of our videos. Check out one of our other videos where we talked about Martha's sauces. I'm going to just gently whisk that in until that flour cooks and that will thicken up really quickly. Perfect. So our beef bourbonnion. Sprinkle your parsley and then sort of just marvel in your creation for a minute or two before you start serving it up. Wow. I could be mistaken that we're in front, in the middle of France right now, like this smells so good, that sauce is lovely and rich. I'm going to show you now how I'm going to plate this up like a Michelin chef. To plate up I'm going to use like a little plate bowl like this and what you want to make sure is you get a nice amount of each of those components. So some of the mushrooms, some of the onions, nice big chunks of the meat, carrots. You're definitely getting your five a day vegetables in this. Oh my god it smells so good. And then a little extra sprinkling of parsley over the top and then we've got it. A beef bourbonnion I think Julia Child would be proud of. This is my favourite part, the tasting. There's a really rich red wine flavour throughout the dish. If that's too overpowering for you, I would say just let it rest in the whole dish, rest in the fridge overnight and it will just deepen and it won't be as pungent sort of a white wine flavour but right now I'm loving that. I quite like that the mushrooms, the pancetta, the sauce, like the onions have still got a really nice bite to it. All right I could fade in that sauce. Just keeps on giving. If you're wanting the recipe for the beef bourbonnion you'll find that on my website but if you want my real in-depth tips and tricks and all the little details that I use in this in this dish you'll find that on my Patreon page. Both are linked in the description below. This definitely is one of those dishes it's going to pop into the freezer and it's going to keep on giving for a long while so a little bit of effort but definitely worth it. Thank you guys for watching and I'll see you again next week.