The Greatest Dish France Ever Invented

This is the best recipe on earth for making cheap beef taste expensive. Because beef bourguignon is traditionally made with chuck, one of the least expensive cuts of beef, you need to make sure to treat it right. And the first step is marinating it. What I love so much about this dish is that it was a peasant dish in France, meaning that it was designed to take a cut of beef that nobody really wanted and make it taste really, really good. The marinade is pretty simple and uses chopped onions, a few smashed cloves of garlic, some chopped carrots, a bouquet garni, which is a French way to tie up herbs, all covered up in a whole bottle of red wine. This wine will tenderize and flavor the beef as it sits in the fridge overnight. Once that beef is marinated, we'll remove it from the mixture and set it off to the side and then I'll also fish out all those vegetables to separate them from the red wine. Now we'll head on over to our stove where we begin to build the foundation of our flavor by caramelizing some bacon lardons. This I'm doing over medium high and I may also add a little splash of oil to speed things along. Here's another great thing about this recipe is that it's just good classic French cooking. Once that bacon is all nice and crispy like this, I'll use a slotted spoon to gather it all up while leaving that nice flavorful fat behind and then after hitting my red wine With a pinch of salt and fresh cracked pepper I'll toss it straight into that super hot bacon fat pressing it down to make sure I get even contact against the pan with the goal of developing a nice beautiful golden brown crust Because it's soaked overnight in wine and all those sugars have gone into the meat It may develop a crust faster than you're used to so make sure you're watching carefully set that beef off to the side and then Add in your veggies stir these around to soften and make sure to scrape off all those delicious bits on the bottom of your pan It's so much flavor that you do not want to leave behind this deep golden caramelized color we see here is not burnt, it's flavor and lots of it. Now, add your tomato paste and stir to caramelize until you start to get this beautiful orange oil. And next, in goes our flour. I'm cooking over about medium heat now, and we wanna cook this for a couple minutes now to cook out the raw flour. You don't wanna taste it later on in the dish. But the use of flour here is to eventually thicken up our sauce. Optionally, now you can add a little splash of brandy for flavor and flair, and then deglaze with all that red wine from earlier. Once again, scraping down every little bit of flavor all across the sides of your pan. Once your red wine is reduced by about half, add in the beef stock followed by the seared beef, we add on some parchment to make sure the tops of the beef don't dry out, then lid on and into the oven for three hours at 375 Fahrenheit, or until the beef is tender but not completely falling apart. While that's in the oven, we'll prepare our garnish by adding some high smoke point oil to a pan over medium heat, then in we go with our mushrooms, as well as our pearl onions, and the goal here is to get some nice golden color. The reason we're doing these vegetables separate from the ones in the oven is that they'll break down too quickly and become mush if we let them cook for that long. Now, we add in some butter. I find it amazing that with this recipe, the French have put in pretty much every classic French ingredient you can think of. You've got those pork bacon lardons. You've got butter. You've got beef, red wine, all kinds of herbs. And then, of course, lots of patience and technique. Once everything is golden and slightly softened, we'll add in that crispy bacon from earlier, then give it all a few more tosses just to coat everything evenly together. And using a slotted spoon, set everything off to the side, leaving behind all that flavorful oil. I'll turn this down to keep it hot for just a moment while I come back over here to make the final garnish. Classic French kitchens always serve this dish with heart-shaped croutons. So I thought it'd be fun for us to do the same. When you think about it, it does make sense to serve some kind of bread with a dish like this. You want to be able to soak up every last drop of that incredible sauce. This step doesn't take long. Just get that nice golden brown crust on each side of the bread, then set it off to the side on a wire rack lined baking sheet, and now we can move back to our beef to finish things off. I don't know if my kitchen has ever smelled this good. To finish this off, we can remove the bouquet garni. Then I wouldn't recommend picking up your beef with tongs because it may fall apart as you can see here. So find something that'll let you lift it off easily and set that off to the side. Oh, I found a little bonus piece of beef. This is exactly what you want. You want it to be able to hold together on its own, but also flake apart super easily like this. And what's super important here is the consistency and the thickness of your sauce. You want something nice and glossy. So if your sauce is too thin, there's two options. One is to reduce it down, just let all that water boil off until it's thick enough, but remember that That will concentrate the flavor, so if it's already salty enough, you might make it too salty after you lose a bunch of the water. So the other option is to mix some cornstarch with a little bit of warm water, and once it becomes smooth like this, you can drop just a tiny bit in. Go just bit by bit at a time, and that will thicken up your sauce instantly. Just make sure you cook it for a few minutes after so you don't taste the cornstarch. See how it's coating the sides of my pan now? It's more of a glaze than so much of a liquid. The final step is to give it a taste. If you want a little more acidity, add a tiny splash of sherry vinegar, and some people even like to melt in a little red currant jelly for sweetness. The very final step is as French as it gets, and that is mounting the sauce with a little more butter. It does sound funny, but I genuinely believe that half the reason French food is so good is because they just find clever ways to sneak in tons and tons of butter to everything they make. Bring it all together now by putting everything back into the same pot. I also like to add in a few carrots that haven't been cooked so heavily. And of course, don't forget about the beef and any juices it may have left behind. Then spoon a bit of your sauce, We're going to toss over that beef just to coat it one last time, then finish it all off with some parsley. And if you want to get real fancy, dip those bread hearts into the sauce and into some parsley and they look really cool. That is beef bourguignon. I'll bet we can all agree that food really doesn't get much better than this. Traditionally, beef bourguignon is plated with some mashed potatoes, often called a pomme puree in France. Then on we go with our hot, beautiful beef, a couple of our vegetables scattered all around the plate. Then of course, as many spoonfuls as you want of that thick and velvety glaze. And finally, that classic French sauce. I know you've all been watching and waiting to see how truly fall-apart tender this really is, so watch how easily I can just peel this beef away with my fork. That's one of the best things ever. It's sweet from the onions, a little smoky from the bacon. The sauce is so silky, and that's from that beef breaking down so slowly over three hours. It kind of makes me just want to... Wow, the bread is really good. Kind of just makes me want to turn all the cameras off and sit and just eat it in total silence. For such an inexpensive cut of beef, it doesn't make sense how good this is. It is, without question, one of the best things I've ever had. I'm confident Julia Child would have been very proud of this dish.