Beef Bourguignon - The Most Comforting Classic French Stew

today we're going to 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 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 going to be a quarter cup of this that's going to give it a great flavor what's also going to give a great flavor is the thyme and it says eight sprigs of time but I probably have like 14 here it's gonna be okay I want a lot of time 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 this and then three cups of beef stock so then all that's going to go in it's going to be braised it's going to 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 chalk 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 want to 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 want to do this you don't have to you'll just remove a ton of fat later on when you do it so what I want to do now is I want to 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 want to Pat it again now this will help get a little bit better sear but what we're going to 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 going to 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 going to be nice it's going to allow us to dredge these so what I'm doing is I'm just getting every side coated and then I'm going to go like this I want to get it all on like covering the whole thing that I want to get every bit of it off when I shake it all off it's all going to go right back into my flour thing because we're going to need this flour that's what's going to 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 going to 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 want to get this till it's pretty brown the bacon it's going to take depending on how high you are anywhere from like five to ten 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 want to keep let that keep going if you make it too high all you're going to do is you're just going to burn everything so you don't need to do that now you can see all the liquid fat in here so I'm just going to take this and put it off on a paper towel you use a slotted spoon here if you want to you want to 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 going to let this brown for a couple minutes per size get some color on this remove them do the next batch and then we'll move on to our next stop 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 [Music] 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 doing 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 going to take them out and we're going to 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 want to get those onions nice and soft

that is definitely a big part of this recipe there's the onions [Music] honestly we don't have any Pat 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 put a little bit of water in there just a splash and that will

allow you to remove a lot of the brown bits at the bottom there let's give it like 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 want to stir this the whole time really going to 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 the whole time if you start the burn a little bit more water that's it I want to show you see how the really dark spots right here on the pot bottom of the pot we want to remove all that now a 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 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 uh 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 going to do this for about a minute and don't worry

if you get lumps or anything you're going to be cooking this in the oven for a long time so that's good see all the flowers in there now so it just kind of all clumped up like that okay this is burgundy or Pinot Noir like I said we want to use three cups so we're going to use down to about here so I'm going to 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 going to 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're removed it all three cups of the beef base all right I'm just going to 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 going to be a long braised delicious beef stew that we have here peel the bottom again everything's good and it is we're ready to go okay I'm going to turn it off cover it 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 going to take this pot okay and we're going to put it in a 350 degree oven we're going to cook it until the beef gets tender it's going to take around two and a

half to three maybe three and a half hours that's going to depend on your exact oven you know convection conventional maybe your oven and 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 a 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 spent two and a half 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 going to be able to tell you could 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 going to rise to the top now it's going to rise more the longer you let it sit but if I just put this paper towel on top of it it's going to 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 you put it on the stove again you warm it up and then you do your mushrooms and your pearl onions we're going to 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 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 going to use stainless pan here the brown the pearl onions and the mushrooms I'm going to 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 going to put olive oil in here we're going to do the onions first I dried the onions these were frozen onions I dried them off as best I could [Music] 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 the oils you don't need any more oil it's enough here it's been about three minutes I'm just kind of weaving them I pushed them around as best I could to make them hit the pan and I don't want to really touch them yet what will happen is as the heat hits them and I have to like probably a touch more than medium heat maybe

like a six out of ten 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 Brown in spots gonna let him go another minute or two I'm 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 time in it and don't worry your your beef burgundy on is is hot because it's in the pot it's nicer to serve your beef

burgundy on and then to put a couple because you don't have that many pearl onions you want to 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 [Music] 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 I'm biased towards beef bourguignon by the way I didn't um tell you but I did it you got a

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 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 works 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 want to look at it if it doesn't look good you're probably not going to 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 want to be able to eat it with a fork and you want it to break apart yup so to me this is cooked perfectly I'm glad you added the time to the mushrooms mushroom onions because you didn't do that last time yeah and I felt that that was

yeah 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 probably the best I tend to part 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 burgundy on then you're like getting more towards beef stew and you're supposed to serve it with potatoes mashed potatoes or or bread this is a baguette that we have so

that's that's what we did yeah I I'm gonna give this a 10. 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 foreign [Music]