Boeuf Bourguignon

Oh So Good.

The recipe was out of Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking so I won’t repeat it here.

The beef: oh so tender. Though it was just stew meat bought at Safeway, it was heavenly.  In fact I’ll bet even the cheapest cut of beef would be heavenly.

The sauce: Deep, dark, rich sauce.  I have seen demi-glace that wasn’t as beautiful as this sauce.

A few miscellaneous notes:

• I couldn’t file a chunk of uncut bacon with rind, so I just used about half a pound of sliced bacon.
• The recipe calls for 3 cups of a ‘young full-bodied red wine’. I used a Cabernet.
• The recipe is a little unclear if the vegetables (carrot and onion) are set aside after sautéing and then recombined later vs just leaving them in the pot.  I chose to leave them in and I’m glad I did.
• The recipe calls for ‘2 -3 cups brown beef stock or canned beef bouillon’. In my 5.5qt Le Creuset French oven all I needed was 1 can of low sodium beef broth.

Both my Wife and Son say this one is a keeper.

A word of warning: make this and you will never again be satisfied with that stew that comes from a can.