Beef bourguignon what kind of beef

Cook, stirring, for 6 minutes or until onion has softened. Add garlic 2 garlic cloves, finely chopped. Cook for 1 minute. Return beef and juices to pan. Add wine 1 cup red wine. Bring to the boil. Reduce heat to low. Simmer, covered, for 1 hour and 15 minutes. Add pickling onions 16 small pickling onions, peeled see tip and mushrooms g small button mushrooms. Cook, covered, for 30 minutes or until meat and onions are tender.

Season with salt Salt, to season and pepper. More specifically, you want one that's rich in connective tissue made of collagen some good marbled fat in the mix doesn't hurt none either. Meat that has lots of collagen in it starts off tough as heck—it tends to come from the strongest parts of an animal's body—but, as it cooks, it very slowly transforms into meltingly soft and moist gelatin.

It's that gelatin that makes the meat still seem moist even after the muscle fibers have inevitably dried out from long cooking. Try stewing a lean, tender cut of beef, like filet mignon, for a couple of hours and you'll end up with scraps of meat that would compete with jerky in toughness and dryness. A boneless chuck roll, which comes from the cow's incredibly strong shoulder, is perfect for stewing, and it tends to be pretty cheap, so it's what I call for here.

You have other options, though, so feel free to peruse my list of top stewing beef cuts for more ideas. To prep the beef, most recipes tell you to dice it into small pieces first, then brown them on all sides. That browning helps develop flavor, but it also dries out the surface of the beef cubes. Even after they've spent a couple of hours submerged in stewing liquids, you can still detect the toughness of their browned exteriors. To mitigate this, we take a slightly different approach with our stews on Serious Eats.

We start by slicing the beef into about three large steaks or slabs, and then we brown only the two largest sides of each. Only after the beef is browned do we cut it up into stew-size cubes.

How big is stew size? Well, for some folks, it's about an inch. Problem there is that, while one-inch cubes will give you spoon-size bites, they'll also dry out a lot faster than larger pieces.

We want moist and tender meat, so we size our cubes up to somewhere between one and a half and two inches. The final stew will have meat that may require being cut with a knife or, more likely, the side of your fork, if your stew is cooked right , but we're okay with that. A lot of beef stew recipes, including ones for boeuf Bourguignon, say that for the best flavor, you should marinate the beef first.

I've been running marination tests with beef stews for the past couple of weeks, and I haven't found this advice to be true. Marinades don't actually penetrate deeply into meat, getting not much further than the first couple of millimeters in from the surface, even after many hours.

That shallow penetration is enough to make a marinade worthwhile in quicker-cooking applications, like when grilling meats. It even helps the chicken in my coq au vin recipe , in which the breast meat is braised quickly, just long enough to cook it through.

But with stew, the meat spends enough time in the pot with the stewing liquid that it ends up taking on as much flavor as meat that was marinated first. In none of my tests could I tell a difference between beef that had been marinated in red wine for as much as 24 hours and beef that first encountered the wine in the Dutch oven.

Pour the beef and vegetables back into the Dutch oven. Add the pearl onions and mushrooms to the pot. Pour the sauce over the beef mix and simmer an additional 3 to 5 minutes. Expert Tips tip 1. Carbohydrate Choice 1. More About This Recipe If you've always wanted to make Julia Child's beef bourguignon but never had the guts, then we're here to help.

You've read the book and watched the movie, so the only thing that's left is to master her classic dish. In all honesty, this will take some time, but in the end, it will be unbelievably worth it. However, if you are looking for a shortcut, check out our Ready-in Beef Bourguignon for Two. Try These Next.

Preparation and cooking time. Prep: 45 mins Cook: 3 hrs and 30 mins Plus overnight marinating. Share on facebook. Share on twitter. Share on pinterest. Email to a friend. Ingredients 1. What is beef bourguignon? Which cut of beef is best? How to cook beef bourguignon Should you leave the beef to marinade overnight? Why is the slow stewing important? Does it make the meat more tender? Is flour important? Do I need to fry everything off before slow cooking? What happens if the sauce is too thick or thin after stewing for 2 hrs?

If your sauce is too thick: Add a splash of hot beef stock or water to the pan. Bring back to a simmer over the hob, if you need to, until you get the desired consistency. Mash to a paste in a small bowl, then add to the gravy in small knobs while stirring constantly over a low heat.

This will thicken and enrich the sauce, creating a shiny, glossy gravy. This is a classic French technique for thickening gravies, soups, sauces and casseroles. It will thicken very quickly when stirring over the heat, so only add a little at a time, and cook for a few minutes to cook out the raw cornflour before serving.

Can you overcook beef bourguignon?