Boeuf Bourguignon

I actually thought about creating a whole new blog for this.  Well not this specifically, but for all the recipes in the Women's Weekly French Classics book I bought the other week.  Much like in Julie and Julia, but a lot less complicated!  But for now it can all stay in here.

The first recipe I made from the book was Boeuf Bourguignon.  We'd planned to make it on the June long weekend Monday night, but then we remembered we were already going out that night, so decided to do in Sunday night.  But this was while we were out shopping on Sunday afternoon and there wasn't going to be much time to slow cook it.  We decided to go ahead anyway, and invite people over to share it. 

The recipe is *huge*.  It called for 2kg meat!  So much food it wasn't going to all fit in the slow cooker.  So I decided to split the food into two.  One lot to be done in a big saucepan on the stove, and the rest in the slow cooker for leftovers.

So here's the starting ingredients.

Bouef bourguignon

Beef, mushroom, shallots (recipe called for small brown onions, this sufficed), bacon, garlic, parsely, thyme, bay leaves, butter, oil, wine, stock and flour.

Here's everything prepped (except the parsely).

Bouef bourguignon

So next we're cooking off the butter, onions, garlic, bacon and mushrooms.  The recipe said to cook until the onions browned, but there was so much stuff in this pot this wasn't happening.

Bouef bourguignon

Meanwhile, brown off all the chunks of meat.

Boeuf bourguignon

Since the recipe wanted the onions browned, when all the meat was browned I fried up the onions a little as well.

Boeuf bourguignon

So then you add some flour til it thickens, then the wine and stock.

Boeuf bourguignon

At this point I split the meat and the onion/bacon/mushroom mix.  Half into the slow cooker and half into the saucepan.  The slow cooker half was looking a little empty of fluids, so I added the rest of the bottle of wine and a bit more stock.

Boeuf bourguignon

So I cooked the stove version on as slow as the stove would go, which was still a pretty decent boil.  It was there for probably four hours.

And oh my!  It was amazing!

The onions had their bottoms kept on so they'd stay whole while cooking.  But that didn't quite work out.  The onions completely disintegrated, as did much of the meat.

The finished product, served with the parsely, and a some rice to soak up all the lovely gravy.  Doesn't look like much, but our dinner guests were pretty impressed :)

Boeuf bourguignon

We left the slow cooker version on low overnight, but probably should have turned it off earlier.  It still tasted great, but the meat was a little dry.  I'd topped up the liquids too before leaving it overnight, but they didn't really boil away, so it was a lot more watery than the stove version.

Boeuf bourguignon

I'd definitely make this again, but I'd halve the recipe and just do it in the slow cooker all one afternoon.