This Was The Recipe That Got Me To Love French Food Foreve

What's up, dude? Life on Earth certainly gets a little bit crazy sometimes, and if you are anything like me, you may seek some comfort in the midst of all that. Well, if that's the case, there is absolutely no better way to do it than bouffe bourguignon. And as always, my friends, there is no time to waste. Now let's go! When it comes to the beef for bouffe bourguignon, you want a tough cut of meat, something you're gonna cook over a long period of time. Don't use filet mignon for this, okay? You need something a lot cheaper and a lot tougher. I went with the mighty short rib for this cook today. You could do something else. You could do chuck roast. You could do beef shin. Any cheaper, tough cut of meat is what you want. The short ribs I have here are on the bone, which is great because we're gonna use those bones in this recipe to make our beef stock. Don't have to do this. You could buy short ribs that are already off the bone and just use beef stock, doesn't matter. But I'm gonna do it. I'm just gliding my knife here right against the bone to get that out. I'll just throw all my bones into this pot here. Gosh, how good does that look, right? Oh my God, it looks like Wagyu. And I'll just hit these with a little touch of oil. That's just any kind of neutral oil. This is avocado. Followed by a little bit of rosemary salt. If you know, you know, this is just a homemade seasoning we make on the channel. Certainly one of my most popular recipes ever. And of course you can just use salt, but if you wanna make the rosemary salt, just take some rosemary stripped off the stem. Sage, same deal, just pick it off the stem. Some fresh garlic, some lemon zest, and a whole bunch of salt. You simply blend it all up using a food processor or a blender and boom, it's done. Keep it in your fridge. It will last for a month, but I try to use it up within two to three weeks. The recipe for that will be in the description below this video. Now, all we need to do with these bones is put them straight into a 400 degree Fahrenheit oven. That's around 205 Celsius. That's step one. After 40 minutes of roasting, you can see a lot of those bits have pulled off the bone. There is so much flavor here. The last thing we're gonna do is add tomato paste. You gotta trust me on this one. Tomato paste and bones roasted in the oven to make a broth or stock or sauce. Unbelievably good. And all we wanna do is it's kind of hard to mix, but we do our best to just toss this around, get it spread out on the bones a little bit. Oh, this is just so cool. More or less good. It's a pass. Now we'll go back in the oven for another 15 minutes or so. The time has elapsed. Now all I'm doing is adding water to this and happy days. This is gonna be such a good stock. All I'll do is set it back on the stove and cook it over low heat for two hours and it's done. All we need to do now is cut up our short rib. There's a decent amount of fat on here as you can see. I might trim off a tiny bit, but fat is flavor and it's gonna render down in the next step of this process. So I don't wanna take off too much. From here, I'm gonna cut it into nice big cubes. Remember, it's gonna shrink a lot during the cooking process. So don't use skimpy little pieces. Something like this is great. And just remember when you're choosing meat for slow cooking or braising, you always wanna look for this intramuscular fat as you can see right here. If your beef is too lean, it's only gonna dry out if you cook it for a long time. But if it has the fat inside like this, it's gonna be absolutely blended, stupendous. It's gonna fall apart. It's gonna be freaking delicious, all right? Let's start preparing this beef. And to do that, we need bacon, believe it or not. Got some nice thick bacon here. I'm just gonna cut it into these big kind of squares. Just gonna drop this into a cold pan, taking a minute here to break these up. Might as well turn the pan on while I'm doing this. Just on to low to medium heat. And we want this bacon as the garnish for the buff bourguignon, but not just that. We're gonna use the fat for a very special purpose coming up. Just keeping that heat on the lower end and we're just rendering this down. After 10 minutes, your bacon is gonna be sort of half cooked or half rendered. At this point, I'll take it out. And when we need it for the garnish, we'll just crisp it up in a pan for a couple minutes. And right now, we just want this liquid gold you see underneath, which is the fat. Back to the beef now. I'm just hitting it with rosemary salt. Of course, you can just use salt, no worries. And Sergeant Gilbert reporting for duty. That's just awesome black pepper. And of course, I'll do that on all sides of the beef. Turning up the heat a little bit for this and we'll sear all our beef in the bacon fat. Oh God, yes. And when that's got a nice sear on it, we'll just give it a little turn. Try to brown it off evenly on all sides here. I'm literally drooling. This smells so fricking good. You know when you're doing something and you're just thinking, this isn't gonna be bad. Okay, there we are. I'm happy with the browning on this beef. Problem is my camera's now oilier than a pro wrestler. Just getting all my beef into a pot now, the one I'll be braising it in. Now, you're most commonly gonna see beef bourguignon made with burgundy wine, which is pretty expensive wine for cooking. However, it's made with Pinot Noir grapes. And all I did was buy a Pinot Noir from Oregon. If you don't wanna use Pinot Noir, Merlot or Cabernet Sauvignon will be fine as well. Now, I'm gonna light that same pan up that I cooked the beef in. All I did was get rid of most of the fat but left a little bit in. I'll turn that on to medium heat and I'm gonna add some onion and some carrots, but no celery. Because honestly, guys, celery sucks. Dude, it sucks. Okay, it doesn't suck, but I don't like the flavor it leaves in a broth when it cooks, so I'm not putting it in. This is not the garnish. This is just to flavor the braising liquid that we're gonna cook the beef in. You can absolutely eat it when it's done if you want, but it's really there just to flavor the sauce. Golden brown. And all I'm trying to do here is just get a little bit of light color on these vegetables. Nothing too crazy. Nice little char going on. And then we'll simply just get these into the pot with the beef. Come here, you. I've got the lights off now because we're gonna flambe our little bit of wine here. And I see in a lot of recipes, people use like a whole bottle. I want it to be more beef stock and less wine, just how I personally like it. So I'm gonna use about half a bottle. Here we go. Pinot Noir is very light wine. I don't know if you can see that. Let's see how much alcohol is in here. Glorious. If I had a marshmallow, I'd be toasting it. That could be a good video. Woo, there we go. Now, when you're cooking with alcohol, you're burning off a lot of the alcohol, but always a little bit remains. So that is something to note if you're cooking this for kids or whatnot. I'll just cook this down for about two minutes. And at the same time, I really wanna scrape all that delicious fond off the bottom of the pan. And we'll pour it over our beef and vegetables here. Oh. And then we'll pour some of our amazing tomato and beef broth over it. Again, if you wanna skip this step, I know it can be a little tedious. You don't have to do this. The last little flavor note we're gonna put in here is called a bouquet garni. It's one of my favorite little French things ever. Here's how you make it. First thing we need is a leek. Not for the leek itself, but for these top pieces up here, because that's how you make bouquet garni. Always check them for dirt because leeks are notoriously dirty. I'll give these a little rinse. Then I'm gonna flatten them out a little bit like this. We lay out a little bit of this butcher's twine and just set a few pieces of our leek down like so. Then inside, we do some thyme, a little bit of garlic, bay leaf, and a few peppercorns. And then all we do is tie it up like a neat little package. I like to do the outer edge first, and we'll do this side. Bing, bang, boom. Just one in the middle for good measure, why not? And there's your little bouquet garni. You can use this for soups, stocks, braises, whatever you want. You can even make a bunch ahead of time and have them in the fridge. I'll lower that into our bouffe bourguignon, or as Julia Childs would say, a wonderful bouffe bourguignon. And here I have the heat just a touch over low. We wanna go low and slow. You could absolutely put it in an oven at 250 degrees Fahrenheit, 300 degrees Fahrenheit. Lower the better, really, it's gonna take longer, but it'll be more tender. However, there is one reason I'm doing it on the stove. As this begins to cook down, I'm gonna show you what it is. It's pretty rad. I'm also gonna put a cracked lid on this. I think it should breathe a little bit. I know it's not alive, but somehow it needs to breathe. And we just let it roll. The trick here is to keep a pastry brush sitting in some hot water, because as this dish reduces, you're gonna see all this stuff left on the sides. And that's all flavor that belongs in the sauce. So we just use our pastry brush here to clean it up. And another reason you do this is for easy cleanup, right? Because all that stuff is really stuck to the sides, and when it cools down after, it is gonna be a pain in the butt to clean. So good trick to learn for when you're doing these kind of braids. At this point, the beef has been cooking for just a little over three hours on this very low simmering heat. The vegetables in here have definitely done their job, so I'm removing the onion, which I'll definitely snack on, as well as these little pieces of carrot. You can get them out now too. If you really want, you can serve these with the beef, but the garnishes are coming up. Also, our little bouquet garni has done its job. That's coming out too. Now, at this point, if you want, you can serve it right away. It will be delicious. However, if you let it sit in that liquid for at least an hour and rest, it is gonna be way more tender. It's just true. And to take that to the next level, if you let it cool down to room temp, stick it in your fridge overnight, and then reheat it slowly the next day, which is what I did. I know I'm wearing the same shirt, but it is absolutely the next day. I would not lie to you. People see me wear the same shirt, and they freak out, man. It's clean, it's clean, it's clean. If you can have that kind of patience, it does make a huge difference in braised meat, which is why it's always so good in restaurants because that's what they do. The last thing we need to do is thicken our beef bourguignon, and for that, I'm gonna be using roux. French dish, French thickener. It just makes sense. If you wanted an easier method, you could just use a little cornstarch mixed with water to make a slurry. Arguably, that will give you a better looking, more shiny sauce. The roux will definitely cloud it up a little bit, but it will give it by far the best flavor if you're asking me. Now, for our garnishes here, I have these little pearl onions. I have some regular old mushrooms. I have some bunched carrots. And that half rendered bacon, we'll just finish it up in the oven when we're ready for it. And of course, a little bit of parsley for that little green finishing touch. Usually, you're gonna use butter for roux, but you can use any kind of fat you really want. So in this case, I'm just gonna skim the fat off the top of this beef bourguignon because it's full of flavor. This is gonna make for some excellent roux. I've got that in a little pot here now. I'm just turning the heat on to medium low, and I'll just add a few tablespoons of all-purpose flour because we need to cook the flour first to get rid of that raw flour taste. That's certainly very important when it comes to roux. Wow, that looks so good. I wanna eat it already. And what I'm looking for here, it's a sort of wet sand type of consistency. Something like this looks good. And I'll just cook this over low heat for about 10 minutes to make sure we've cooked out the flour. All you gotta do is stir it occasionally. All we need to do now is bring this to a low simmer, and we're gonna add a little bit of our roux, but only one spoonful at a time because it can get thick quickly, and we don't wanna over-thicken it. And we really need to let the stew warm back up to see how that thickener really worked. Needs more, so I'll go in with another spoonful. At this point, too, we can taste it for seasoning. Might need a little salt or pepper. Oh, God, it tastes so frickin' good. I'm just doing a tiny little pinch of salt, little bit of pepper. I can already see how that roux is working with just two spoonfuls. I really don't like my sauce is overly thick. You're welcome to thicken it up as much as you like. I'm gonna go in with another just half a spoonful, about two and a half tablespoons total only in here. This looks absolutely wonderful. All I'm gonna do now is turn the heat off, let this relax one final time while we prepare the vegetable garnishes. Let's start with these little onions because this is a labor of love. We gotta trim each and every one on either side, just the tiniest little bit. These things are such a pain in the beep to peel if you don't do what I'm about to show you first, right? We start with the trim. Now we blanch them, boiling water, just for 45 seconds. We just remove, and now I can just take a little towel and just press, and I should be able to pop them all out just like that. Does make this whole process much easier. I love these onions, and I hate working with them. That's just how it goes. With the carrots, here's a shape I like to cut them into, make a diagonal cut like that, and then we'll just go down the whole way, cutting like this to get these little pyramid, almost triangle shapes. You can also roll it over if that's easier, and when you get down to the bottom, just make them a little wider so that they're all the same size. With the mushrooms here, I'm just gonna pop out this little stem like so, and then simply just quarter them. Okay, okay, my friends, here's the plan. Take a pan, drop in your mushrooms, carrots, and onions, no more than about this amount. Taking some of my beef stock here, we're gonna make these little fondant vegetables almost for the top, barely covered like this. Couple little pieces of butter, and we'll turn it on medium-high heat. Essentially, what we're doing here is making glazed vegetables, so as all that stock reduces with the butter, in the end, we'll end up with this nice, shiny glaze, as you'll see here in a minute. Looking beautiful, and of course, if you want, you could just throw this all in the last 30, 40 minutes of braising. You don't have to do this, although it will definitely make for a beautiful presentation here coming up in a minute. I'm just having fun, all right? Don't hate me for it. It's been about five minutes, and that liquid is really starting to reduce, and our vegetables are cooking nicely. Here we are after about 12 minutes. You can see that that sauce is really starting to thicken up and glaze onto the vegetable. This is what we want. I'm gonna reduce the heat a little bit now. Let's just check all the vegetables. Perfectly forked tender carrots, the mushrooms are cooked, onions as well, nice and soft. We'll turn the heat off now, and we're ready to plate. Look at how that sauce is just coating on the vegetables. Here we go into a bowl, wow. And here we go with our vegetables. Just put them around where you see fits. This is so exciting. I love making beautiful food like this, and your mushrooms. Can't you see it needs a carrot over here? Clean it up, and we'll finish with some little leaves of parsley. Let's face facts here. This isn't doing anything but making it look great, which I guess, is it doing something? And our final garnish, bacon. Sorry, parsley, move aside. And there you have it, my sweet, sweet, sweet friends. Bouf bourguignon, bourguignon. Well, oh my God, I just poked the meat with my fork, and you could literally just feel how freaking insanely tender it is. Little bacon, little carrot. Thank you, God. Oh, watch this. I just need you to get a sense of this. I mean, it just comes apart like nothing. And you put the work in, you have a little patience, you just make really freaking good food. The beet falls apart in your mouth so easily. It's so freaking tender. The vegetables are perfectly cooked and fit right in. The little crunchy pieces of bacon are a welcome surprise. It's honestly just heaven in a bowl, my friends. And until next time, you know I love you in a mouth.