Comments on: Boeuf Bourguignon

By: David

David — Sun, 30 Aug 2009 17:59:37 +0000

Thanks for the link! Keep reading, not all of my recipes are day-long affairs.

By: Bessy

Bessy — Sun, 30 Aug 2009 17:16:23 +0000

I’ve been looking for good, helpful recipes for Beef Bourguignon so I was very happy to find this site. I gave a link from my site that suggests what people should eat for dinner .

By: St. Julia’s Day, Part 1: Coq au Vin

St. Julia’s Day, Part 1: Coq au Vin — Fri, 21 Aug 2009 20:56:11 +0000

[...] wouldn’t require firing up the oven. I had done that once before (see the second paragraph of this post), and it wasn’t [...]

By: Sean

Sean — Wed, 18 Feb 2009 20:47:16 +0000

Hi David–

I finally finished my blog post regarding the beef Burgundy. I departed from J & J’s recipe from Cooking at Home most noticeably in how I prepared the onions and mushrooms by cooking the mushrooms first rather than the onions. I believe this is only the second time I’ve made the dish, but I couldn’t have been more pleased and wanted to get everything written down in my blog!

By: David

David — Tue, 17 Feb 2009 05:21:12 +0000

The recipe in in Volume One of Mastering the Art of French Cooking by Julia Child, Louisette Bertholle, and Simone Beck. It was originally published in 1961; my copy is the thirty-second printing from 1981. There’s still a bookmark at the recipe on page 315, the page is warped from splashes and splatters.

The big difference with the old recipe involves tossing the browned meat with flour and cooking it in a high heat oven for about ten minutes. The heat is lowered before adding the wine and all the vegetables. I recall this all being very messy and difficult to control.

By: Melanie Campbell

Melanie Campbell — Tue, 17 Feb 2009 04:31:22 +0000

I remember my mother cooking this dish eons ago; she had “Mastering French Cooking”, and used it often. She might have used the old recipe. I don’t remember the taste; people can’t remember tastes without meeting the taste again. I’m sure it was good.

By: David

David — Mon, 16 Feb 2009 21:56:38 +0000

Thanks for reading! The Julia and Jacques recipe is a great improvement over the old Mastering recipe, which I cooked once. It's not essential to blanch the salt pork. you just have to be more careful with the seasoning of the finished sauce. I go by feel: if I can feel the salt grains when I'm trimming off the skin, it gets a blanch.

By: Sean

Sean — Mon, 16 Feb 2009 17:38:39 +0000

I made Boeuf Bourguignon for Valentine’s Day dinner also (which included my partner’s father and his dad’s girlfriend; don’t ask!). And I used the recipe from Julia and Jacques collaboration rather than the recipe from Mastering the Art of French Cooking. I was curious to blog about my preparation and had a bit of challenge tracking down a reference to the recipe from Julia and Jacques Cooking at Home. Google pointed me to lots of folks who relied on the recipe from the 1960s and compared to the updated version in Julia’s collaboration with Jacques, well, there’s no comparison in terms of simplicity! I won’t be trying the older version of the recipe and even simplified the recipe that I used by not boiling the bacon before frying it. I also wasn’t as disciplined as you about not sampling the bacon! Next time I’ll make extra! The proof is in the result because we all loved this dish and I can’t wait to make it again! Great way to use up some of those bottles of red wine from Christmas!

By: David

David — Mon, 16 Feb 2009 14:37:57 +0000

You definitely want to make the potatoes. You can even use leftover mashed potatoes of you have them, but in this house “leftover mashed potatoes” is a foreign phrase, like “too much bacon.”

As for the wine, Jacques suggests using a splash of whatever you’ll be drinking with the dinner. I was skeptical, but it was only a quarter cup, and it did tie the meal together.

By: Phyllis Bregman

Phyllis Bregman — Mon, 16 Feb 2009 13:11:05 +0000

I’ve cooked this from the Julia Child original recipe, but always used frozen pearl onions. I hate peeling pearl onions and you lose almost nothing taste-wise with frozen ones. I’m going to have to try the potato recipe. It sounds wonderful.

Interesting that you used two different wines. I always stick to one.