Beef Bourguignon, Bennelong style
June 15, 2009
My cyber-savvy mother-in-law cooked dinner for eight on Saturday night, including us, and her main was a spectacular beef Bourguignon she found on the SBS Food Safari website.
The step-by-step recipe is all in an online video with the Opera House Bennelong restaurant’s Guillaume Brahimi showing the way. The result was too good to describe – and one of the fab secrets is using pureed carrot instead of flour to thicken the stew.
Of course, being a fancypants chef, he used Wagyu beef (hello??) – but he also says he’d have no trouble using ‘any piece of beef’ so I guess I’d go for chuck. Annie if you’re out there, what did you use? It was soo tender.
Anyway, here’s the video – I might give it a whirl this week, will report back with results. And thanks to Annie for the amazing taste test.
How to shuck an oyster 
Thanks for the kind words, Charlotte, altho’ I feel I should pass them on to Guillaume himself as I slavishly followed the video. I did use chuck steak as you guessed. So sorry I didn’t send some home with you as there was half a bucket left over but I was feeling a little delicate and wasn’t thinking straight. Thanks again for your company.
This is really challenging my idea of BB, and looks just like my mother’s best ‘beef casserole’. In slow food BB consists of nothing more than beef (blade), eschallots or pickling onions, speck, mushroom and of course, burgundy, with some other yumminess. Having said that however and seeing Maeve’s knees weakening on first bite, GB may well have a point and this may be a job for Le Chassuer (Big Red) this weekend!
Do you reckon Maeve has a thing for GB? Or just his BB? She certainly was weak at the knees. I am going to give this a shot tonight – and Annie, I too am sorry you didn’t send some home with us, but good you got lots of hearty goodness to eat for the rest of the week…
Yep, she is SOOOOO hot for him.
That pureed carrot tip is a WINNER. Gastronomic gold.
Okay – so I cooked this tonight, and it is officially the best recipe ever. After S. chicken, etc etc.
Only issue was I wish I used better meat – no not Wagyu, fool! – but I got the ‘lean diced beef’ from the (good) butcher, and it was fine, not quite juicy enough as chuck would have been, but still pretty damn good. The carrot puree thickening thing is astonishing and a revelation – I have leftover puree to thicken any old thing anytime, from the freezer. Dinner pal Harry pointed out this might not work for cauliflower soup, unless you want to turn is a strange shade of yellow, but otherwise can’t see a down side. On the whole dinner buds were swooning apace at the BB; actually the whole thing was quite a mess what with picking them up off the floor, along with the washing up.
My only gripe is mashed fricking POTATO, jeesuss!! GB’s thing with the tamis had me & Senor in a whirl and then an argument, because of course we ain’t got a tamis, just a crappy misshapen sieve, and I tried to shortcut by whizzing in the whizzer first, against Senor’s wishes, which pretty much just created glue. Which was then impossible to sieve, blah blah BLAH. Next time, a masher or a fork. It all tasted delicious obviously as anything with BUTTER in it will, but Hamish if you’re out there be warned, I am soon going to post on the labour and misery of making perfect fricking mashed potato!! i want professional and other opinions. I would far rather chuck a spud in the oven than go through all that palaver. Do not reply on potato here! I am going to have a Rant soon and want your replies There!
No way am I doing GB’s potato thing. It really reminded me of those old fashioned washing boards, as in, “I’m so glad I live in an age of automatic washing machines… those things look back-breaking.” There must be an easier way.
Yeah, I’m with you Di, for potato anyway. I have flirted with the idea of getting one of those sievey things to make a super-smooth chicken/duck liver pate or parfait though – but then stopped flirting and moved on. If they weren’t so huge I might have succumbed.
[…] Using up carrots: My first contribution will be ol’ Guillaume’s carrot puree, used to thicken his BB – I made too much, but have used it twice since, in thickening a […]