09 February 2017

Bœuf braisé au vin rouge...

...avec carottes, échalotes, et champignons. That's what we're having for lunch today. I made it two days ago, and this will be our second meal out of it. Since I used red wine, you might call it bœuf bourguignon, or estouffade de bœuf. Beef stew with red wine, in other words. Usually, beef stewed with carrots (bœuf aux carottes) is made with white wine in France.




Anyway, I won't call it « bourguignon » because I didn't make it with burgundy wine. Instead, I used a bottle of Côtes du Rhône red. I bought a case (12 bottles) of the wine a couple of months ago, and then I immediately went back to the supermarket and bought another case because it was so good. It was on a special sale and I'm almost ashamed to tell you how little I paid for it.


I'll tell you anyway — less than $3.00 a bottle in U.S. terms. And it had won a gold medal at some wine show in Lyon in 2016.

Off subject: I was just listening to a report about "veggie burgers" on Télématin. It's something new here, I guess. I've made veggie burgers a few times, myself. The report says that French people are gradually diminishing their consumption of meat products. In 1998 per capita meat consumption was at 94 kilograms annually. Now it's down to 86 kilos a year. I haven't looked up the statistics for the U.S.... but with all those hamburgers and bacon that Americans eat... At least one Wikipedia page shows that Americans eat more meat than French people do (though the figures don't match the ones given on TV).


After a video report showing how veggie burgers, called « steaks végétaux », are made and what they contain, the discussion turned to the term « steak » in this context. It's not a steak, the people on the show agreed, because a steak is meat. It's a galette. That's an all-purpose term for cookies (galettes bretonnes), puff-pastry cakes savory (galette de pommes de terre) or sweet (galette des Rois), pan cakes (galettes de sarrasin) , or even Mexican tortillas (galettes de maïs). It will be interesting to see what term for "veggie burger" might catch on in France. The concept is not yet clear, so neither is the terminology.




Okay. What I made included vegetables but it also contained a lot of meat. Both beef and pork, because I cut up a chunk of what we might call "slab bacon" and added it for flavor. In French that's called lard or poitrine, and it is fumé(e), or smoked. And I put in a whole bottle of red wine for about 1.5 kg of meat, plus the carrots, onions, shallots, and mushrooms. It was right good and I'm looking forward to lunch. Often these kinds of  "simmered dishes" or plats mijotés are better re-heated and served the second time.

10 comments:

  1. Your bœuf bourguignon a la Côtes du Rhône looks delicious! On the topic of veggie burgers, they are popular here and I quite like them. Just don't expect them to taste like a beef burger. They are their own entity.

    Lots of carrots; are you expecting chm?

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    1. Malheureusement, CHM is too far away to be able to come for lunch. To my mind, carrots, unlike celery or tarragon (to give two examples) do not dominate or overwhelm other flavors in dishes like this one or blanquette de veau or choucroute. Carrots are a kind of exhausteur ou révélateur de goût, I'd say — they don't impart their own flavor so much as they enhance other flavors. One friend said to me once that carrots "soften" the flavor of, or "sweeten," meats that they are cooked with.

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    2. Yes, I love carrots. But, unlike Ken, I don't put them in anything and everything, especially in Blanquette de veau and Choucroute garnie where they're not called for and don't add anything special. In the stew here, I'm sure they are delicious.

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    3. « Mange tes carottes, ça rend aimable et ça donne les fesses roses ». Ma mère a dû m'apprendre ça.

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  2. I bought a used Le Crueset braiser off of eBay recently. Been making country style pork shoulder ribs in it, since they are usually on sale around here. Typically I do a google search for recipes, (thats how I found your blog, 'breton pancakes'), I look at the images section of the search, and closely examine the most appealing ones. Today I searched the term, ' plats mijotés', (Thank you), and found quite a few potentials for me my new old braiser, including what you have posted today. Have a pleasant day.

    -craig-

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  3. Glad to be helpful. I love plats mijotés. They are stews or braises or sautés...

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  4. Oh, that photo just under the wine photo, makes your stew look perfect and delicious.
    I like the label on your bottle of wine. I learned the term Millésime just one of the last times I was in Paris... it was the name of our hotel, and a friend explained the term to me. Great buy on that wine!

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    1. There are often great prices on wine here, compared to the sky-high wine prices in the U.S. Equal quality understood...

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  5. A curious footnote, perhaps. I went into East Berlin through the Wall not long before it came down, and on a wet Sunday in November, the only thing I could find for lunch was a rather sad-looking cafeteria trying to imitate a poor imitation of McDonalds: only they called their version of a hamburger - "galetta" (mind, it tasted of good quality meat).

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