Welcome back to Cooking With the French Chef, in which I review episodes of Julia Child’s original show, cook out of the new edition of the French Chef Cookbook and share the results with you. Past posts can be found here.
Our first official installment! This month’s recipe is a no-brainer: Since Julia made Boeuf Bourguignon on her first episode, that’s what I’m going to do, too. Here’s the episode, which was broadcast on WBGH on February 11, 1963:
Everything that happened on the show, while it looks natural, was laid out very scientifically, with foods and equipment diagrammed by Paul so all Julia had to do was reach for them. Julia brought her own table service for the presentation bit at the end.
The episode included in the French Chef cookbook, however, is Episode Nineteen, Season Seven, because for a time it was thought that the first episode was lost. The second version originally aired on February 10, 1971. While I couldn’t find it on YouTube, it is available on DVD and Tubi.
What’s interesting about watching the two shows back to back is seeing how differently the same recipe was presented almost ten years apart. Julia’s debut, while it gets the job done and Julia comes across very well, looked experimental, which it was, and the set is much more closed in. The later episode, obviously, was in color, and Julia seemed much more relaxed, easily showing various tweaks to the Bourguignon recipe such as adding a cut-up tomato instead of tomato paste, and adding a pork rind to the pot before it was put in the oven. There’s almost too much information to take in with the later episode, whereas in the earlier one, Julia seems relieved to have made it through.
One of the elements that I’ve always loved about The French Chef is that Julia cooked on an electric stove, something that would never happen on a cooking show nowadays. We might see a convection burner, but never, ever an electric stove, as it’s not ideal when marks have to be met within certain time periods, and a host can’t be holding pots in the air waiting for burners to cool down. Julia didn’t seem to do that anyway; if something was finished cooking she just moved it.
The reason I’m mentioning this is that while I’ve cooked on gas stoves and cooktops, as a two-decade apartment-dweller I’ve always had electric stoves, so seeing Julia cook on electric just makes her more relateable. And as my mom always says, “If you can cook on an electric stove, you can cook anywhere.”
And with that, on to Julia’s Boeuf Bourguignon. Reading through the recipe made the process look a wee bit daunting, especially after seeing the army of pots and pans Julia has lined up in the Season Seven episode. I was pretty sure I didn’t have that many, or maybe I did? There was a lot of pulling out and pouring back in and adding to and putting aside and reheating.
After a few scans of the recipe, though, I figured I could plan things out as if I were blocking a play. I could use a certain pan here, and have a certain bowl on standby, putting something else in a certain spot waiting to be used and clearing out what I didn’t need anymore. One step at a time.
The first step, of course, was to gather my ingredients, which, amazingly, mostly fit on my big cutting board.
Next was to preheat the oven to 325 Fahrenheit and chop the bacon into what Julia called lardons, which were blanched to get rid of the excess salt, browned, and then added to the beef when the time came to put the stew in the oven.
I kinda wondered how necessary these steps were, because who doesn’t like bacon or bacon flavor? But as Julia said, the bacon would be all one tasted if it wasn’t blanched first, so I decided to trust Julia and go with it.
Browning the beef came next, and first came the all-important drying. As Julia, and for that matter everyone else, say, meat needs to be dry before browning or all it does is steam. I liked that Julia used a nonstick skillet to brown her beef in both episodes, because as any of us who have used nonsticks know, these pots can’t be heated to very high temperatures, so browning is a longer process. It’s not impossible, though. However, I have a skillet that is particularly good for browning meat, so I used that.
Voilá. This skillet is really good for toasting burger buns, too.
Anyway, on to the next steps, which were: Deglazing the skillet with some wine, adding it and the beef to a Dutch oven with more wine and beef broth, then popping everything in the nice, warm oven for the next two hours. Phew.
That didn’t mean I got to kick back and relax, though. While the Bourguignon bubbled away in the oven, I set about working on the onions and mushrooms. This was pretty simple: Blanch the onions, peel them, and braise them in butter, salt, and pepper, reserving the cooking liquid.
Meanwhile, the mushrooms got quartered and lightly sauteed, but I forgot to take an “After” photo.
It would seem when the stew came out, I’d add the mushrooms and onions and be done with it, right? Au contraire. It was time to make the sauce, and after the obligatory fat-skimming session came a butter and flour paste, which, admittedly, looked a little like buttercream frosting.
While I had visions of plunking the whole mass into the beef broth and watching it turn into a matzo ball sans matzo, not that I would ever do that, Julia instructs us cooks to add some of the broth to it and whisk until smooth.
Long story short, after thickening the broth and adding the beef, mushrooms, and onions back in, we were finally in business. Yeah. Five hours from start to finish. Julia suggested serving the Bourguignon with mashed potatoes, noodles or rice, and I decided to go with noodles.
However, I think if I were to do anything differently next time, I’d skip the noodles and serve it with mashed potatoes because the noodles compete too much. I’d also either buy a whole chuck roast and cut it up, or if I can only find stew beef, dial the cooking time down to an hour and a half or so and brown it a little less, because the beef was slightly tough on the outside and tender on the inside. It doesn’t need a ton of cooking time.
In other words, the beef was like the ideal man, but I digress. 😉 Seriously, though, bigger is better when it comes to the beef in this recipe.
Other than that, the onions were nice and sweet, the broth was fantastic, aromatic and rich. Boeuf Borguignon is one of Julia’s signature recipes for a reason, and now I see why.
Bon Appetit!
Another post is coming up on Saturday. Hope you all have enjoyed this, and have a good one…
The French Chef Cookbook, The French Chef, Volume One (DVD) and The French Chef, Volume 2 (DVD) are available to own from Amazon.
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