Cooking With the French Chef: Steaks And Hamburgers

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.

Beef. It’s what’s for dinner. If that phrase brings up a certain series of commercials from the 1990s and 2000s , not to mention a certain sprightly Copland piece, I heartily apologize. Kind of. 😉

Anyway, we all know the French like their steaks, but hamburgers? Sacre bleu! According to Julia, though, the French DO eat hamburgers. Fancy French hamburgers.

Before we go any further, here’s the relevant episode, which originally aired on August 27, 1963, the twenty-seventh episode of Season One.

Gee, so many things happen in this episode, among them the phone ringing and an airplane flying over, and Julia doesn’t even flinch. That’s some serious professionalism.

So yeah. French hamburgers, or Hamburgers a la Francaise. Let’s start with our ingredients.

One of the nice things about this recipe was the quick prep, and these burgers got a mixture of egg, salt, pepper, dried thyme, and Julia’s favorite shallots, the latter of which were sauteed in butter and allowed to cool.

Here’s my thing with meatballs, meatloaf, or anything that’s vaguely meatball-like: I always mix my herbs and other ingredients before mixing the meat in, because it guarantees a light, fluffy meatball. I got the idea from Giada de Laurentiis and it works every time.

The next steps were pretty straightforward. The patties were cooked in butter and then got drizzled with a pan gravy, and meanwhile, on the other end of the stove, egg noodles bubbled away.

The one place where I deviated from Julia’s recipe was her bone marrow gravy, because I don’t know where I’d find any other beef marrow besides the neck bones I use to make beef stock.

It would have been fun, because Julia’s gravy was a dramatic affair, with her splitting a beef bone with a giant cleaver, but again, I didn’t feel equal to that, and anyway, I don’t have a cleaver, so I made a pan gravy with mixed mushrooms.

Yeah, this is basically a Salisbury steak, or whatever Salisbury steak would be called in French, except for the nice, earthy flavor of thyme. Very, very tasty and very, very rich. The onions were cooked in butter. The burgers were cooked in butter. The gravy had butter in it. The noodles were buttered.

Eeeek. So. Much. Butter.

A few days later we had the second recipe, Sauteed Steak, Henry IV-style. Here are the ingredients, with the shallots coming back for a return engagement.

Also in the lineup was this delicious bottle of Marsala wine. Seriously, this stuff is good.

Once again, the prep was quick. Mince the shallots, take the stems off the Portabellos and scrape off the gills.

The mushrooms would go in the broiler and get good and roasted. Yum!

In the meantime, I started on the Bearnaise sauce. Here are the ingredients, but I won’t go into the process because Julia devotes a whole episode to Bearnaise and Hollandaise, and they deserve their own post.

And what of our steak? I used a very nice flank steak from Costco, cut it into four equal pieces, and then cooked it in a mixture of butter and Chosen avocado oil.

More butter…

When this steak came together, it really came together. First, the toasted bread, then one of the steaks, then a Portabello, and finally, that decadent Bearnaise sauce. Voílá.

And how did it taste? Eye-rollingly, eye-flutteringly incredible. The Bearnaise, the flank steak, the shallots cooked in a Marsala reduction, that meaty Portabello. I couldn’t resist taking a photo of all three layers in one glorious bite.

Henry IV was the clear winner here. I don’t know how well that Bearnaise will keep, and the odds are excellent that it’s better on the first day, but this meal is definitely coming back.

Mmmmm…beef.

A new Club 15 post comes up tomorrow. Thanks for reading, all, and I hope you’re having a great weekend…

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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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