Meat that has lots of collagen in it starts off tough as heck—it tends to come from the strongest parts of an animal's body—but, as it cooks, it very slowly transforms into meltingly soft and moist gelatin. It's that gelatin that makes the meat still seem moist even after the muscle fibers have inevitably dried out from long cooking. Try stewing a lean, tender cut of beef, like filet mignon, for a couple of hours and you'll end up with scraps of meat that would compete with jerky in toughness and dryness.
A boneless chuck roll, which comes from the cow's incredibly strong shoulder, is perfect for stewing, and it tends to be pretty cheap, so it's what I call for here. You have other options, though, so feel free to peruse my list of top stewing beef cuts for more ideas. To prep the beef, most recipes tell you to dice it into small pieces first, then brown them on all sides.
That browning helps develop flavor, but it also dries out the surface of the beef cubes. Even after they've spent a couple of hours submerged in stewing liquids, you can still detect the toughness of their browned exteriors.
To mitigate this, we take a slightly different approach with our stews on Serious Eats. We start by slicing the beef into about three large steaks or slabs, and then we brown only the two largest sides of each. Only after the beef is browned do we cut it up into stew-size cubes. How big is stew size? Well, for some folks, it's about an inch. Problem there is that, while one-inch cubes will give you spoon-size bites, they'll also dry out a lot faster than larger pieces.
We want moist and tender meat, so we size our cubes up to somewhere between one and a half and two inches. The final stew will have meat that may require being cut with a knife or, more likely, the side of your fork, if your stew is cooked right , but we're okay with that. A lot of beef stew recipes, including ones for boeuf Bourguignon, say that for the best flavor, you should marinate the beef first.
I've been running marination tests with beef stews for the past couple of weeks, and I haven't found this advice to be true. Marinades don't actually penetrate deeply into meat, getting not much further than the first couple of millimeters in from the surface, even after many hours. That shallow penetration is enough to make a marinade worthwhile in quicker-cooking applications, like when grilling meats.
It even helps the chicken in my coq au vin recipe , in which the breast meat is braised quickly, just long enough to cook it through. But with stew, the meat spends enough time in the pot with the stewing liquid that it ends up taking on as much flavor as meat that was marinated first. In none of my tests could I tell a difference between beef that had been marinated in red wine for as much as 24 hours and beef that first encountered the wine in the Dutch oven.
Once the beef is browned, the next step is to brown the aromatics. A lot of stews simplify this by having you brown the diced vegetables you'll be serving, then cook them in the stew. This is, to be sure, the easiest way to do it, but the price you pay is overcooked vegetables with little flavor left to them because it's all come out into the stewing liquid.
A better way: Brown large pieces of aromatic vegetables, like halved carrots, onions, and crushed cloves of garlic, and cook those in the stew along with an herb bundle tied together with cooking twine. Later, when those vegetables are verging on mush, just pluck them out and replace them with a fresh set of diced ones that you'll actually be serving, which I'll explain below. In my recipe, once the large aromatics are browned, I deglaze the pot with a splash of brandy.
That's an optional ingredient—use it if you have it, but don't skip the recipe if you don't. The flavor gain is subtle, not nearly reaching deal-breaker status.
For the other liquids, I use a small amount of chicken stock with unflavored gelatin bloomed in it, and plenty of dry red wine. A small dose each of both fish sauce and soy sauce adds some complexity and deeper savoriness, but rest assured, you won't taste them. One does not casually work beef bourguignon into their schedule; no, this is the sort of cooking weekends are planned around. And boy, is it worth it.
Anthony Bourdain calls it the perfect party dish. To make beef bourguignon at home, you soak a relatively inexpensive cut of beef, the shoulder, in red wine, and then sear and simmer it with carrots, onions, celery, and herbs. Can bacon replace salt pork? And how pricey a wine do you need to use? Sounds manageable. There is nothing difficult about its preparation, but there are no shortcuts.
That much we know. Everything else, it seems, is up for grabs. While, like most stews, this will work with almost all slow-cooking cuts, chefs have their own particular preferences. A good well-marbled chuck not always the case with supermarket versions does the job, and the more gelatine-rich shin and heel are even better, but my own favourite is the cheek, which seems to offer the best balance between meat and melt.
Some testers agree, but my problem with it is that, far from tenderising the meat, it seems oddly to have dried it out slightly. Whether or not the wine is actually to blame, the meat should have plenty of time to absorb its flavour in the oven, rendering such a step pointless. This certainly works, but trotters are not always easy for everyone to get hold of. One tester suggests that the more commonly available oxtail might do the same job even better is a good one. You can leave it on the bone if you like, although I prefer to strip it off after cooking so the meat is more evenly distributed.
Boeuf bourguignon almost always contains cured pork, too — after all, this is a French recipe, and two meats are better than one. If you have access to salt pork, you may wish to poach it briefly before use to tame its aggressive salinity, as Olney does. The traditional Burgundian garnish of button mushrooms and miniature onions ought to be non-negotiable, preferably sauteed until golden in the fat from the bacon, as Eastwood, Olney, Hopkinson and Bareham suggest.
In this way, they absorb some of its savoury richness. Much easier.
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