Clara's Cooking | Easy Beef Bourguignon Recipe

Easy Beef Bourguignon Recipe

There are several versions of this recipe. If you have the time, it’s totally worth it to add bacon and use bacon fat to cook the vegetables. If you want a fairly quick prep time with still a lot of flavor, try my recipe! This is one of our all time favorite recipes. Even if you make a mistake, as long as you have the red wine and slow cooking process (which allows the beef to easily fall apart with a fork), you can’t go wrong.

Ingredients:

Crock Pot or slow cooker

2 medium potatoes, chopped into large pieces for stew (into 8 pieces per potato)

1.5-2 cups diagonally sliced carrots

1/2 yellow onion, finely chopped

6oz frozen pearl onions 

1 TBSP minced garlic

1 cup sliced white button mushrooms

1 to 1.5lb beef cut for stew

1 cup red wine (I like any pinot noir)

1 TBSP tomato paste

12oz chicken or vegetable broth

1 bay leaf

2-3 sprigs of thyme

Salt

Fresh ground black pepper

Vegetable Oil

Directions:

1. Set slow cooker to LOW.

2. In a medium-large pan, brown garlic in oil. Cook yellow onion until silvery.

3. Add potatoes, carrots, and pearl onions. Cook until slightly softened.

(To prepare the meat:)

4. Pat beef dry, season with salt and pepper. 

5. Heat a separate pan to medium high. Add vegetable oil.

6. Sear beef a few minutes on each side. 

7. Set pan aside, but DO NOT clean pan. (see below)

8. Add beef and vegetable mix to slow cooker. 

9. Add tomato paste, broth, and 3/4 red wine to slow cooker. (set 1/4 of red wine aside)

10. Add bay leaf, thyme, salt, and pepper to slow cooker. Cook stew for 6 to 8 hours on LOW (or 4-6 hours on high).

While the stew is cooking:

11. Add oil to the pan where you had seared the beef earlier. 

12. Add mushrooms one layer at a time. Stir to mix them with the beef flavoring leftover in the pan.

13. Cook mushrooms until browned, being careful not to crowd the mushrooms (they need space and patience to brown properly).

14. Add 1/4 cup red wine to cooked mushrooms and allow to cook, reducing fluid about 50%.

15. Pour pan ingredients to slow cooker when stew has 20-30 minutes left of cooking time.

16. Serve alone or with a slice of French bread.

Tips: This is the kind of dish that tastes AMAZING the following day, because all the flavors have had time to merge together. You could make this for a dinner party of holiday celebration a day in advance, as the stew reheats well!

To make Whole30 compliant, make sure the vegetable broth does not contain any restricted ingredients. Also, you'll need to eliminate the wine, which unfortunately makes a HUGE difference, turning this recipe into a regular beef stew. It's still delicious, but I would add more mushrooms in this case to add complexity to the flavors.

Enjoy!

love + light,

Clara