Beef bourguignon, or, more accurately, how not to make beef bourguignon...

Sorry for the absence folks. Had a business trip to the US where I had planned to not only cover off on the work I had to do, but also talk about food a bit.

Instead, I'm still recovering from the impacted bowel I always seem to get when I digest what passes for food in that forsaken land. There is good food in the USA, but you just happen to pay through the nose for it, and no matter what you pay, getting a good serve of vegetables, or bread without gallons for corn syrup, is nigh impossible.

Vancouver, which I also visited, is a foodie heaven, however. Awesome seafood, an understanding that vegetables are important, and a mighty fine understanding of how to make a martini.

But, long story short, I'm back. Now to try and get the hang of cooking for myself again after a week and a half of being waited on and making nothing more strenuous than black coffee.

So, let's drift back in time to a dinner party I hosted a little while ago, for a lesson in how far you can push a recipe and still make it work.

Beef in Red Wine, with boiled new potatoes

Normally I like to go through ingredients and do the whole nine yards recipe thing, but the truth is... I really consider this dish a pretty serious failure. So, basically, I'm not even going to suggest you cook it. But it's an interesting and illustrative failure, at least.

Beef bourguignon, which this is a bastardised version of, is a classic dinner party dish. Rich, hearty, and really easy to make ahead of time. In fact, many recipes call for just that - make it the night before, let the flavours intensify overnight, then reheat to the tasty amazement of your guests. The problem with that is simple - who has time to cook a meal that technically should be on the go for hours, put it aside for the next night, then make something so you can eat there and then? It's a time intensive dish, and like a lot of city dwellers, time's a serious commodity for me.

That said, there are some handy shortcuts, and I've made this dish before in about an hour, and it's super good. But when you're already shortcutting a recipe, the last thing you want to be doing is cutting any more corners, and that's where my last Beef and Red Wine really fell down.

The people I was cooking this for presented a range of interesting challenges, not the least of which was a serious dairy allergy. Another guest doesn't dig on pig (I know, it's crazy, but she's a lovely person), and I do believe there was even some gluten issues at hand.

The thing about cooking is that it's effectively science for your mouth. Any really good dish is a series of chemical and organic reactions, as well as complex interactions of mouth feel and flavour; messing about with any facet of a dish often has disastrous consequences. I know this. I knew it then, too, but I was so stuck with the idea of presenting a ballsy beef bourguignon, and cooking it in front of my guests (because, for me, cooking is as much about being seen to prepare good food as it is presenting that good food - it's a performance thing) that I just plowed ahead, and figured I could easily cook a dish that was already flaunting the recipe, and go ahead and remove butter, bacon, and flour.

Rookie. Fucking. Mistake.

Sure, it looks okay. But that's just what it wants you to think. Look closer, and the rich-seeming sauce is missing that all important shimmer of butter. That sauce is also being soaked up by the beef, because it's not been thickened by the flour.

And, when you taste it, it's lacking anything like the body it should have. Oh, bacon, why dids't I forsake thou?!

Because I'm an idiot, that's why!

The annoying thing is that this is dish I can really cook - and in just an hour or so. But it needs those important ingredients. The butter adds richness, a silky mouthfeel, and thickens the sauce. The flour should coat the meat when it's first browned, which transfers a magic amount to the pan, while also adding further thickness when the meat's added again later in the dish, not to mention changing the consistency of that meat. And the bacon - it's bacon! Rich, smoky bacon.

There's simply no stock rich enough, no demi glace ballsy enough (as Bourdain would put it), to make up for not having those important elements. What I produced was a flat, flavourless dish that if you got it in a restaurant, you'd send back to the kitchen with a sternly worded letter to the chef.

Of course, all this whining aside, the final irony is, well, kind of delicious. Everyone seemed to enjoy it, but one of my guests went back for seconds and thirds. He told me it was one of the tastiest things I'd ever cooked for him.

Then again, this is the guy who's allergic to dairy - what would he know*?!

* Actually, quite a lot, as he's a cook I quite respect in his own right. But nonetheless...

Just a quick observation...

It goes without saying, that good spelling and grammar are important. But it's doubly important when you are listing food ingredients.

Now, I admit - I don't really give accurate measurements for my dishes. Mostly because I don't cook with accurate measurements, and much rather the 'cook by feel and taste' approach. But, if I were making something where measures are vitally important, they'd be here.

And that's not something you want to make a mess with. If you look up a recipe here and I've transposed a few digits, you'll be suitably cross. Like if I recommended putting, say, 23 teaspoons of chilli powder in a dish, you might well grow to hate me (once you wake from your coma).

But another area where things can go horribly wrong - as I'll soon illustrate - is in the unfortunate turn of phrase you may end up with by leaving an important word out. Not only can this be clumsy and make a recipe unclear and hard to follow, it too can lead to unfortunate cooking decisions.

Case in point: I point you to this otherwise fine-looking recipe for Stuffed Spatchcock, from the ABC's The Cook and The Chef. I think this will definitely inspire a recipe of my own, but I do hope that the recipe doesn't actually call for...

knob butter

But maybe it does! Perhaps Maggie Beer, delightfully foodie-type that she is, likes a bit of, well... sauciness in her cooking. For all I know, knob butter adds a silky finish, as it were, to the sauce that accompanies the dish. Or she's just an inveterate knob-butter-gobbler*.

Who can say.

Well, I can say one thing - be very careful when transcribing your recipes.

* Did I just call Maggie Beer a knob-gobbler? I think I did. Oops. Expect litigation and firebombs made from tasty food any day now.

What's in the box?

I've mentioned our little local food collective, called Feedbag, a few times, and since this weekend just past was Feedbag day, it seemed a good opportunity to share the awesomeness.

There's some onion and potato from a previous Feedbag run, but otherwise, that's everything we received on Saturday. Impressive, huh? It's effectively three boxes of awesome produce bought direct from Flemington markets at ohmigod o'clock. The brave souls who do the run are starting to get known out there, and are even getting some stuff discounted - remember, there are about a dozen other people in the co-op, so we get a lot of food.

Some of the market guys even thought the two girls who do most of the shopping were running a restaurant.

Anyhoo, here's the complete list of stuff:

Vintage Gouda
Dutch cream potatoes
Kipfler potatoes
Gold sweet potatoes
Button mushrooms
Broccoli
Limes
Mandarins
Baby cos lettuce
Daikon radishes
Yellow capsicum
Baby eggplant

Brown onions

Single clove garlic
Rhubarb
Grape tomatoes
Baby squash
Chinese cabbage (wombok)
Granny smith apples
Fuji apples
Diced goat
Carrots
Oyster blade steak

Spatchcck
Fresh coriander
Fresh mint
Fresh basil
Persian dried figs
Cardamom pods
White peppercorns
Spice mix for goat

See? Huge amounts of goodness, and all for only $50. It's more than enough to last the fortnight between shops, lasts wonderfully long (remember, this is literally market fresh, so it's not sitting in a cool room at a Woolies or something), and is a serious cooking inspiration. I find the surprise ingredients really pushes my cooking in interesting directions.

Like the spatchcock...

... and the figs, for instance.

Not stuff I'd normally consider purchasing or cooking with, but now in my kitchen and in need of a worthy cooking effort.

Feedbag - we hearts it, precious.

French Onion Soup

It's getting colder, and it's certainly been a wet week or two in Sydney. In other words, it's perfect weather for a nice hearty soup.

One of the things I love about a good soup is how easy they are - chop up your ingredients, saute a bit in oil or butter, add stock and herbs, and then let simmer away for however long you've got. Soup can be as structured or as freeform as your ingredients allow - it's a real wonder meal.

That said, there are some classics that really do deserve a bit more attention, and French Onion Soup is one of them.

Interestingly, for a lot of people the term 'french onion' was likely first associated with heavily creamed dips and Jatz crackers. As a kid, I devoured entire bowls of french onion dip at parties and BBQs. When my tastes started to broaden, and I moved out of home, I encountered the real thing. This taught me two important lessons:

1. French onion dip is a crime against food and likely humanity as well.

2. For true disdain and cranky service, you can't go past a pissed off Frenchman.

It was... some time in the early nineties, and the restaurant in question was a converted cellar in a Sydney laneway, called Le Guillotine. Sounds cheesy, yeah, but trust me, this place made a French Onion Soup that you'd gladly form a revolutionary government for. Most of the staff were either French or pretending, and man... they hated anyone who interrupted their busy Gaulish habits. You know - smoking, wearing berets, and wearing onions instead of cooking them.

But that soup stuck with me, and when I was recently staring at the large amount of onions in our pantry, it seemed the kind of thing that an onion would be proud to be a part of.

French Onion Soup

In the classic French style this is a dish that started out as simple peasant fare, but has now become more of a dinner party staple. Say to someone that you're cooking up a pot of French Onion Soup and they're likely to go "Wow, that's cool" instead of "You poor peasant sod." But that's the genesis of this dish - in many regions of France onions are plentiful, grow all year round, and are easy to come by.

It is, in effect, the inland version of bouillabaisse, though far easier to cook, at least.

ingredients

Eight medium onions

Goose fat

Beef stock

Sprig of Thyme

Sprig of Flat Parsley

Bay leaves

Dry white wine

Salt and pepper

Brown sugar

Crusty bread

Gruyere cheese

That's a lot of onions.

The first step is to get chopping those onions up. You'll want to make sure you've got a good sharp knife on hand, too - it'll not only make that much work a lot easier, but the onions need to be sliced as regularly as possible, so that it cooks as evenly as possible. After skinning the onions, I chopped each in half, then sliced away, producing one hell of a mound of onion, and making myself cry like a two-time Oscar-winner.

Once sliced up, add two large scoops of goose fat to a heavy bottomed sauce pan, introduce a medium heat, and toss in the onions. Toss the pan a couple of times, cover, let sit for about ten minutes. This essentially steams and softens the onions for the next phase - caramelising.

This is where you need to be a bit careful. The onions will need constant attention to stop them from starting to overcook; you'll be stirring every few minutes for about fifteen to twenty minutes. It's slightly more intensive than making a good risotto, but soon you'll see the mass onions reduced by about half, a lovely thick yet clear fluid start to build up in the pan, and the onions should be lovely and golden, and smell ever so sweetly.

Add a dash of wine to deglaze the pan, stirring vigorously to make sure you scrape all the tasty stuff up and into the dish itself. Then pour in the stock, and add the herbs and salt & pepper to taste. Turn up the heat to get a good boil, then reduce to simmer, covered, for about ten minutes.

When that time's up, uncover, add a teaspoon of brown sugar, and keep simmering uncovered for about a quarter of an hour. Technically, this is a dish that deserves a lot of time, but it can be made fast with a few tricks - that's where the brown sugar comes in, as it adds a further caramel texture. It's a cheat, but I want tasty food and time to enjoy it, dammit!

After this time you should have a lovely gold brown broth, and the attention of any partners within smelling range. Take off the heat and set aside - time for some cheesy toast!

Slice roughly centimeter thick chunks of bread - I used a fresh baguette - and sprinkle on some grated gruyere before placing under the griller. Technically, you should place the bread on the bowls of soup, sprinkle the cheese, and toast the whole lot, but I don't have oven proof bowls, and this is again a good shortcut. When the cheese is melted and just starting to brown, add soup to bowls, and top with the bread. Sprinkle a bit of spare gruyere into the soup itself, add cracked pepper, and you're done.

And oh... Gods... the tasty.

There's almost more solid onion in this than liquid, but it's rich and smooth without any bite. The goose fat adds a delicious silkiness to the soup, too, one that you just can't replicate with olive oil or butter, which is what most recipes call for. Really... you want the fat.

The toasted bread and gruyere adds great mouthfeel and flavour complexity, too. It's such a heartwarming meal, too - you just can't feel down enjoying something like this. And the brown sugar cheat works a charm - the caramel complexity of the dish is just about perfect.

In future I'll be keen to add some more authentic embellishments, like preparing my own veal stock beforehand, and investing in some properly rustic (and ovenproof) ramekins for an even better plating experience. But even as it stands, this is a keeper.