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...

Roast beef on a bed of bok-choy, with kipflers, peas and tomato

I'm not really one for formal recipes most of the time. I like to look at what's in the fridge or in the pantry and work from there; plus, I like the challenge of making something that looks and tastes good from relatively first principles.

Of course, sometimes this doesn't quite work out - some things that sound great in your head don't quite work on the plate (or palette). Similarly, it can be really easy to overdo a dish or the amount of ingredients when you start thinking that you should start using a certain ingredient (like when it's been sitting there for a while and you want to use it before it collapses under its own entropic field).

My roast beef attempt last night was pretty much a success, but also - I think - one ingredient too far...

Roast beef on a bed of bok-choy, with kipflers, peas and tomato

Pretty much everything here is care of the food co-op, including the excellent slab of beef. In fact, this dish is pretty much inspired by a fellow Feedbagger (our delightful name for our co-op), who used a similar combination a few nights ago to very good effect. She went for a sweet sauce, though, while I was feeling like something a bit more savoury.

ingredients

Slab (it's a metric measurement) of grass fed sirloin

Three Kipfler potatoes

Goose fat

Dijon mustard

Two bunches of bok-choy

Peas

Cherry roma tomatoes

Coriander

Sea salt

Pre heat the oven to around 200 degrees celsius, or whatever's good for roasting - so many inner city ovens in rental houses are so wildly different in their heating that real measurement's a quaint whimsy rather than a hard rule. Unless you're clever and have an oven thermometer.

I'm not that clever.

While the oven's warming up, work on the slab and the 'taters. Arrange them on the baking tray, with the meat resting on a raised grill or similar, for even roasting. Use a basting brush to coat the meat and veg with a liberal coating of goose fat (ah, goose fat... I'll wax lyrical about you in a later post!), then brush on a good coat of dijon mustard to the upper surface of the beef. Sprinkle it all with some salt and pepper, and whack in the oven.

A piece of meat that size should take about a half hour to 45 minutes to cook to medium rare, and you'll also want to give it some time to rest once you remove it from the oven, so now's a good time to refill that glass of wine and check Facebook. Alternatively, it's a good chance to consider why you need to rest meat.

When you apply heat to steak or large fillets like this one, it contracts. It's a muscle, after all, and as the muscle squeezes itself, it squeezes all the tasty juices into the center of the cut. You can perfectly cook a steak, but if you serve it straight off the pan it'll be less than stellar. One cut will see all those juices flooding the plate, and the meat's colour will be quite uneven.

As a rule of thumb, you should rest meat cooked in a pan for as long as you cooked it. With a roast, like this, something like ten minutes will suffice for those juices to have suffused the entire cut. It'll be more tender, tastier, and look a lot better.

So, having pondered the importance of rest, you can now prep the rest of the meal.

Remove the bok-choy leaves from their stalk, wash, and place in a steamer (or a collander, if you're kind of half-arsed about having the right tools). Set a pot of salted water boiling, and then switch off your brain while you're shelling peas. Once you've got a good handful, set aside, and chop up some baby romas quite finely, and add some similarly chopped coriander.

You can plate the tomato right away, making a circle around the edge of the plate. Check the meat, and either guess it's done or be fancy and stick it with a thermometer: 60 degrees in the center means medium rare - the only way to eat good meat. Rest the meat in foil or in a warmed bowl, leave the potatoes in the turned off oven to stay warm, and get to steaming your bok-choy.

You want the bok-choy just wilting, when the leaves no longer look dry and unappetising. Create a mound of bok-choy in the center of the plate, then add the peas to the boiling water you've just used for steaming. Get the potatoes out, chop them into halves or thirds, and arrange around the bok-choy. Uncover the meat, slice thickly, and carefully place the slices on the bok-choy, before sprinkling some sea salt over the tomatoes and potato. Finally, spoon the peas over the meat, letting them fall where they may.

Serve to a salivating partner, and ponder your greatness.

Now, this was quite good if I do say so myself, but I regret including the potatoes. The kipflers are great, and tasted wonderful, but they really didn't add anything to the dish, and I think they actually made it a touch too much - and I'm not pleased with their aesthetic impact, either. I think this would have looked much more appetising without them, leaving the bold colours of the greens, the meat, and the tomato to speak for themselves.

That said, my partner devoured it no time, with a slight look of possibly wanting a bit more. So who am I to judge?

And the meat was perfect. Annoyingly, it was cut in such a way that a seam of connective tissue ran right down the center, but otherwise it was tender and juicy, and the mustard crust was a simply and very tasty addition that did away with the need for a sauce to add interest. The tomatoes with sea salt were fresh and tasty, and the steamed but still crunchy bok-choy complemented the meat superbly.

Done hard, played strong.