chrishansenhome

I am always looking for interesting, simple, and tasty recipes to keep HWMBO and myself well-fed and happy. Thanks to

tim1965, I've found another one.

I have to preface this recipe with the comment that, over years of making stews and soups of various sorts, I have always been cursed by stringy beef. On top of the stove, it never actually gets tender and moist. It's always been stringy and somewhat dry. This dish, however, was tender, moist, and melt-in-your-mouth good. I shall have to try cooking other stews and soups in the oven, rather than on top of the stove.

Here's the ingredient list as Tim gives it:

2 bacon slices—finely diced
2 1/2 pounds chuck roast—boned, cut into 1-inch cubes
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/2 teaspoon black pepper
1 garlic clove—minced
5 cups onion—thinly sliced
3 tablespoons all-purpose flour
2 teaspoons white wine vinegar
1/2 teaspoon sugar
1/2 teaspoon dried thyme
1 can beef broth—(10-1/2-ounce)
1 can light beer—(12-ounce)
1 bay leaf
6 cups egg noodles—cooked (about 1 12-ounce package)

I'll start out by saying that British bacon is not as good for this purpose as US bacon. I think that using pancetta (Italian bacon pieces for cooking) might be better. British bacon seems to be (at least the stuff I bought at Tesco) full of water and not very useful as an ingredient in cooking. I also used regular stew beef rather than the chuck roast. I think they're equivalent in this dish, and the results bear this out. Finally, I didn't have any light beer but I did have a bottle of bitter, so I used that rather than the light beer.

All that having been said, here we go.

Preheat oven to 325 degrees F/Gas Mark 3.

Cook bacon slices in a large Dutch oven over medium-high heat until crisp; remove bacon with a slotted spoon, reserving drippings in pan. Set bacon aside.

Add beef, salt, and pepper to drippings in pan; cook 5 minutes, browning beef well on all sides. Add garlic; cook 30 seconds. Remove beef from pan with a slotted spoon; set aside.

Add sliced onion to pan; cover and cook over medium heat 10 minutes, stirring occasionally. Stir in flour, and cook 2 minutes.

Add vinegar and the next 5 ingredients (vinegar through bay leaf), and bring to a boil.

Return bacon and beef to pan. Cover and bake at 325 degrees for 2 hours or until beef is tender, and discard the bay leaf.

Serve over noodles.

When it's finished, it looks like this:

Now after some thought, I took down my copy of Julia Child's Mastering the Art of French Cooking and looked up the recipe. She calls it Carbonnades à la Flamande, and remarks:

Beer is typical for the Belgian braise, and gives a quite different character to beef than the red wine of the bourguignon. A bit of brown sugar masks the beer's slightly bitter quality, and a little vinegar at the end gives character. Serve this with parsley potatoes or buttered noodles, a green salad, and beer.

Her recipe departs from Tim's in several ways. She only specifies "rendered pork fat" rather than bacon, and allows for "good cooking oil". She uses 4 cloves of garlic, not one. She uses slices of beef, not cubes. And, finally, rather than putting the flour and vinegar into the dish while cooking, she removes the meat and onions to a plate and thickens the sauce that's left with flour dissolved in vinegar, then pours the sauce over the meat/onion mixture and serves it thus.

I may try her method of thickening the sauce the next time I make this. Another departure I might make is putting button mushrooms in with the onions to sauté. There is a distinct lack of texture except for the beef, and I am wondering whether mushrooms might improve the dish.

Good food is important. This is a good dish, and tastes wonderful. I am so grateful to

tim1965 for drawing my attention to it, as well as for all the other features of his blog.