Barefoot Contessa Ina Garten Makes an Easy Beef Bourguignon Recipe in Honor of Julia Child
Ina Garten has found the perfect way to honor famous chef Julia Child, with a delicious beef Bourguignon recipe. The Barefoot Contessa star’s beef Bourguignon has all the flavor of the classic French dish, but is made in a fraction of the time.
Ina Garten honors Julia Child with a classic French recipe
Garten took to Instagram to share her beef Bourguignon recipe and had the perfect reason to make it.
She captioned a photo of the hearty stew: “This weekend is the Hamptons Film Festival and I’m so excited to see JULIA, the documentary about Julia Child by my friends Betsy West and Julie Cohen. In Julia’s honor, I made Beef Bourguignon for dinner tonight.”
“My version doesn’t cook for the usual four hours so you’ll be able to make dinner and get to the movies on time!,” she added.
Garten shared her love for the unfussy dish
Traditional beef Bourguignon can be a time-consuming recipe to make, but Garten has nailed down making the comfort food recipe with far less cooking time. “The first thing I’m going to make is beef Bourguignon, which is really just beef stew with red wine,” she explained on an episode of Barefoot Contessa.
“I think Americans think of French food as this sort of fancy, pinkies-up kind of thing,” she noted. “And I love the really traditional recipes that are real country food.”
Garten started by cooking bacon in oil, then removed it with a slotted spoon. She cut beef chuck into cubes and dried it with paper towels, then seasoned the meat with salt and pepper and browned the cubes in a pan. Once browned, she removed the meat.
“This is a really traditional French recipe and I just think it’s a much easier way to make it. It takes much less time,” Garten noted. “But it’s wonderful for entertaining because you’ve got the meat and the vegetables and everything all together in the pot. And if you make it a day or two in advance, all the flavors just get better and better.”
Garten shared her easy trick for cooking beef Bourguignon in less time
Garten continued by adding chopped carrots, sliced onions, salt, and pepper to the pot, cooking everything for 10 to 15 minutes, then she offered a pro-tip about when to add garlic. “Very often, recipes call for onions and garlic to go in together but I think the garlic really burns very quickly,” the Barefoot Contessa star explained. “So I tend to do the onions for about 10 or 15 minutes and then the garlic for only the last minute. And then you get all the flavor of the garlic and no burning.”
She added cognac and then, “the fun part” — she lit a match and held it quickly over the pan. “What the flame does is it burns off all the alcohol but leaves a gorgeous flavor of cognac,” Garten explained. She added the meat, bacon, and juices back into the pan, as well as a bottle of “good red wine,” beef broth, tomato paste, and fresh thyme.
The Barefoot Contessa star shared her easy time-saving tip for the French dish. “This is the other novel thing about this recipe,” she explained. “Instead of cooking it on top of the stove, as most beef Bourguignon is … I discovered that if I cooked it at 250 degrees in the oven for an hour and 15 minutes instead of like two and a half hours … it comes out perfectly done.”
After removing the pot from the oven, Garten thickened the sauce and added sauteed mushrooms and frozen onions, then simmered the hearty dish for another 15 minutes before serving.
The full recipe is available on the Food Network website.
