Belgian beef stew
Tonight’s dish was a Belgian beer-based stew called Carbonnade Flamande. I adore all things Belgian and this was a spectacular dish. We used Daniel Boulud’s recipe in the excellent book Braise, which involved beef shoulder, onions, bacon, Belgian Trappist abbey beer (we used Chimay), a little mustard and orange marmalade, and oddly enough crumbled gingerbread. The gingerbread dissolved entirely during the 2 hours plus in the oven and was a flavoring agent. Usually carbonnade is a stew, with the beef cut up into chunks but we braised one big chunk of beef instead and cut it up later. The sauce was a blend of creme fraiche and mustard. The whole sauce was stellar, very medieval in character with a sweet and sour note from the beer and various spices. It felt like an old recipe and it is – carbonnade flamande is something the monks in the Trappist abbeys eat, the recipe goes back hundreds of years.
Our execution of this meal had two minor flaws: one the meat was a little dry in the center. We could have pulled it out maybe twenty minutes earlier and it would have been perfect. And the pie crust was a little tough, but I know why that happened too – excessive kneading of the dough beforehand.
Pommes Puree
This whole meal’s preparation took probably an hour’s work of chopping and browning the meat and so forth, and another few hours of waiting while it cooked. This was not counting the time spent making the gingerbread, but that was as an ingredient and conveniently gave us a dessert.
A good mise en place, setting up everything beforehand with all the ingredients measured out in little dishes, and cleaning as you go, make these sort of operations a pleasure. This was a lot of work but a great deal of fun.
