The Happy Home Cook: Beef Bourguignon

The Happy Home Cook features cherished recipes of Filipino dishes from well-known foodies and contributors. If you have a recipe that you are proud of and would like to share, please send it along with a photo of the dish, your two-sentence bio and your picture to submissions@positivelyfilipino.com.

Beef Bourguignon, served with pasta (Photo by Veronique Pagnier)

This is one of my favorite recipes. I like to fix this for a large crowd. I can prepare it ahead of time and warm it up before the guests arrive. I serve it with rice, salad, and perhaps a ham or salmon as well.  The recipe below serves 6 or so, and when I fix for a larger group, I have to triple the recipe.

Instead of sirloin, I've used the stewing beef cut into chunks from Costco, and as long as I use a well-covered casserole oven pan, it turns out tender and just as good as sirloin.

Instead of butter, I've used olive oil, and it turns out fine.

My recipe for beef bourguignon uses a Secret Ingredient.  Email me at cbrainard@aol.com if you are seriously following my recipe. Otherwise, the recipe works without my Secret Ingredient. (My SI, gives it a bit of oomph!)

Ingredients

3 lbs. sirloin, cut 2-in cubes
1 1/2 cups burgundy wine
2 tbsp brandy
2 tbsp salad oil
1 tsp salt
1/2 tsp thyme
1 bay leaf
6 tbsp butter
2 crushed garlic cloves
2 large onions, chopped
1 carrot, chopped
4 rounded tbsp flour
1 tbsp tomato paste
1 cup beef broth
1 1/2 cups tiny white onions
3/4 lb mushroom caps
Secret ingredient- I am not sure the French will forgive me if they know what my secret ingredient is, so if you're seriously using my recipe,  email me cbrainard@aol.com for this.

Procedure

The author, serving up Beef Bourguignon

Marinate beef overnight in wine, brandy, oil, salt, pepper, thyme, and bay leaf. Drain, reserve marinade. Pat meat dry. Brown meat quickly in 2 tbsp butter. Remove meat to casserole dish and saute garlic, onions, and carrots until lightly browned. Blend flour and tomato paste. Add marinade and beef broth. Stir to boil. Pour mixture over meat. Cover and cook at 350 degrees for 2 1/2 hours. Heat 2 tbsp butter in skillet. Saute white onions until golden brown. Remove. Add mushroom caps and saute for 2 minutes. Place onions and mushrooms on top of casserole and bake for 10 minutes. Cecilia adds her Secret Ingredient, to taste, perhaps 1 tbsp.

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Cecilia Manguerra Brainard

Cecilia Manguerra Brainard is the author and editor of 21 books. The Philippine edition of her first novel, When the Rainbow Goddess Wept (University of Michigan Press) will be released by the University of Santo Tomas Publishing House in 2019.

PALH (Philippine American Literary House), which she runs, has published Veronica Montes’s collection, Benedicta Takes Wings and Other Stories; Eve La Salle Caram’s novella, Please, San Antonio!; and Linda Ty-Casper’s A River, One-Woman Deep: Stories.

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