Alsace & the North · Main
Carbonade Flamande
- Intermediate
- 40 min
- roughly 3 of 4 for cost
Leads with acid holding everything up to the light, richness that coats and comforts, trailing gentle sweetness.
Ingredients
- 1.2 kg beef chuck or paleron, in 5 cm pieces
- 40 g lard or beef dripping
- 3 large onions, sliced
- 500 ml Flemish brown ale
- 200 ml beef stock
- 30 g vergeoise or dark brown sugar
- 20 ml red wine vinegar
- 3 thick slices pain d'épices
- 40 g strong mustard
- 3 bay leaves
- 4 sprigs thyme
- Salt and black pepper
The skills inside
Deglazing & pan saucesThe bare simmer: holding liquid below the boil
Allergen screen
Found: mustard · alcohol
Screened for: gluten, dairy, egg, nuts, peanuts, fish, shellfish, molluscs, soy, sesame, celery, mustard, lupin, alcohol. Not screened: sulphites.
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Method
- Dry the beef on cloth and brown it hard in the lard in uncrowded batches, until every face is mahogany and the pan floor is dark but not black.
- Cook the onions in the same fat until they collapse to a deep gold jam, using the water they give up to lift the fond off the base.
- Deglaze with the ale, add the stock, vergeoise, vinegar, bay and thyme, and bring to a bare simmer.
- Spread the pain d'épices thickly with mustard, lay the slices mustard side down on the surface, cover, and cook at 150C (300F) for three hours, until the beef gives at the push of a spoon.
- Whisk the softened bread through the sauce until it is glossy and coats, then taste and pull the bitterness back with a little more vergeoise or a few drops of vinegar.
How to tell it is going right
This dish has no standard of its own yet. It is judged on the techniques it exercises: checked at the pan, while there is still something to be done about it.
Deglazing & pan sauces 49 recipes
- The pan still holds its fond. Nothing has been rinsed, wiped, or soaked, and the browned layer is intact on the floor.
- Excess fat was poured off first and the browned layer left behind; the fat is not the flavour and a sauce carrying all of it will not come together.
- The liquid went into a still-hot pan and the floor came clean: scraped while it bubbles, the base goes from stuck brown to bare metal and the sauce darkens as it takes it up.
- The fond was brown and not black. A burnt floor dissolves into bitterness that cannot be seasoned out, and is better washed away than deglazed.
- Reduced first and seasoned afterwards, tasted at the consistency it will be served at rather than at the start.
Where it goes wrong The pan was left to stand and go cold before anybody came back to it. Cold fond will not dissolve, so the scraping lifts nothing, and the sauce arrives thin and pale with the flavour it was supposed to carry still welded to the metal.
The bare simmer: holding liquid below the boil 183 recipes
- The surface is read rather than assumed: bubbles break slowly in one or two places, or the surface merely shivers, and it does not reach a rolling boil at any point.
- It was held there: the pot was watched and the heat adjusted rather than set once and left, and there is no tide mark up the pot wall from a boil-over.
- The liquid stayed as clear as it should be: no clouding from agitation, and no fat churned into an emulsion through it.
- Whatever is in the liquid is still intact: nothing shredded, broken up, or worried apart by movement.
- The level is roughly where the elapsed time should have left it; a large drop is the evidence that it ran hotter than this while nobody was looking.
Where it goes wrong It was brought to a boil and then left on the same heat, so it churned for the whole cook: the liquid clouded, the fat emulsified into it, and the solids broke apart into the broth.
At the Table
- The Pour
- Syrah (northern Rhône) or Nebbiolo
- Also Right
- The braising wine itself, better bottle
- From the Taps
- Belgian dubbel
- Zero-Proof
- Beet & blackcurrant shrub
Long-cooked beef trades bite for depth: savory, structured reds echo the pot; and pouring the braise’s own region is law.
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