Lyon & Burgundy · Starter
Oeufs en Meurette
- Advanced
- 50 min
- roughly 3 of 4 for cost
Leads with richness that coats and comforts, aromatics blooming from the first bite, finishing long and savory.
Ingredients
- 750 ml red Burgundy, a young Pinot Noir
- 250 ml brown veal stock
- 150 g smoked lardons
- 16 small onions, peeled
- 200 g button mushrooms, quartered
- 40 g butter for the pan, plus 40 g softened and 30 g cold
- 30 g plain flour
- 10 g caster sugar
- 1 shallot, sliced
- 2 garlic cloves, crushed
- 1 bay leaf and 2 sprigs thyme
- 4 very fresh eggs
- 4 thick slices pain de campagne
- 1 garlic clove, for the toast
- salt and black pepper
The skills inside
Reducing a saucePoaching eggsSweating aromatics: soft, never brownedRendering fat: and cooking in what runs outThe bare simmer: holding liquid below the boilSalted water & the float test
The words inside
Poach, Simmer, BoilPinot Noir & BurgundyPinot Noir
Allergen screen
Found: gluten · dairy · egg · alcohol
Screened for: gluten, dairy, egg, nuts, peanuts, fish, shellfish, molluscs, soy, sesame, celery, mustard, lupin, alcohol. Not screened: sulphites.
Screened by keyword from the ingredient list, not reviewed by a person; check every label for what the list cannot show.
Method
- Render the lardons in the 40 g pan butter and lift them out, glaze the small onions with the sugar until burnished, then fry the mushrooms until they squeak and colour. Reserve all three together; this is the garniture.
- In the same pan sweat the shallot and crushed garlic, add the wine, thyme and bay and boil hard to reduce by half, until it smells of fruit rather than alcohol. Add the stock and reduce again to about 400 ml.
- Poach the eggs one at a time in a small pan of that wine held at 82C (180F), spinning the liquid first, until the whites are firm and stained purple, about 3 min. Lift them out, trim the ragged skirts, and tip the wine back into the sauce. 3 min
- Knead the 40 g softened butter with the flour and whisk it into the simmering sauce in small knobs; hold it at a simmer two minutes, until it coats a spoon and no longer tastes raw of flour, then strain.
- Return the garniture to warm through, take the pan off the heat and swirl in the 30 g cold butter until the sauce turns glossy and clings.
- Toast the bread, rub it with the garlic clove, sit an egg on each and spoon the meurette over so it pools around rather than soaks in.
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.
Rendering fat: and cooking in what runs out 73 recipes
- It started cold or low and came up slowly: fat that met a hot pan seizes and scorches before the inside can melt, and there is no recovering it.
- The fat in the pan is clear and clean-smelling, pale to golden, with no dark sediment on the floor and nothing acrid in the steam.
- What is left behind is crisp and deep gold with no soft pale fat still clinging to it and no black burnt edges.
- There is a real volume of it: enough to film the pan floor and be poured off and kept, not a dry smear that never ran.
- Whatever cooks in it browns in it and takes its flavour, rather than sitting in a greasy pool that never gets hot enough to colour anything.
Where it goes wrong The heat was raised to hurry it along, so the outside seized and browned before the interior fat could melt; very little runs out, and the solids come out burnt on the outside and rubbery within.
Reducing a sauce 95 recipes
- A steady simmer with the surface moving, never a rolling boil that throws it up the sides and scorches what is left on the base.
- Judged by behaviour rather than the clock: it coats the back of a spoon and holds a clean line when a finger is drawn through it.
- The drop in volume is visible against the side of the pan: there is a line to see, not a guess about whether anything has happened.
- Seasoned at the end and not the beginning, because salt concentrates at exactly the rate everything else does.
- Nothing is catching underneath: a spoon drawn across the base comes up clean, with no browned film building where the heat is fiercest.
Where it goes wrong It was seasoned at the start and then reduced by half. The salt concentrated along with everything else, so the sauce reaches perfect body and is too salty to serve. And the only remedy is to dilute it and reduce it all over again.
At the Table
- The Pour
- Nebbiolo (Langhe) or aged Pinot Noir
- Also Right
- White Burgundy for cream-based versions
- From the Taps
- Dubbel
- Zero-Proof
- Roasted barley tea
Earth speaking to earth: forest-floor reds echo fungal depth; truffle and Nebbiolo literally share a hillside and a season.
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