A symbol of French gastronomy, beef bourguignon is a traditional Sunday dish, once eaten by peasants on holidays. A cousin of beef stew, this dish is prepared from pieces of beef marinated in red wine, then simmered in a casserole dish with its garnish (onions, carrots, mushrooms, bacon bits, etc.). In fact, this typical dish from Burgundy inherits as many recipes and variations as there are families. You will thus be able to come across beef bourguignon "minute", "express", even without wine for its most distant variants. But all connoisseurs agree that all the flavor and softness of this typical dish come from the length of cooking, in a traditional casserole dish. Regarding the choice of wine, we often tend to think that cooking wine is to spoil it, and therefore to use poor quality wine. However, to make a good beef bourguignon or more generally good food with wine, you have to use a good wine and ideally, the wine you drink at the table. Beef bourguignon is usually served with mashed potatoes or pasta.
We stay in Burgundy and we stay in wine for this new Burgundian culinary specialty. Poached eggs are a typical regional dish which consists of poaching extra-fresh eggs in a Burgundy red wine sauce. Consumed as an appetizer or main course, this dish is a delight for any wine lover. Its preparation is very simple if you have some dexterity with cooking eggs. You must first prepare the wine sauce by sautéing shallots and bacon, then add chicken broth and red Burgundy wine. Reduce the liquid and add butter or a butter/flour mixture to thicken. You can choose to poach your eggs directly in the sauce or in vinegar water for convenience. The eggs must be very cold to facilitate poaching and must be broken one by one into ramekins then gently placed in the water. Fold the white around the yolk with a spatula and cook for 3 minutes in simmering water.
Typically Burgundian, gougères are soft and tasty little puffs with cheese. They traditionally accompany cellar decents, but are also very popular as an aperitif or as a starter. If it is usually prepared in the form of small puffs as big as a ping-pong ball, there are also crown-shaped gougères, to be cut into portions, or in the form of large individual puffs for a meal on the go. . To make gougères, we use cooked and tasty cheeses such as Gruyère or Comté, but to stay in the region, Époisses remains the traditional cheese. Every year in May, the cradle of gougère, Flogny-la-Chapelle, celebrates the famous little cabbage with events, competitions and exhibitions.
