Booze In Your Food: It’s Always Belgetoberfest with Carbonnades a la Flamande

Strap on your lederhosen meine damen und herren, and if you don’t have a pair then for God’s sake get thee to a lederhosiery: it’s time for Oktoberfest. In most parts of the country October means leaves changing color. Here in Los Angeles we traditionally celebrate it with earthquakes and wildfires, but this year, just to keep us on our toes, the entire state has been blanketed in cold, damp, grey misery. This wasn’t part of our deal, Satan! We want our souls back! But you know what they say: every cloud has a savory, braised lining, and in this case the frigid temperatures gave me a chance to ring in fall with one of my favorite winter dishes, carbonnades a la flamande. If the name doesn’t sound particularly Deutsch that’s because it’s the national dish of Belgium, but Belgium of course is the small Francophone country known for waffles, chocololate, mustachioed detectives and being invaded by… anyone? anyone? Germany! Happy Oktoberfest! All tangential geopolitical connections aside, carbonnades a la flamande is a simple recipe of beef and onions braised in lots and lots of beer, and that makes it a perfect match for this uniquely boozocentric holiday.

As with any beloved “national” dish, there are as many different versions of carbonnades a la flamandes as there are Belgian grandmothers, so what I’m presenting today is a Franken-recipe cobbled together from parts of this one, this one and this one. Before I get into the specifics, here are a few words on the three building blocks of this simple recipe:

BEEF: As with most any other stew-like recipes, carbonnades flamandes uses big, tough cuts of meat, chuck or rump roast in this case, which is great on the one hand because you end up with a lot of food, cheaply, but on the other hand does require some extra strategizing to actually make the meat chewable:

• First divide and conquer: Trim off the excess fat and cut the meat into strips, 2”x4”x¾” sounds about right.
• Second braise the meat (from the French braiser – “ to cook the shit out of”; from the Olde Frenche brese – “yea, verily, to cook the shit out of”) in liquid for 2 to 2 ½ hours. A long time, I know, but the upside is that while you’re waiting for a meal that promises to warm you from the inside, you wind up heating your apartment up as well. It’s a win-win.

Most recipes brown the meat on the stove and then transfer to the oven and simmer, covered, at 325 F. I had always used the oven in the past, but this week, in a triumph of laziness, I decided to leave the pot on the stove, uncovered, and stir occasionally. The results were great and it was much more convenient to stir, taste and control the heat with a pot on the stove. Also if you don’t have an oven-safe pot this allows you to do everything in one place, rather than browning in one pan, then transferring to a baking dish for the oven.

BEER: I chose Spaten Oktoberfest more for seasonal appropriateness and supermarket on-saleishness than anything else, but opinions vary on the best beer for carbonnades flamandes. Julia Child likes a pilsner, the Boston Globe says dark beer, and the FoodBeerTravel blog prescribes a Belgian dubbel. I’m told Jacques Pepin enjoys a fine Natural Light Lager which he loving refers to as “Natty Lite,” but he was unavailable for comment at press time. Honestly the brew in your stew (ugh… sorry) doesn’t matter much because you cook it for so long, and the subtler flavors that distinguish one beer from the other probably won’t survive hours of slow boiling. That said, you should still probably stay away from intensely bitter, hoppy beers like an IPA, which was after all invented to hold its flavor during the long, hot voyage from England to India. Chances are it’ll hold up pretty well in a bubbling stew pot too, and a taste that strong is not necessarily a good thing.

FAT: Some say you should brown the beef in oil or butter, then add bacon in a separate step; I decided to kill two birds with one blob of grease. Inspired by Claire’s Definitive Bacon Fat Primer from a few months back, I’ve been saving up a summer’s worth of bacon fat in my freezer – and since summer means tomatoes, and tomatoes mean BLTs, I now have what’s quickly becoming an annoyingly large surplus. So for this recipe I skipped the bacon entirely, and instead used the bacon fat to brown both the beef and the onions. If you’d rather make this the traditional way you can add 2-3 strips of bacon to the recipe, which follows below:

Carbonnades a la Flamande – about 6 servings

3 Tbsp oil, butter or… BACON FAT

3 lb. beef rump or chuck roast

3 large onions – 1.5 to 2 lbs

4 garlic cloves

1/2 cup beef stock

2-3 cups beer (about a bottle and a half)

2 Tbsp flour

1-2 bay leaves

6 sprigs parsley

1/2 tsp dried thyme

Occasional stirring

2-3 Tbsp red wine or sherry vinegar

• Brown chunks of beef, in batches if necessary, over high heat in half the bacon fat and then set aside. Each piece only takes a minute or two. And if you’re including bacon, fry it after the beef, set it aside too.

• Roughly chop onions and sauté in rest of the bacon fat until golden, ~15 minutes. Add minced garlic halfway through. Season with salt and pepper.
• Add broth, beer, parsley, bay leaves and thyme. Stir in flour until it dissolves.
• Return beef and juices to the pot and simmer over low heat for a looooong time. Two hours and eighteen minutes to be exact, or the full running time of Fellini’s 8 ½. It worked for me. Incidentally this is also the step where you’ll add the “occasional stirring,” especially towards the end, like around that press conference at the rocket ship. Oh sorry, also towards the end of the cooking time.
• Add vinegar. Seriously, don’t forget this at the end. It makes this dish. After hours of boiling I was a little disappointed when I finally sampled my stew; all the onions had made it surprisingly sweet. Was it undersalted? Should I not have used sweet yellow onions? (Probably not) But two tablespoons of sherry vinegar later the dish was completely transformed, restored to a savory balance with just enough acidic bite to wake up all the flavors that had mellowed and sweetened during the braising. Actually vinegar isn’t the only way to do this: one recipe I found left it out entirely and instead set two or three slices of French bread, crusts removed and spread with whole grain mustard, on top of the stew. Over the two hours of simmering the bread flotilla sinks and dissolves, thickening the stew, and leaving behind the sharp taste of mustard. Oh those clever Belgians. I can’t wait to try it myself this winter. But back to tonight’s dinner:

• Serve with egg noodles. Or potatoes. And spaetzle. And a pretzel. And a beer. And welcome to Fall.