bbstx, Ina Garten has a couple of recipes for Beef Bourguignon...one with chuck and one with tenderloin. I've only made the one with chuck, but it's really good. I would recommend checking her version out that calls for tenderloin. I'd be surprised if it disappoints. Obviously the cooking time for the meat is greatly shortened with the tenderloin recipe. Just thought it might help with whatever tweaking you need.

https://www.foodnetwork.com/recipes/ina-garten/filet-of-beef-bourguignon-recipe-1957232

Steak tips in mushroom gravy.

bbstx, so funny you would ask. I made Ina's
Beef Bourguignon

on Christmas Day but using the chuck recipe above and subbing a 2 1/2# tenderloin roast I found half price holiday sale at Fred Meyer. I probably would not have used it if the beef had been full price but our dinner was wonderful.

I admit to skipping the step where I was supposed to have added the 1/2 cup cognac to the vegetables when those were partially cooked and lighting it. I did use the full bottle of wine, plus beef broth.

With all else going on and in, I couldn't see where the cognac would have done more than glaze the vegetables, wouldn't even add to the presentation if we'd had guests (it was just the two of us) since it was to take place in the middle of the cooking, and I left it out.

Dinner, served on toasted french bread as suggested very good. We had it again the next night with mashed potatoes. A container went into the freezer for another meal later.

It will be wonderful. As you mentioned, no braising with your tenderloin. A quick sear, remove, then add at the end to briefly heat.

Chloe bud, that is what I thought I might need to do...

If I had tenderloin to use up, I'd make Beef Stroganoff and save the Bourgingnon recipe for chuck.

I agree with colleen.

I make stroganoff often. The bourgignon is something I’ve never made before. I was aiming for something a little special.

I, also, agree with colleen.

I had an experience with sirloin tip roast last week where I completely ruined the meat by over cooking it. Lucky that I had divided my piece of meat in to two and had ruined only half of it.

I tried to braise it, but it was very tough and very dry.

The second half I just seared, make a sauce from the fonds in the skillet and then served them together. It was a vast improvement. I guess you could do that and use red wine.

You will have to be careful and treat it gently. It does not seem that one cut could sub for the other. It would have to be a different progression of cooking and assembly.

I'll bet you will do fine with it, though. You seem to know what you are doing.

The sauce also needs a long cooking, not just the meat. The flavour from the caremilsation of the meat adds a lot of flavour. If you browned your filet to that extent it would be overcooked.

I think if you want to make something similar, get some nice fat lardons, some small bite sized onions, carrots, celery and brown all together in your pot. Add some tomato puree, a few cloves of crushed garlic, sprigs of thyme, then when all is fragrant add a little flour, cook out, then add a bottle of red wine. Cook it gently for an hour, flash fry your meat and add it at the last minute. Serve with noodles.

IC, I think you nailed my problem...everything needs a long slow cook except the meat.

bbstx, I use tenderloin, boneless rib eye or top sirloin for stroganoff in a similar way...quick sear then add in again at the end. It's always tasty.

Islay's recipe sounds good.

Your original idea was, frankly, to make stew out of a cut that's 100% opposite of stew.

There are all kinds of wonderful things you can do to make a beef tenderloin special. It's known for having less beefy flavor than any other cut, and therefore, takes sauce well. There are a zillion sauces you could go “special” on, saving the stewing for an appropriate cut.

The result should be good using either Islay's or Ina's version with the very brief cooking of the meat. I did notice Ina's recipe calls for 1-inch thick slices, so anything smaller would make a difference. I recommend trying her BB with chuck sometime. It's one of my faves from her.

Islay nailed it! That is the only way to do what you intend to do

I made the mistake of using a cut that wasn't suited for the type of cooking and it was totally ruined. Truth be told I dont cook much beef and never really have.

As we are talking about meat, I would like to share a realization that I have come to as it relates to eating meat. This is just a share, that's all. This is just my own personal place that I have come to.

The conclusion is that I dont really want to take a low cut of meat and stew it until it becomes a stringy bite of stuff. Better to have a small and more tender cut of meat rather than one that had to be cooked for a long time to make it edible. It seems, at that point, you are eating it as a rendered protein and not so much as a culinary joy. Better to get the needed protein from some other sources and leave the consuming of meat to being just a joy to eat. My conclusion!

Using a ground meat to brown up and use in something like a pasta sauce or a chili is a waste of meat. By the time the meat gets distributed around in little bits it gets lost as meat and just becomes filler.

I also dont care much for sausage. I have made sausage and I have experienced that horror of seeing it made. To grind up a piece of flesh and stuff it inside of the animals intestines just is something that I dont much care to do ever again.

I have come to value and to prefer to both cook and to eat meals that dont include meat. Redefining a relationship to eating meat and deciding what is pleasurable had been an expanding experience.

I ended up getting rid of the piece that I ruined by over cooking it and had some previously stewed pot roast that I put in the freezer along with some of it's juices that I took out yesterday and proceeded to make a meal with it before I decided that it was not worth it.

Not only was this meat cooked to a stringy protein, it had also been frozen as raw, cooked, and then refrozen. What a horrid way to have meat after all of those different processes had been applied! I am going to go out into the yard today and bury it. I just could not serve it for dinner. Now, the broth that came off the meat is full of flavor, but the stringy meat is not a pleasure at all no matter how many times it is described as "pull apart" or "shredded" or " off the bone".

.

I will only buy grass fed ground beef as beef anymore. It can be prepared many ways. If I do brown it up in a skillet for some use such as that, it will be in chunks or made into meatballs. The culinary pleasure of eating tiny bits of nondescript meat in a sauce eludes me. Also, if you have to add such things as soup mix to your meat to get it to taste like anything, it is time to look a bit further for something else that actually has a pleasing flavor of its own. Onion soup cannot redeem it.

Less quantity and more measured quality! Rather a small piece of good than a plate full of "meh", ----- tastes like onion soup.

This is part of defining what is real, desired, necessary or important in everyday life and getting the most from it. by editing out the bits that dont deliver. That means eliminating more than just the clutter in the closet.

I feel so grateful that I have choices. So very grateful!

Spoken like a vegan. I love long slow cooked meat that absorbs the flavors of the sauce.
And if your meat tastes like onion soup or you think you need to add a soup mix or a can of soup to make it taste good, you need to go back to the drawing board.
you don't HAVE to eat meat, and you obviously don't enjoy it....so stick to the vegetables and tofu.

I’d have to say I’m with you there, Linda. If meat has been cooked to the point of stringiness it’s well overdone, but a good braise is a delight. Similarly I love sausages in all their infinite variety. Braising, ground meat dishes and sausages are (besides delicious) a way of using up all of an animal, which to me is a far more respectful thing than just eating the best bits and tossing the rest.

Definitely not going to go vegan! Never! Not even vegetarian..

I dont, and never have, used any kind of dried or canned soup in anything. Not my thing. But it is a common thing that many do.

I do enjoy eating meat. but not all meat.

At other times and places it was necessary to use every bit of the animal from tail to cheeks. But that is not the scenario that we live with. Most of us dont have an entire slaughtered animal to process, We pick and choose from the packaged selections at the store. What they do with the offals of the animal, I don't know. We don't do that here in modern America.

In some old world markets you can get the meat from the head of the animal and some cultures prize the little bits of meat in the cheeks of the goat or lamb. My Chinese DIL likes the eyeballs of the fish and loves chicken feet. We don't do much of anything of that sort in our modern lives here, in America.

I feel sorry for all of the animals that end up as mystery meat in some breaded and fried nugget in the frozen section or on the menu at a fast food. What a dishonor that is! That is one example of an undesirable way to have meat.

Husband likes that soft cooked meat that falls off the bone in the stew pot. I have more and more become disenchanted with it. Most often I would buy a chuck roast or that package of stew meat at Costco and stew it up slowly with onions and sometimes, red wine. ( no soup is added) But, that industrial strength beef has fallen short of delivering pleasure. It all but tastes and smells of the mass production that it came from.

Beef and chicken seems to have declined in taste and quality.

Many years of my growing up we ate mostly wild game. We lived in Alaska for a number of years and my dad hunted and fished. We ate moose and caribou, mostly. Dad did his own butchering.

We will on occasion get some local venison and those animals are wonderfully flavored from grazing in all of the abundant farmland and forests around here. I like the taste of wild game, but dont hunt. I went with my dad a couple of times and helped him field dress the game. Around here they thin the herd of deer with open hunting seasons. Sure they do most places.

I also buy a better quality poultry from the the same source. A good chicken is nothing like those horrid packages of chicken in the grocery store. At one point I was buying whole chickens from a farm and they were the very, very best. The broth that could be rendered from one of those chickens was rich and the raw chicken had none of that smell that you get with packaged chicken and all of its yellow/orange tinted flesh and bits of fat.

I know where the meat that I I buy comes from. It comes from farms that I can locate on a map. I buy local and I know that it really is local. "Local" can apply to quite a large radius, but this is really local.

It is not necessary to buy grass fed beef if that is not your thing. It is not necessary to buy expensive cuts. Just give some deep consideration to what you buy and how heavily you depend on animal protein. Think just what it is that you want from the flesh of that animal. What kind of bargain did you strike with yourself when you decided to eat that animal in that manner?

Animal protein as a main source of protein is highly problematic in view of the manner in which it comes to our dinner plate and how it is raised, processed, rendered, packaged and sold and cooked and served. Let us not discount the environmental impact that it has, as well.

Much of it fails miserably on all of those measures and, to my reckoning , most of it could rightly be seen as being quite dishonorable to the animal that it came from.

If you live where you raise a few animals for your own consumption, you are fortunate. But, most of us don't have much grazing pasture in our back yards and chickens are frowned up on in most suburbs and apartment balconies. Little piggy pets are much too adorable to want to eat them.

One more aspect of eating meat is that the fact that, on a nutritional basis, we don't need to eat as much animal protein as most of us do. If you look at the recommendations, most of us exceed those, by far. Eating less meat can translate into better meat eating experiences. It can also facilitate having a more varied diet and many culinary pleasures that you may have over looked when meat reigned king in the middle of the plate and held court with the peas and carrots and potatoes.

You make many good points.

“At other times and places it was necessary to use every bit of the animal from tail to cheeks. But that is not the scenario that we live with. Most of us dont have an entire slaughtered animal to process, We pick and choose from the packaged selections at the store. What they do with the offals of the animal, I don't know. We don't do that here in modern America.”

This is the attitude I have problems with. It may not be economically necessary to use all of a slaughtered animal, but in my eyes it is wasteful and disrespectful of the animal’s life to slaughter it, pick out the “good bits” and toss the rest. Apart from anything else, this means that more animals would have to die to provide enough choice parts to satisfy the market. If an animal dies to provide food for my table, I want to respect the sacrifice by not wasting it.

We have absolutely no authority over what happens to the bits and pieces when the animal is butchered. We are never given those decisions to make.

The only way to do that is to do your own slaughtering and butchering.

When humans lived a life that required those measures, life and survival were hanging in the balance. In modern times we still need a balance, but our dependence on animal protein is weighing heavily on the earth and on our health, dangerously unbalanced and tipping fast.

If humans were more respectful and exercised more mindfuilness in our actions , fewer animals would be required to be raised and butchered. That mindfulness is what I am promoting. I am promoting more respect for the animal and our relationship to it as a food source, not less.

Personally, I think it awful that the animal ends up in a jar of horrid meat sauce on the shelf at the grocery store or on top of a greasy pizza at the Wawa. What an inglorious ending that is! It serves no one well, and certainly not the animal.

This is not a choice of buying steak as opposed to buying tongue.liver or kidney.

This is an issue that envelops our dominant paradigm that we need to raise and eat so many animals for our protein. We really dont' need to do that. But, we make the choice to do so. I advocate wiser choices that are better for us, for the earth and for the animals that get butchered.

If you go into a grocery store such as one that serves Asian populations, for instance, you will find bits and pieces of the animals in the meat department that you are no where as likely to find in a suburban grocery store.

When is the last time most of us ate tripe or cooked up liver? Sure, some do. But, I am willing to bet that the majority of us have not eaten those parts of the animal lately, if at all.

My MIL used to love tripe cooked in a peppery tomato sauce.

In Mexico City we ate tongue tacos and they were extraordinary!

I, myself, have a fondness for liver, and I remember steak and kidney when we lived in England and it tasted wonderful! I even grew fond of blood pudding when we lived over there. Those are not really things that are appreciated much in our modern American society. Some, yes, but not much. Blood pudding is not nearly as popular as pepperoni. Not many make head cheese anymore, either.

You will find these things more readily in a venue that serves a population that still relates to an old world acceptance of eating all parts of the animal, even the eyes. That does not include the majority of modern consumers. Some, yes. There are always some.

Some really old cultures and some animals will even eat the stomach contents of the animal that they kill. Cats, I am told, eat some parts of the kill that provides an essential nutrient that has to be added to commercial cat food.

I watched Anthony Bourdain politely refuse to eat the still full but cooked intestine of an animal. The people that he was featuring did eat all of the animal. Yeah, that part, too. Then there are chitlins................

Steaks, chops and sausage or chitlins, liver and tongue? Whatever, I am just advocating to be mindful of the decisions that we make and the false narratives that we create.

but back to that beef bourgionne with tenderloin. I will bet that is wonderful!

I cooked the second half of the roast that I ruined by cutting it into smaller pieces and just searing it. It was much much better that way. Matter of fact, it was a real treat and tasted wonderful.

We will usually have some meat maybe once or twice a week. I have no intention of declaring my self to be vegetarian, but I do prefer to cook without meat and I anticipate my meatless meal with the same enthusiasm as that beautiful seared piece of beef. If it is good, it is good no matter if it is a cut from high on the hog or a wonderful meal with beans, which I have a real fondness for.

Boy has this thread gone off the rails!

What did you decide to cook?

I took the easy way out. There was one chunk big enough to serve 2 (as opposed to the other chunks that were just random chunks). I cooked it sous vide with roasted asparagus and roasted potatoes on the side. The random-random chunks are going to be cooked today or tomorrow. I can either make stroganoff (DH preferred) or fiddle around with a bourguignon bastardization. It’ll depend on how I feel at the time.

Easy way out?. Nah, not in my kitchen. Easy way would be Chic-fli-a or delivery pizza. Frozen entrée, 😂. Not that I've ever done that and maybe good for some....back-up plans are fine.

That is a creative use of what you have. I would do the same if had both meat choices. I like the Ina recipes using both cuts. DH will often get side noodles if desired...even taco night I use lettuce wraps for mine after one corn tortilla...if he wants carbs and noodles, he gets it. Odd that he wants what I want. recently. Lettuce wraps.

We are in covid creative times. Make meals that satisfy. Without waste.

I made a bastardized bourguignon. I combined Julia Child’s recipe from Kitchen Wisdom, Simply Recipe’s slow cooker version sans slow cooker, and Ina Garten’s version. I cut the wine back to 3/4 bottle. [hanging head and looking abashed] I added the tenderloin too soon. It was fine, but 30 minutes later would have been better. I served it over toasted brioche, a la Ina. DH pronounced it a “5 star meal.” What more needs to be said? Was it authentic? Nope! Did the people who ate it, enjoy it? Yep! ‘Nuf said! I made note of my amendments so that I can do it again. I may try chuck next time and actually braise it!

John Liu, beurre manie made thickening this soooo easy! It was cooked for 2 minutes after being added. The finished product didn’t taste of raw flour.

What matters is you enjoyed YOUR dinner.

glad it turned out to be a quality meal. That is what you want when you cook a piece of meat. The same with the second half of my roast. I used a different cooking method and it was like night and day. I fixed the leftovers for hubs the next day for his lunch and it took the form of something like what you served over the brioche. It was a nice open faced sandwich with a good home made bread. I fixed it so that the meat was barely heated. I did not want to chance letting it get tough. He loved it.

I would have deglazed with wine but we just dont have any in the house anymore. Hubs has some progressive and ongoing neurological problems and alcohol is not good for him anymore. It was a hard change for him. He always loved his red wine. It is almost like poison for him anymore. But he knows that he had to let it go. I used to do beef in wine and it was one of his favorites. I would not balk at using the wine to cook with as the alcohol cooks off. We just don't have it around anymore.

bbstx, I'm glad it turned out well. Just wanted to chime in and tell you that I made Julia Child's boeuf bourguignon recipe and I've never been more proud of anything I've ever cooked. Long, involved recipe but foolproof.

cb, you are right about it being long and involved. I may have to try the classic version sometime in the future.

It's not really long and involved as most of the time it looks after itself.

IC, for me the daunting part is at the end. All of the straining and separately cooking the onions and mushrooms. That is why I did a less-than-classic take on the recipe. Among other things, I wanted the vegetables that had been cooked with the meat to be part of the end-dish.

You can just remove the meat, which should be in quite big chunks so easy, add the veg and lardons and reduce the sauce while the veg cooks.

http://couteaux-et-tirebouchons.com/boeuf-bourguignon-recette-facile-traditionnelle/

Here's a translation of most of the recipe

Then, once the meat is well marinated, we are going to drain it well (without throwing away the marinade of course). Then, in a large casserole, heat a little olive oil and fry the meat over a very hot heat for a few minutes until it is golden brown on all sides. Remove the meat from the casserole and add the chopped garlic cloves and onion. Fry for a few minutes and then deglaze with the marinade. Then add 15 cl of veal stock (either homemade or 15 cl of water with a little powdered veal stock). Bring to the boil for 2-3 minutes, then reduce the heat to a gentle simmer and add the meat. Normally your meat should be almost completely covered.

To be soft, the meat should cook for about 2 hours and a half on a low heat, without covering: but be careful not to reduce the sauce too much, otherwise add a little water from time to time. To make the cooking even softer, you can also put the casserole in the oven for 2 hours and a half at 140 degrees, without covering, this gives a slightly "roasted" side to the beef and it is even better.

The vegetables of the beef bourguignon

When the meat has been cooked at least 2 hours, 2 hours and 15 minutes, the vegetables must be tackled: carrots, mushrooms and spring onions. Peel your carrots and cut them into fairly thick slices (or in half if they are leafy carrots), cut your mushrooms and peel your spring onions. When it's ready, take your meat out of the casserole, and add your carrots and spring onions to the sauce (which should still be a little too liquid). Raise the heat slightly and let it cook for about 20 minutes. This will allow your carrots and onions to cook, while reducing and thickening the sauce.

In a frying pan, sauté your bacon cut into small pieces so that it is well browned, as well as your mushrooms.

To finish the beef bourguinon

At the last moment, we will finish the sauce by adding a little butter and one or two squares of chocolate. We season (salt, pepper) and we put the meat back in the casserole to heat it up for another 5 minutes on low heat. At the last moment we add the mushrooms and the sautéed bacon, then it only remains to serve. Beautiful pieces of simmered meat, a good ladle of sauce, some vegetables, all with good fresh pasta, or potatoes, it is a delight.

So the point of Julia's recipes is that they were designed for what average American women could obtain and cook 60 years ago or more. I remember when shallots were tiny, and packed in a tiny disposable aluminum tart tin wrapped in plastic wrap and very dear. They’re still not cheap, but no longer shocking, and pretty easy to come by. Etc. Even now, when I read a French recipe, I have to think about what substitutions I have to make, how they'll change the outcome, and whether it will be okay.