This is the recipe I send everyone first, because it’s the one that converted me. I had a third of a bottle of red going nowhere on a Sunday and a cheap cut of beef in the fridge. Three slow hours later I understood what wine actually does in a pan — and I’ve cooked this way ever since.
It asks almost nothing of you. You sear, you pour, you walk away. The wine does the work, the house smells incredible, and you look like you tried far harder than you did. Make it on a Sunday with something good on the radio, and it’s even better reheated on Monday.
- Reach for
- a dry, fruity red — Côtes du Rhône, Merlot, or Chianti. Whatever you’d happily drink.
- How much
- 250ml (about a large glass).
- What it’s doing
- it deglazes the pan and reduces into the braising liquid, trading its sharpness for deep, savoury body — the thing that makes people ask what’s in it.
- No open bottle?
- swap in 200ml extra stock + 1 tbsp red wine vinegar. Close — but the wine genuinely earns its place here.
Ingredients
Serves 4
- 1kg (2.2 lb) beef chuck or shin, cut into 4cm chunks
- Salt and freshly ground black pepper
- 2 tbsp plain (all-purpose) flour
- 3 tbsp olive oil
- 100g (3½ oz) smoked bacon lardons or pancetta (optional, but worth it)
- 2 onions, diced
- 2 carrots, cut into chunks
- 2 celery sticks, sliced
- 3 garlic cloves, crushed
- 2 tbsp tomato purée (paste)
- 250ml (1 cup) dry red wine — the bottle this is all about
- 500ml (2 cups) beef stock
- 2 bay leaves
- 3 sprigs thyme
- 200g (7 oz) chestnut mushrooms, halved (optional)
- Small handful flat-leaf parsley, chopped, to finish
Method
-
Heat the oven to 150°C / 300°F (130°C fan). Pat the beef dry, season generously all over, then toss in the flour to coat.
-
Brown the beef. Heat the oil in a heavy casserole (Dutch oven) over medium-high. Sear the beef in batches until deeply browned on all sides, then set aside.
Don’t crowd the pan — brown in batches. A crowded pan steams the meat and you lose the crust that flavours everything.
-
Build the base. Add the lardons (if using) and cook until golden. Add the onion, carrot and celery and soften for 8–10 minutes. Stir in the garlic and tomato purée and cook for 2 minutes more, until it smells rich and slightly caramelised.
-
Pour in the wine. Add the red wine and scrape every brown bit off the bottom of the pan. Let it bubble and reduce by about half, around 5 minutes.
Those scraped-up bits — the fond — are pure flavour. Reducing first concentrates the wine and cooks off its raw, sharp edge before the long braise.
-
Braise. Return the beef and any resting juices to the pot. Pour in the stock, tuck in the bay and thyme, and bring to a gentle simmer.
You want a bare simmer, not a boil. A boil tightens beef; a whisper makes it melt.
-
Into the oven. Lid on, cook for 2½–3 hours, until the beef is fork-tender. If using mushrooms, stir them in for the last 45 minutes.
-
Finish. Fish out the bay and thyme. Taste and season. If the sauce is thin, lift the beef out and simmer the liquid on the hob for a few minutes to thicken. Scatter with parsley. Serve over creamy mash, soft polenta, or celeriac purée — anything that catches the sauce.
Use the rest
Got a final splash in the bottle? Simmer it with a spoonful of sugar and a strip of orange peel into a quick syrup for vanilla ice cream — or freeze it in an ice-cube tray and thank yourself the next time you’re deglazing a pan in a hurry.
Pour alongside: the rest of the same bottle, obviously. Make ahead: even better the next day — cool, refrigerate, and reheat gently.