The eleventh recipe I made for French Fridays with Dorie, from Dorie Greenspan's Around My French Table cookbook, was My Go-To Beef Daube, found on pages 243-245.
This recipe transforms the lowly chuck roast into something very special in taste alone...it looks like a bunch of meat and vegetables thrown together, but it all melts on your tongue and the flavors are better than anything you can imagine, you will need to make it to see for yourself just how good it is. Oh, and when you make it, don't be substituting this or that or changing that or this because it won't be the same thing, and you definitely want the same thing, the recipe is perfectly wonderful as written, I didn't change a thing, so I speak from experience.
Ingredient list: beef chuck roast, bacon, salt & pepper, oil, onions, shallots, garlic, carrots, parsnips, cognac, wine, and bouquet garni as specified in recipe.
Yes, that's quite a few ingredients to line up but none of them are difficult to find, all of them absolutely work in symphony together. This takes the better part of an afternoon to orchestrate, but it is so worth it when you sit down to eat it, especially on a cold dark wintery night like we had here this evening.
Since there are no potatoes in the recipe, and guys here love potatoes, I decided to make some mashed potatoes for them to have with the daube as I knew they would enjoy that...and indeed they did. The daube is good just by itself, but if you want to see guys really smile, give it to them over mashed potatoes which soak up all that wonderful juice!
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