♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ - You know, I grew up cooking in the '70s out of Mastering the Art of French Cooking, great recipes and obviously the world's best cooking teacher.

But in the 21st century, some of those recipes just don't make it-- boeuf bourguignon for example.

Sauté the meat in batches, you make a mess on the stovetop, those little tiny onions, and you end up with a one-note dish at the end.

So I'm not making that.

But there are plenty of other recipes from the French repertoire that I still make that are absolutely terrific.

A beef stew with orange and olives from the southern part of France for example.

Or a lentil salad, which we'll do a little bit differently, but that's also a classic.

And then using the French macaron, or macaroon, recipe we'll change that into a chocolate meringue cookie.

So stay tuned right here at Milk Street as we update French classics.

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♪ ♪ - I love to say you don't have to make beef bourguignon ever again.

It takes hours, you have to sauté all that meat in batches, it makes a mess, goes on and on.

I think at the end of the, that time also, the stew tastes kind of dead.

You know, it doesn't have a lively flavor.

So we're going to take a stew from Camargue, which is northwest of Marseilles in southern France.

They used olives and orange and beef or bull or whatever they had at the time.

We like those flavor combinations but we're going to showcase our way of making a stew that's about half as much work.

- That's right, so we are going to use beef here, not bull.

And this is a six- to seven- pound chuck roast.

Now we recommend buying a a whole roast and butchering it yourself.

It's really easy to do once you get the hang of it.

It's kind of fun.

It's better than buying pre-cut stew meat in the supermarket.

That's cut from a different part.

- Usually the round.

- Exactly.

- The upper leg.

- Very little fat and very little flavor.

So this cut has both.

And so the first thing you want to do is sort of identify any seams of fat that you can find in the roast and just start tearing into it with your hands.

- Jeez, a little frightening.

- Use a knife to help you do that.

(meat tearing) - Did you just rip up a six-pound roast with your hands?

Is that what you just did?

- I am... - Jeez!

- Just don't, don't mess with me!

- So don't mess with Lynn!

I think that's the takeaway here.

- So all this fat on the top is really hard.

That's not going to melt away when we cook it.

So you do want to get rid of that.

Same thing with the silver skin or sinew here.

That's not going to melt away once we cook it so we want to take that off.

So the best tool for this job is a boning knife.

It has a really flexible blade.

You can see it moves really well.

It's nice and thin, so it gets that fat off pretty easily.

And now we're going to cut this into 2-inch pieces.

All right, so our pieces are cut into two-inch chunks.

I'm going to put them in the Dutch oven.

And we're going to add two tablespoons of salt.

- We're not sautéing the meat... - No.

- ...before it goes in the Dutch oven.

- It goes right in.

And two teaspoons of pepper.

Just going to toss this around so everything gets seasoned.

And then we're actually not even going to add any liquid to our braise.

We're going to allow the meat juices to braise the meat.

But we are going to add some aromatics in here.

So first I'm going to add three anchovies.

And that's not going to create any sort of fishiness, it's just a really nice background flavor.

Two garlic cloves that are sliced, two tablespoons of extra virgin olive oil, and then I have two carrots.

Now these are not the only carrots we're going to add here.

But we're going to add half the carrots here, so that's two carrots now.

That's going to season our cooking liquid and these are going to really break down.

So toward the end of cooking we're going to add another two carrots and those will be more like a vegetable in our stew.

And then this is just one chopped onion.

- So no sautéing of onions, none of that.

- Everything's going in the pot.

- I love this recipe.

- I knew you would, I knew you would.

Everything goes in raw, then we cover it.

Goes into a 325 oven on the lower-middle rack.

It's going to go for about two hours.

At that point, I'm going to take it out and I'm going to add this half cup of Kalamata olives.

And that goes in uncovered.

And then we'll put it back in the oven for another hour-and-a-half, just until it's tender.

♪ ♪ - So our meat has been cooking for about three-and-a half hours.

- Well, can we just stop and say, oh, you were about to say it.

- Look how brown that meat is!

- (laughter) Look how brown that meat is.

Well, it really is, the oven does a great job.

- So I'm going to take the meat out at this point.

Okay, I'm going to set that aside.

So if you wouldn't mind picking that up and bringing it over here so we can strain out those solids.

Just going to press on these solids to make sure we get all of the liquid.

I'm going to use a fat separator.

We definitely don't want all that fat in our sauce.

You can also just skim the fat with a wide spoon or a ladle.

We're going to set this aside and let that fat sort of settle.

And while we do that, we're going to cook down some wine.

So you know we haven't added any wine up until this point.

If you add it at the beginning, by the time three-and-a-half hours passes, you can barely taste any of that wine.

- So this is a great culinary mystery, because stews for hundreds of years have said cook meat in wine.

Now, the Italians have those recipes, the French do as well.

We found that the wine when cooked for a long time loses all of its high notes, right?

All the volatiles go away.

And so it's rather dull tasting.

We also don't like what it does to the meat.

It seems to actually extract some of the flavor from the meat and makes the meat kind of bland.

So reducing the wine at the end and adding it in makes perfect sense.

- Right, and for the red wine that we're using here, this is two-and-a-half cups of red wine.

We do want to pick something with a lot of flavor, something really drinkable.

A Côtes du Rhône is a good option here.

Those are really good, flavorful.

- Medium-bodied.

- Yeah.

- So I'm going to bring this to a boil over medium-high.

We'll reduce it to medium and let that simmer for about eight minutes or so.

We want the wine to reduce by about half.

That's about a cup-and-a-quarter.

So we're going to add that defatted cooking liquid back into the pot.

You should have about two-and-a-half cups of this.

...a little but shy, so we'll put in a little water.

Pour those in.

So to this we're going to add some vegetables.

That other half of the carrots.

And then one red bell pepper.

So we're going to let this simmer for about ten to 15 minutes.

We just want those vegetables to be tender.

♪ ♪ - So those vegetables are nice and tender.

Now we're going to add the meat back in.

And here's where that orange flavor is going to come in.

We have a third of a cup of orange juice.

So we took a whole orange, zested it, and then actually juiced the orange, so... Freshly squeezed, only the best for you, Chris.

So we're going to let this cook here for about five minutes or so.

We just want that juice to cling to the meat.

I'm going to turn the heat off and move this off the heat.

And add just a little bit more flavor to this.

So we have another half cup of Kalamata olives.

Those are going to be nice and fresh here at the end.

We have a tablespoon of orange zest, two teaspoons of red wine vinegar, and we have a cup of parsley.

I'm going to put half in and mix that in.

- So one of the things we like to do at Milk Street is to finish off a soup or a stew with some fresh, bold, strong ingredients.

You could use ginger, you could use spices at the end, you could use, even garlic.

In this case, of course, we use some olives, orange zest, etc.

And even a handful of herbs you can throw in, it makes all the difference.

And one final note, of course, is you do want to make sure that you're seasoned properly.

- So we're going to finish this with the rest of our parsley.

And we're ready to eat.

So we have some baguette here to soak up that really delicious sauce, if you want to... - No, I'm going to, I'm going to go right for the meat.

And then I'll do that later.

Well, it's definitely tender.

Mmm.

So many stews, everything tastes the same, it all tastes like meat.

Here you have the orange, you have the olives, and you have actually the bright flavor of the wine that's not overly cooked down.

- So nice and bright.

- So I think I could call this a master recipe for any kind of beef stew, actually, or pork stew.

Which means you put everything in the pot raw, right?

- Yeah.

- Even the onions and the beef.

- You cook it for a couple hours covered and then you take the top off to finish.

And then that meat at the top, because it's not submerged, gets brown so you didn't have to do the browning ahead of time.

Then you finish off with some wine that's simmered down about halfway.

And then some bright elements at the end.

And that's a recipe for success.

A beef orange olive stew, very easy to make, and I think it's the best stew you'll ever eat.

♪ ♪ - You know the best way to see Paris is with someone who either lived there or lives there.

And a friend of mine, Jean-Pierre, grew up in Paris.

So I've been there a couple times with him.

And he takes me to very out-of-the-way, inexpensive eateries, which is really the best place to go.

One of my favorites is Le Rubis.

Now you walk in, it's a tiny little place, and it looks like a wine bar.

But if you know the secret, there's a little door in back and a little tiny staircase, so you go upstairs and it's a little tiny dining room with maybe 20 seats.

So you order, you know, the plat du jour, whatever they're making.

But of course they would have a simple recipe, like a lentil salad.

So we decided to take one of those simple, inexpensive French classics and Milk Street it.

By way of Yotam Ottolenghi, because he sort of had this idea before we did.

So we're going to dress up a lentil salad.

- Wonderful.

Well, this lentil salad makes for a great weeknight meal.

It's hearty and simple, as you said.

We're going to start by pickling two shallots into a half cup of white balsamic vinegar.

And to this I'm going to add one teaspoon of salt.

Now what this does is two things.

It softens the bite of the shallots and it draws some of that shallot flavor out into the vinegar, which we'll use later.

So moving right along, we are going to start building a base for our lentil salad.

So to start, I have here six cups of water.

And we're going to use a Milk Street classic technique.

I'm going to use a whole head of garlic, cut off one-third off the top.

And this goes in just as is.

And once it's cooked down and softened it's going to form the base of our dressing for the salad.

The rest of the ingredients I have, one celery rib that's been halved crosswise, two carrots, also halved crosswise.

We're just throwing them in water.

No chopping, no sautéing, very simple.

One tablespoon here of yellow mustard seed.

A teaspoon of kosher salt, and then some herb flavor.

I have two bay leaves, and six sprigs of thyme.

This is just coming up to a boil.

I'm going to turn the heat down to a simmer and cover this for 30 minutes.

♪ ♪ - Et voilà!

What we're going to do is take out the carrots, the celery, bay leaf, and thyme.

Because they've done their job.

And then this flavorful broth is now ready to receive the lentils.

We're going to use green French lentils, which are similar to the Indian green masoor dal.

They cook very quickly, they have a lovely texture, and they hold their shape, but we want to make sure not to overcook them.

So I have here a cup and a half and I'm going to bring this back up to a boil.

And again these want to cook for 30 to 35 minutes, not more.

All right, Chris, it's been 30 minutes, and they're looking good, they're not mushy, which is one of the things that can happen with this recipe if you overcook the lentils.

Grab our garlic and we're going to drain the lentils but we're going to reserve the cooking water because we're going to use some of it in our dressing.

Thank you.

The shallots we saw at the beginning that had been pickling, these are ready now to be added to the hot lentils.

What they're going to do is actually absorb most of that pickling liquid.

Now these are delicate lentils so we want to be gentle.

Okay, so this just needs to cool to room temperature.

And when we come back we're going to build our dressing.

All right, so we're going to start building our dressing, Chris.

And to do that, the reserved garlic, which is very soft by now, I'm going to just squeeze out.

This is a technique we use a lot in different recipes at Milk Street.

- Well, we do it in stews, soups.

And also it's easy to do, you don't have to mince garlic, slice garlic, grate garlic.

- So I'm just going to go ahead and mash this garlic.

This will form the base of our dressing.

- So since these were whole cloves, they weren't broken down, you're not going to get that intensely garlic flavor afterwards.

It's much milder, right?

- Mm-hmm, it's much, much milder.

Safe for a date.

(laughter) You get all the flavor of the garlic without that really intense bite.

We're going to add to this one tablespoon of olive oil, a half-teaspoon of kosher salt, and a quarter-cup of the reserved lentil cooking liquid.

And that is our very simple and efficient dressing.

So, let's go ahead and add that to our cooled lentils.

Now we're going to add our star ingredient, crumbled gorgonzola cheese.

This is half-cup and I'm going to add half of the half-cup, so a quarter-cup.

- Now we do have to say, Yotam Ottolenghi, the concept of gorgonzola lentils was...

I first found in one of his books.

So, we need to give Yotam credit for this.

- Definitely.

And we want to make sure to use fresh gorgonzola, not pre-crumbled gorgonzola.

And to add some crunch and bite, I have a half-cup of toasted and chopped walnuts.

I'm going to add half of them now and keep the rest for garnish.

And last of all I have a half-cup of chopped parsley.

Some color and herbal notes.

I'll give it a stir.

All right, and that's our salad.

Let's plate this and then we can taste it.

I'm going to add the remaining gorgonzola on top.

And the rest of our walnuts.

And here we go, lentil salad with gorgonzola.

Are you ready for a taste?

- I'm always ready for a taste long before you offer me a taste, as you well know.

(laughter) May I begin?

- Bon appetit.

- I have to wait till the host starts, right?

Is that right?

Mmm.

You know the classic lentil salad does have great depth of flavor.

If you go to a French bistro, you know, it's got that earthy thing.

But this has creaminess with the gorgonzola, it's got the pickled shallots, it's got so many other things going on.

So, if you like lentils, this lentil salad with gorgonzola might be just the thing for you.

And it would be great on a Saturday night, as well as on a Tuesday night.

Thank you, Rayna.

- You're very welcome, Chris.

♪ ♪ - You know, over the years you and I have done lots of chocolate cookies, right?

- Yes.

- We're looking for a very particular style, which means sort of glazed and crackly on the outside, light and sort of fudgy on the inside.

Well, there are two recipes we really like.

There's one from Claudia Fleming.

She was the pastry chef at the Gramercy Tavern.

She wrote a cookbook called The Last Course and we like her recipe.

Its sort of a chocolate brownie cookie.

And then François Payard, who has also worked at Le Bernardin as a pastry chef and at Daniel.

So Erica's going to solve the problem of crispy crunchy on the outside, and light but fudgy on the inside.

- Yeah, and really, really chocolatey, right?

- And really, well I forgot.

- Because that's the most important part.

- The most important part.

- Here we have eight ounces of bittersweet chocolate.

You want to use a chocolate that's between 65% and 70%.

- Cacao?

- (laughs) Yes.

- ...finishing my sentences department.

(Erika chuckles) - And we want this to be finely chopped.

Now we're going to set aside a half a cup of this, it's about two-and-a-half ounces, for later.

And then the rest of it's going to go into this bowl.

Okay, to this chocolate we're going to add four tablespoons of salted butter.

This is a quarter-cup of cocoa powder.

We're using Dutched process cocoa powder, we like the flavor, but you can use either one in this recipe, it'll work.

Either natural or Dutch processed.

And then at last a half teaspoon of espresso powder.

This is instant espresso powder.

And now we're going to go here to the stove.

And here we have a medium saucepan.

It's filled with just an inch of water that I brought to a simmer.

And you don't want the water to be touching the bottom of the bowl.

And then we're going to just gently melt this.

This looks great.

So I'm just going to set this off to the side here to cool a little bit, and we're going to move on to our egg whites.

So here we have three egg whites.

And we're going to add two-thirds of a cup of light brown sugar, lightly packed.

We really liked the flavor that light brown sugar added.

- So you can add the sugar to the egg whites before you start beating?

Most of the time when you do egg whites you add the sugar, slowly.

- You add it slowly, yeah.

I'm about to whisk this.

(laughs) - Give me a moment!

- You do not need to worry.

I'm going to add a teaspoon of vanilla extract and half a teaspoon of kosher salt.

And now we're going to do something that is quite different from the other recipes that we found.

And this was a little trick.

We're going to heat these a little bit.

And that's going to heat up the egg whites, it makes them a little more stable, and it's also going to dissolve the sugar.

- Any chance to use a double boiler more than once in a recipe.

- It's so much fun.

- Erika can't, can't resist it.

- So back we go.

So what we're looking for here, in addition to having the sugar dissolve, is we want to bring it up to 100 degrees Fahrenheit.

We're not looking to cook the whites, we just want to warm them gently.

I'm going to go back to our mixer.

And now we're going to beat this on medium-high speed until it's really light and fluffy.

We're looking for soft, glossy peaks.

And that's going to take about three to four minutes.

(blender whirring) Okay, Chris, this looks great.

You can see it's really pale, it's shiny.

We've got beautiful soft peaks forming here.

So it looks great.

- Mm, we'll see.

- I knew you were going to do that!

- Well, you know.

- Quality control.

- Boy, is that good.

- And if you could hand me that bowl of chocolate, that would be great.

Now you really want it to be warm because you want it to be nice and fluid or else it's going to beat all the air out of the whites.

- So is there something missing, like flour?

- Yeah.

- Or, or this is a... - You noticed that?

- ...flourless chocolate...?

- I did notice.

- No, it is in fact.

- I'm very quick.

- It is, in fact, a flourless cookie, which is, is wonderful.

It gets all of the structure, really, from the egg whites.

And obviously the chocolate will give it a little bit of structure and the cocoa powder.

And I'm going to start by just taking a third of the whites and adding them to the chocolate.

And this just lightens the mixture a little bit.

And you don't have to go all the way.

It's okay if there's a few streaks.

And now I'm going to add the rest.

- Well, as we often say around here, when we visited Claire Ptak at the Violet bakery in East London, she made a big deal about not folding the whites all the way into a batter.

- Right.

We don't really want to have streaks by the end, when we're done because they will show in this cookie because there isn't any other flour in, you know, and in the cake it works a little differently.

But, again, you do want to be mixing the least amount as possible.

So now I'm being really gentle at this point.

I'm going to get to the point where I'm getting close but it's still a little streaky.

We're going to go ahead and add this reserved half-cup of chopped chocolate which because we really liked having little bits of melted chocolate in there.

Because, you know... - Why not?

- In case they weren't chocolatey enough!

(chuckling) Okay, Chris, this looks great.

Okay, now that's done, we're going to go way back over here.

We have two baking sheets set up lined with parchment paper.

And we're going to go ahead, we're using about a one-ounce cookie scoop here.

- Which is what in tablespoons, if you don't have a scoop?

- It's two tablespoons, yeah.

- Okay.

- You can definitely use two spoons, kitchen spoons, and just scoop with one and then transfer it onto the tray.

We want these to be spaced about one-and-a-half inches apart.

We're going to put 12 cookies on each tray.

There we go.

Okay, so we're all set.

These are going to go into a 350 degree oven.

I have a rack set in the upper and lower middle position, so we can bake two trays at once.

They're going to bake for 12 to 14 minutes and I am going to rotate and switch them halfway through.

- Okay, now everyone overbakes their cookies, except you.

Because they look half-baked.

- Right.

- When you take them out, they're not set.

But a chocolate cookie is really hard to tell.

Because you can't look at, like, is the, are the edges underneath browning?

So how do you know...?

- Yeah, you can't go by color.

- So what do you go by?

- So what you want to look for, you want the whole cookie is going to pop up quite dramatically, and the tops are going to be cracked.

But it's going to look moist in between the cracks.

- Okay.

♪ ♪ - Don't these look beautiful, Chris?

- Okay, you can talk all you... - Yeah, yeah, right.

- Let, let Erika discuss them and I'll just eat them, how about that?

- Well, I just want to point out, you've noticed that they are... have flattened quite a bit from when I took them out of the oven.

They baked for 12 minutes until they were puffed and cracked.

- Mm-hmm.

- But still moist in the center.

(laughter) - All I can say is, "Cookie, cookie, cookie starts with C," right?

I mean that's my, my favorite character.

- Right, what else is there to say?

They remain crunchy on the outside, but they're nice and chewy in the center.

- They're incredibly light!

- But they're light but with a huge punch of chocolate flavor.

- Yes.

- Mmm.

- Mmm.

- So we were in pursuit of the chocolate meringue cookie, which is a flourless cookie, more like a souffle, actually, than a cookie.

And the trick was to whisk the brown sugar and the whites on a double boiler to fully dissolve the sugar, and that gives you the nice crackly outer crust.

And the rest of it is pretty much business as usual, chocolate and cocoa powder as well.

Great outside and a really almost liquid, chocolatey inside.

You can get this recipe and all the recipes from this season of Milk Street, at MilkStreetTV.com.

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Please access our content, including our step-by-step recipe videos, from your smartphone, your tablet, or your computer.

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The Milk Street cookbook offers bolder, fresher, simpler recipes.

Order your copy of the Milk Street cookbook for $23.95, 40% less than the cover price, and receive a Milk Street tote with your order at no additional charge.

Call 855-MILK-177, or order online.

- Funding for this series was provided by the following.

- Ferguson's proud to support Milk Street and culinary crusaders everywhere.

For more information on our extensive collection of kitchen products, we're on the web at fergusonshowrooms.com.

- For 25 years, Consumer Cellular has been offering no-contract wireless plans designed to help people do more of what they like.

Our U.S.-based customer service team can help find a plan that fits you.

To learn more, visit ConsumerCellular.tv.

- Since 1899, my family has shared our passion for everything that goes into our Mutti 100% Italian tomatoes.

Only tomatoes.

Only Mutti.

- Designed by cooks for cooks for over 100 years.

Cookware collection by Regal Ware.

Handcrafted in Wisconsin.

- The AccuSharp knife and tool sharpener, designed to safely sharpen knives in seconds.

AccuSharp: Keep your edge.

♪ ♪ ♪ ♪