Wednesday, April 10, 2013

Beef in wine sauce

Our freezer is getting low on beef. We're completely out of roasts; we're getting low on ground beef; and our selections of steaks is becoming a bit more limited. We'll be butchering a bull calf and a steer at the end of the month, so we'll just hang on until then.

Meanwhile I wanted to do something new and different with the steak meat we had. Usually I just broil it and serve it with a butter gravy which, don't get me wrong, is great; but wouldn't it be nice to have something different?

So I wondered if I could make a wine sauce for steak. Pork chops in wine sauce is already a family favorite, so I thought steak in wine sauce might work well.

So I started by cutting the meaty portions out of some steak meat, and browning it in a pan.


While the meat browned, I pulled out my wine sauce recipe.


The wine sauce consists of:

1/2 cup olive oil
1/2 cup flour
1 cup dry white wine
4 cups chicken broth

However since I was using red meat, I decided to use red wine (instead of white) in the sauce to see what happened. Please note that I loathe red wine (to me, it's like drinking liquid wood, yuck) but we had been given a bottle at Christmas and we might as well use it for something. I like the taste of red wine when it's in a savory dish; just don't ask me to drink a glass. Yuck.

Anyway, I assembled the ingredients.


I heated the oil and flour.


The mixture doesn't thicken until the wine is added. Red wine made the mixture look uncannily like the filling for chocolate cream pie.


Drizzling in the chicken broth.


By this point the meat was ready to flip, to brown on the other side.


When the meat was browned, I put it in the Crockpot and poured the red wine sauce over it (a cloud of steam came up). By the way, heat denatures the alcohol in the wine, so the sauce has a wine taste but no alcohol content.


I did all this in the morning, and set the Crockpot on low for the day. Man I love my Crockpot.


By dinner, the meat was fork-tender and the wine sauce was absolutely delicious over rice.


This recipe is a definite keeper, and once we have our steer in the freezer, it will be even better with a roast.

6 comments:

  1. That sounds really yummy. I've got some steaks in the freezer - we'll be trying this recipe later this week!

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  2. If you do not like red wine but like to use it for sauces, as we do, you can use port instead which will keep far longer once opened. The flavour is some times far stronger so you sometimes only need around half the usual quantity. A bottle of port will be usable for the better part of a year once opened!

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  3. I bet you're missing out if you're not deglazing the meat browning pan with some wine and adding that to the sauce. There's a lot of flavor in that pan.

    I'll try this one.

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  4. The recipe looks delish.... I will definitely make this one. Thanks for sharing.

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  5. This looks great! As of late I've been struggling to come up with dinner ideas, thank you!

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  6. For those that don't like the flavor of wine, try making this with french onion soup instead. Mama was an extreme teetotaler. No booze in the house even if it had no alcohol! I never learned to like the flavor of beer batter, wine sauce, or anything similar. There's always a way around, though, to give a dish good flavor. Try apple cider in BBQ sauce instead of whiskey. Delish!

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