Please help me salvage this beef bourgignon dinner!!

[gerbo]

Cooked a beef bourgignon style stew today for visiting family to have tomorrow. It contains a whole bottle of red wine and 400ml of stock too, and only just squeezes into my le creuset.

It works beautifully normally and tastes great.

However a friend distracted me today from removing it from the oven (my silly fault) and it had about an extra hour. Seemed very low on liquid, not burned though. So I put in some wine I had left over to make more sauce, however now it tasted a bit acrid and bitter!!!! Help!!! Costs loads to make (two packs of beef, loads of veg and bottle of wine) and takes two and half hours to cook.

Worried that if I boil it up for a while to burn off the winey taste the meat will collapse. Shall I give that a go? It just tastes like red wine in a pot a the moment and is a bit strong to say the least. Yuk.

What would you do?????

can you remove the meat and veg with a slotted spoon and set aside, and reduce the sauce separately? you can add them back at the end to just heat through

Agree, take all the 'filling' out and burn off the alcohol. Or just let is cook for even longer, you could even try to flambe it to help the alcohol burn off quicker.

Tanks for your ideas. I'm doing that now....have removed filling and now reducing sauce left over with a little more beef stock added too. Fingers crossed.

It seems much better now but because it cooked for so long the meat has def broken up quite a lot and there aren't many big chunks left. It tastes much better.

Is that still serveable or more of a beef soup now? Wondering whether to just go to mars and spencer and cheat.....would you mind being served that if it tasted ok but had few meat pieces left????? Confidence crisis!

If you have tomato purée, add a little, it will help neutralise the bitterness from the wine.

it sounds delicious, don't worry.

I like it best when the beef is disintegrating - don't worry, it'll be fine.

I like it fine when the meat is falling apart, but could you serve it as a very posh pasta sauce if you feel it is too far gone?

My (French!) MIL always does this with bourgignon left overs. She does it with very nice fresh pasta, lots of parsley, a hint of chilli and fresh parmesan. She sometimes does it as a bake with fresh lasagne sheets and spinach, it is mega.

Just a suggestion in case you think the meat is too far gone to hold enough to go with veg.

Thank you all for your help. Mumsnet comes up trumps yet again! Fantastic. Will discuss with husband and def use pasta sauce option if it's too broken down.