Sauce Espagnole and Beef Stew

Sauce Espagnole. Also known as "brown sauce," it is a strong-flavored, rich, dark sauce that serves as the basis for a true demi-glace, as well as often being used in classic French recipes like Beef Bourguignon. It can be made vegetarian through the simple removal of the lardons or bacon and substituting the beef stock with vegetable.
As always, La Rousse:

Espagnole Sauce: A brown sauce, which is used as a basis for a large number of derivative brown sauces, such as Robert, genevoise, bordelaise, Bercy, Madeira, and Périgueux. It is made with a brown stock to which a brown roux and a mirepoix are added, followed by a tomato purée. Cooking takes several hours and the sauce needs to be skimmed, stirred, and strained.

So, first things first, the Mirepoix:


Mirepoix Ingredients:
1 part celery, diced
2 parts onion, diced
1 part carrot, diced
1/2 part (by volume) streaky bacon or lardons

Method
1. Melt just enough butter in the pan to thinly coat the bottom.
2. Let the onion and carrots sweat briefly, then add celery and lardons.
3. Cover and cook on medium for about 20 minutes.

You will not use much of this mixture for the Espagnole, so set all but about half a cup aside to store in the freezer. Mirepoix, once made, comes in handy in all sorts of stocks and soups!
The next step is to make a brown roux:



Like a blonde roux, the recipe includes using equal parts butter and flour (by weight), melting, and letting the flour toast. However, unlike the blonde, you allow the process to carry on until the mixture has formed a deep, chestnut color. For our Espagnole, we used 25 grams of both butter and flour, which works out to 2 tablespoons butter and 1/4 cup flour.

Mix the roux with 1/2 a cup mirepoix, and then combine with 1 cup chopped mushrooms and a can of chopped tomatoes. Add 1 liter of beef stock, along with thyme, chervil, and parsley, and simmer uncovered for 4 hours.


After cooking, skim the sauce and strain through a cheesecloth to get all the veggies out. Even though they'd had--as my high school bio teacher would say--"the snot and vitamins cooked out of them", I was sad throwing all those good vegetables away. Of course, the sauce was flavorful and completely saturated with the taste of carrots, celery, onion, tomatoes, mushrooms, and bacon (!), we decided to make a stew that could reincorporate them in some way.

First, we browned a pound of cheap beef with simple herbs:

And then stewed it with the sauce, in the oven, covered, for about 4 hours at 250˚ F. Three or so hours in, we added some diced butternut squash and reincorporated the veggies from before, along with about 1/2 a cup of reduced red wine and the juice of half a lemon. This made for the most hearty, deepest-flavored stew I'd ever had, and it tasted delicious on couscous (though I couldn't fault anyone who wanted to cook up some simple dumplings or egg pasta to accompany it instead). I don't have any photos of the stew, though, because all stew is incredibly unphotogenic.

It was wonderful.