Daube Provençale
Beef marinated in red wine with orange peel and cooked for three and a half hours. Provence rather than Burgundy — olives, orange and no bacon.
Photograph credit: Daube3 (image of Daube on Wikidata Q517394) by gerard cohen · Public domain · Wikimedia Commons
Dried orange peel is the ingredient that makes a daube a daube rather than a bourguignon, and it goes in with the marinade so it has time to give up its oils. The marinating is not optional either — overnight in the wine both flavours the meat and, more usefully, means the wine has already lost its raw edge before the long cook begins. Do not brown the meat too hard after marinating: wet meat will not colour, so pat it genuinely dry first.
Questions About Daube Provençale
How long does Daube Provençale take to make?
30 minutes of preparation and 3 hours 30 minutes of cooking, plus 12 hours of marinating overnight, so allow 16 hours from start to finish. The recipe serves 6.
The Method for Daube Provençale
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Combine the beef with all the marinade ingredients, cover, and refrigerate at least 720 minutes.
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Lift the meat out and pat it thoroughly dry. Strain the marinade, keeping both the liquid and the vegetables.
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Brown the dried beef hard in the oil in batches, 10 minutes total. Lift out.
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Fry the drained marinade vegetables 10 minutes, then stir in the tomato purée and cook 2 minutes.
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Return the beef, pour in the strained marinade and the stock, add the salt, and bring to a bare simmer.
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Cover and cook very gently 180 minutes, or in a 150°C / 300°F oven, until the beef gives to a spoon.
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Add the olives and cook 20 minutes more. Skim the fat, scatter with parsley and fresh orange zest, and serve with potatoes or pasta.
Related guide: Prep, cook and total time.
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Worth Getting Right
- Dried orange peel. It is what separates this from a bourguignon.
- Pat the meat properly dry or it will not brown.
- Olives at the end — an hour in the pot makes them bitter.
Changing the Recipe
- An eighth of a teaspoon of garlic powder per clove is the stand-in usually given when you are out of fresh garlic; it will not brown the same way, and it burns easily, so add it with the liquid.
Pairs Well With
Buttered pasta · Country bread · A glass of Bandol
Sides from the same cuisine on this site: Brioche Loaf, French Baguette, Aligot.
Keeping and Reheating
Refrigerated for 4 days and much better on day two. It freezes for 3 months.
Nutrition per Serving
No nutrition figures are given for this recipe: they cannot be worked out reliably from its ingredient list (some ingredient lines cannot be read). Why some recipes have none.
Your notes on this recipe
Cooked this? Keep a note for next time
Compiled by Turab
Checked by script for timings, diet labels and nutrition arithmetic. How the recipes are checked. Found a mistake? Tell us.
First published ; last changed .
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