Daube niçoise

Daube niçoise, Nice’s beef stew in red wine

Daube niçoise (doba à la nissarda in Niçois) is beef braised for hours in red wine with salted pork, onions, carrots, celery, tomatoes and dried cèpes. The Nice Côte d’Azur tourist office calls it an emblematic dish of local cooking. The cook Yann Lefebvre describes it as an old recipe once reserved for modest households, now a symbol of Niçois cooking beside salade niçoise and pan bagnat.

In Nice it does double duty. It is eaten as a stew with pasta, gnocchi or polenta, and its sauce and leftover meat go into ravioli. Our guide to Niçoise cooking lists it with the ravioli that traditionally follow it. Leftover daube also fills petits farcis.

How cooks in Nice make daube

Daube niçoise is a family dish: a France 3 report filmed in a former oil mill at Blausasc, inland from Nice, says each family has its own recipe. The differences are in the marinade, the thickening and when the vegetables go in.

Version	Meat	Method	Finish
Cuisine Nissarde label	Cheek, chuck and gîte, 200 g salted pork	No marinade; brown, flambé with marc brandy, 3 to 4 h on very low heat	Dried cèpes in the last hour; fresh pasta or gnocchi
Chef at Blausasc, France 3 (2026)	Chuck (collier) in big cubes, lightly seared	Tomato paste, stock from the previous day’s daube, 2 h 30	Carrots for the last hour; creamy polenta with olive tapenade
Yann Lefebvre (2024)	Cheek, gîte or paleron	12 h wine marinade, flour, Cognac, 130 °C oven for 2 h	Cèpes added, 2 h more
L’Ane Rouge, Nice (2017)	Beef shank marinated in red wine	One daube, three dishes	Stew, sauce with gnocchi, leftover meat in ravioli

The France 3 chef sears the meat only lightly and keeps the cubes large, so they hold together after three hours. For a home cook without stock left from a previous daube, he suggests water with a little veal or beef stock powder, boiled with a carrot and two onions.

Choosing the meat, wine and cèpes

The label calls for a “daube du boucher”, the butcher’s mix of cheek, chuck (paleron) and gîte à la noix. Yann Lefebvre also names cheek and gîte as lean choices and paleron as a more gelatinous one. A single braising cut works if you cannot get the mix.

Pick a red wine you would drink; Yann Lefebvre uses a Provence red. Marc brandy is the label’s choice, and cognac does the same job. Salted pork (petit salé) can be replaced by unsmoked streaky bacon, as Lefebvre uses bacon lardons.

Cooking daube at home

A heavy cast-iron pot with a tight lid is what the label uses. If your hob will not hold a very low simmer, use the oven: the label suggests finishing in a closed pot at 140 °C, and Lefebvre cooks the whole dish at 130 °C. Both give an even heat.

Tomatoes are easy to peel: score a cross on the base, put them in boiling water for 1 minute, then in cold water for 1 minute, as Lefebvre does. The seasoning, with thyme, bay and a clove-studded onion, is the label’s; Maison Tosello, a Nice producer, also adds nutmeg, oregano and herbes de Provence in its 2014 video.

Serving daube niçoise

Serve daube niçoise with fresh pasta, potato gnocchi or creamy polenta, with plenty of sauce. The label recommends fresh pasta or potato gnocchi. For polenta, the France 3 chef cooks it in half water and half milk, using four times as much liquid as polenta, and stirs in olive tapenade.

Keep leftovers: the sauce seasons ravioli, and the chopped meat with its carrots and a little juice is the traditional filling. Do not add orange zest if you plan this.