BRAISING BEEF
Check out the story after these two recipes for bunches of info on braising beef.
RECIPE: Braised Oxtail
Adapted and prepared by Bill St. John and Madeleine St. John from “Queue de Boeuf,” Claude Peyrot, Le Vivarois, Paris. Serves 4
Ingredients
8-10 pieces of oxtail
Clarified butter or ghee for browning
2 carrots, peeled and chopped
2 shallots, finely chopped
1 small onion, finely chopped
2 stalks celery, chopped
1 clove garlic, finely minced
1 bouquet garni (sprigs of parsley and thyme and 1 bay leaf, tied with kitchen twine)
1/2 cup veal or rich chicken stock
1 bottle (or less) good red wine
4 tablespoons unsalted butter, at room temperature
Salt and freshly ground black pepper to taste
Directions
Brown the pieces of oxtail in the clarified butter or ghee. Set aside. In the same pan, lightly brown the cut-up vegetables, including the garlic, adding a slight amount of butter if necessary. Return the oxtail to the pan, in a single layer if possible, and add the bouquet garni. Pour in the veal or chicken stock and enough red wine to barely cover the meat.
Cover the pan and braise in a 300-degree oven for 3 and 1/2 hours, turning the meat over once, or until the meat is very tender and beginning to fall off the bone. To serve, remove the meat to a warmed platter and strain the pan juices. Reduce the juices by half and bind it by whisking in the 4 tablespoons of butter. Pour the sauce over the oxtail pieces to finish.
Pour just enough braising liquid to come up halfway on the meat.
RECIPE: Beef Back Ribs Agrodolce
Serves 6-8
Ingredients
Handful of dried porcini mushrooms
10-12 meaty beef back ribs (about 6 pounds), or beef short ribs in the same measure
1/2 pound guanciale, pancetta or thick-cut prosciutto, cut into small chunks or thick sticks
Extra-virgin olive oil
Salt and freshly ground black pepper
3 medium onions, roughly chopped
3 carrots, roughly chopped
2 ribs celery, chopped on bias
6-8 cloves garlic, roughly chopped
3 tablespoons tomato paste
Leaves from 3 sprigs rosemary and several branches each of thyme and sage
3 bay leaves
1 quart beef stock
2-3 cups 100 percent tart (not "black") cherry juice
1/2 cup aged balsamic vinegar (see note), or more to taste
1/2 cup honey
2/3 cup large golden raisins (sometimes called "sultanas")
1/4 cup pine nuts, lightly pan-toasted
Flat-leaf parsley leaves, chopped.
Directions
In a small heatproof bowl or cup, soak the porcini in hot liquid (you may use some of the cherry juice or the beef stock, or just water) for 1/2 hour. Drain, squeeze and rinse them, reserving the soaking liquid. Chop coarsely.
Take a large ovenproof Dutch oven or pot and, in sufficient oil and over medium-high, brown the ribs all over as best you can (the ribs' curved sides will be difficult of course). Set them aside and season generously with salt and pepper. Crisp the cured pork so that it's browned all over as well, 15-20 minutes over medium or medium-low heat. Set it aside with the ribs.
Over medium to medium-high heat, soften and turn golden the onions, carrots, celery and garlic, making sure not to burn the garlic, adding more oil if necessary, 8-10 minutes. Add the tomato paste, herbs and bay leaves, and then enough of the beef stock or cherry juice to deglaze the pot, turning the heat to high and scraping the pot's sides and bottom of any brown bits. Add the liquid in which the porcini had been soaked, being sure to catch any dirt from going in. To the pot, add back the ribs, porcini, cured pork pieces, the balsamic vinegar, honey, and then enough beef stock and cherry juice just to cover everything, stirring well to distribute all the ingredients.
Cover the Dutch oven or pot and bring everything to a heady simmer atop the stove, then place in a slow oven, 200-250 degrees, depending on the size of the pot and your oven, so that the braise can cook slowly for 2 and 1/2 hours. Check the braise 2-3 times during that period, stirring everything up again and distributing the flavors, adding more heated liquid if necessary.
When the beef is cooked through and beginning to separate from the bone, remove the ribs with tongs, setting them aside, and strain the liquid through a large colander into a large bowl, reserving all the solids (vegetables, pork pieces, porcini). Go through the solids, removing any twigs or stems and the bay leaves. Mash half the solids into something like knobby mashed potatoes. Defat the liquid in the bowl (chilling it overnight works well; the fat rises and solidifies).
To serve: To the defatted liquid, add the golden raisins and pine nuts, heating the liquid and softening the raisins, about 20-30 minutes. Add the solids and the mash, stirring and heating through. You should now have a nice, thick, very dark sauce with which the nap the ribs and anything you serve with them. Adjust the overall seasoning for salt and pepper and especially the sweet-sour balance of the sauce, if necessary, with a bit more balsamic or honey. Garnish servings with the parsley.
Note: From Italy and elsewhere, balsamic vinegar comes in many stripes nowadays. What you're after here, for this recipe, is not the cheap, caramelized, very tart vinegar sold under the name "balsamic" (from wherever) that is thin and should be used for salad dressing only, if that. You're after aged balsamic, which also is called merely "vinegar," but which is also more expensive, thicker, and slightly sweeter than the other stuff. Sometimes the Italians sell it as "condimento," although that term is rare. (If you see a condimento for under $30 a bottle, buy it.) Aged balsamic will cost anywhere from $10-$30 for a bottle sized 8.5 ounces and up.
STORY: When you think about it, we have two ways only to heat beef in order to eat it, dry ways and wet ways.
Dry heat ways with beef are the familiar pan-searing or grilling over flame or other heat.
Wet ways include any sort of braise, of which the stew is the most traditional, but also any use of a liquid to heat a pot roast in a slow-cooker or pressure cooker. Praise the braise.
I submit that many a straightforward oven “roast” is also a wet way, even though a hunk of beef is merely placed inside a hot, dry oven. That so-called dry heat cooking coaxes moisture from within the beef roast by breaking down—in essence, making into moisture—elements such as fat, cartilage and other connective tissue that slowly wet-cook the roast, along with the oven’s dry heat. A salt-based rub (tellingly termed, on occasion, “a dry brine”) just wheedles more wet from the meat.
But the true rub comes from having to choose the correct cut of beef to which to apply either dry or wet heat. Cuts of beef such as the tenderloin are ill-served as pot roasts; likewise, straightaway slapping on the grill a thick eye of round is a costly mistake.
But how to choose correctly when butchers give so many—truly an unwieldy plethora—of names to cuts of beef? The other day, just at my neighborhood Safeway, I found beef steaks labeled “flat iron,” “tri-tip,” “chuck eye tenders” (as distinct from the mere “chuck tenders” nearby?), “cross rib tender,” as well as the mainline “T-bone,” “brisket” and “top sirloin” and so on.
Grill ‘em or braise ‘em? Don’t easily know.
In a big way, it helps to know from where on the beef carcass (usually a steer’s, but sometimes a heifer’s) comes the meat. In one axiom of the cook’s trade, “The higher off the hoof, the tenderer the meat.” (Easy exceptions are several parts of both the round and the chuck, not to say the tongue or cheek.)
“When a carcass is broken down,” says Justin Brunson, founder of River Bear American Meats, “it’s split down the middle and then each half into four pieces.” Often enough, however, smaller cuts of beef (such as steaks) do not reference these primal or sub-primal cuts.
A bigger issue is that large sections of a primal such as the chuck, for example, can be very tough while other sections are rather tender.
Dry Cooking:
One key to finding more tender and better value portions of any beef is to discover what used to be called “butcher cuts,” those parts of the carcass that only butchers knew about and hence saved back for themselves and their families.
Note that the butchers weren’t being merely selfish. Many of those so-called butcher cuts were too closely associated with (and often, in fact, were part of) larger and less desirable sections of beef such as the shoulder or the diaphragm.
“One of those butcher cuts,” Brunson points out, “the tri-tip, comes out of the sirloin and so does the sirloin cap” (this latter found often in Latin markets as “picanha,” “picaña” or “bistec de palomilla”). He adds, “the hanger steak is another [butcher’s cut], and so is the flat iron.” The hanger steak is so named because it “hangs” from the toughly-muscled diaphragm (in a sense more correctly, the diaphragm hangs from it) and the flat iron resembles an old-fashioned laundry iron.
Wet cooking or braising:
For wet cooking such as any braise or stew, it’s best to use the gnarliest cuts, those sporting a lot of connective tissue (cartilage, tendons holding onto bones, the bones themselves) and to especially use pieces with visible veins of fat.
All of these break down during the braise and moisten the meat to which they were once attached. They “baste” the beef pieces as they cook over their several hours in the liquid in the oven.
But to underscore the most important, trusted technique in braising: Brown the meat very well. This causes the Maillard effect, a chemical reaction that explains the caramelization of proteins and sugars in browned foods of any sort (cookies, steaks, caramel itself, and roasted vegetables, for instance). It is named after Louis Camille Maillard who discovered it in the early 1900s.
To get there, be sure to allow ample space in between the pieces of beef chuck, say, or lamb shoulder as they brown atop the stove before the actual braise begins. Cooks who crowd the pieces of meat merely steam them. Browning also creates what the French call “fond” (the browned bits at the bottom of the pot post-Maillard) which is, as it indicates, the foundation to the rich tastes of the sauce to come as the result of the braise itself.
Deglaze the fond in the pan with a small amount of white or red wine (depending on the heaviness of the meat) or low-sugar apple cider or tart cherry juice; one cup should do. Then, when adding the liquid with which you are going to braise the meat—broth preferably, although plain water works too—pour in just enough to come up halfway on the meat.
Don’t use wine or juice alone as the braising liquid. In the end, the sauce might well become too strong and clumsy.
Deglaze with wine (or juice); braise with broth.
I always thought that it was important to cover the meat with the braising liquid, but that’s unwise. In truth, that diffuses flavors. Also, the meat (and vegetables, if you’re using) will give off quite a lot of their own moisture, so dearth it with the fluid.
Overall, successful browning and braising mean to pick and use a proper pot. A good browning requires a heavy-bottomed Dutch oven or casserole. And a large, wide-open pot is better than a high-walled one. For the braise, the meat ought to lay on the bottom in one layer, with the braising liquid poured evenly around it.
When you have some downtime in your kitchen, make ahead both some classic bouquets garnis and also a few bouquets d’épices. The former are sprigs of thyme and parsley and a bay leaf tied together with kitchen twine. And the latter are the same, in a small cheesecloth sachet, tied at the neck with twine, that also includes a few peppercorns and a clove of peeled garlic.
For my bouquets garnis I like to use a green “leaf” of a leek as the wrap. Both types of bouquets can be frozen and used as needed. You’ll need one or the other to flavor the braise as it cooks, then remove it for service.
Finally, I also had thought that the braising vegetables—carrots and onions are common, but turnips, celery, mushrooms and potatoes also play—should go in with the meat. But a braise usually lasts a long time (two hours isn’t uncommon) and can make mush out of vegetables as well as turn bland their flavors.
Add vegetables about an hour (depending on their cut-up sizes, perhaps as little as 45 minutes) before you estimate the braise will finish. Some of the fresh flavors will retain themselves and that’s a bonus.
If you’ve got a butcher in the vein of a Brunson at your disposal, you’re in luck and may simply ask them from where comes the cut of beef and about it. But if you’re like most of us, it’s you who will need to educate yourself, something I find people sadly reluctant to do.
But that’s what online search engines are for and they are simply great at their job. Because my butcher is, often enough, google.com, I can research and find pretty much anything I’d like to know about any cut of meat and certainly many recipes by which to cook it.