Braised Chuck

Thought provoking title I know.  This meal was another derived from our pack of Chianina Beef.  We have had some lovely meals from these cuts and this meal was no exception.  This pack was about 1.5kg of chuck on the bone.

The recipe came from Neil Perry’s Rockpool Bar and Grill.  This an impressive book, both in size and presentation.  I pretty much bought it for one recipe – insane I know, but hey, we are talking cookbooks here.  That recipe was seared king prawns with goat’s cheese tortellini, burnt butter, pine nuts and raisins.   Haven’t made it yet but I will.  Having said that, the more I look through this book, the more I like it.

The recipe was wagyu chuck braised in red wine with gremolata and potato puree.  This was one of the richest braises I’ve had – very good though.

Firstly cook 1 diced carrot, 1 diced onion, 1 diced celery stalk, 50g of chopped prosciutto and a head of garlic halved in 80ml of olive oil.  Cook for 15 mins or so until veges are well caramelised.  Add 500ml of port and simmer until liquid reduced by half.  Then add 1litre red wine, 10 sprigs of thyme, 2 bay leaves and 10 peppercorns.  Continue simmering until liquid reduced by half.   Meanwhile, brown the chuck in hot pan and seal on all sides.  Place beef and braise into a covered casserole and cook in a 150C oven for 3 to 4 hours .

When beef is fork tender remove from sauce and keep warm.  Strain sauce.  Heat 80ml of olive oil in a pan add 1 carrot, 1 onion, 1 leek and 1 stick of celery all finely diced.  Add 3 garlic cloves sliced and cook for 10 mins until starting to colour and caramelise.  Add strained sauce and 2 1/2 tbsp of balsamic vinegar and cook until sauce is a thick glaze.  Add a little sugar to sweeten if needed and season to taste.

Smokin’

I have a new toy, sorry important piece of barbecue kit.  It’s a Weber Smoky Mountain.

Its burns charcoal and produces a long, low temperature cooking environment that is enhanced by the smoke produced by the addition of hickory chunks.

I’ve been fascinated by US style BBQ for some time and this gives me a chance to give it a go for myself.   So far I’ve cooked brisket, pork ribs and pork shoulder with varying degrees of success.  I think my downfall thus far has been not cooking the chunkier meats long enough.

Anyway, here are a couple of pics of the brisket I tried first up.

The brisket recipe comes from Heat and Smoke, by Bob Hart.  If you are looking for a book to get you into BBQin’, I think this would be it.  Basically the brisket is rubbed with a spice mix prior to cooking, mopped with a sauce every hour while cooking and then served with BBQ sauce on rolls with coleslaw.   The BBQ sauce in particular is very good. It is a mixture of:

1 1/2 cups tomato sauce
1/4 cup cider vinegar
1/4 cup molasses
1/4 cup water (though I left out)
a splash of liquid smoke (yes, I brought some of this back from the US)
and 2 tbsp of the BBQ rub
also added a dash of bourbon as recommended

The ribs I smoked turned out quite well.  I didn’t get any pics but served them with coleslaw and jalopeno cornbread, both recipes coming from Al Brown’s Stoked, another worthy BBQin’ cookbook.  The cornbread served us for the rest of the week.  To make jalopeno cornbread saute 1 1/2 cups finely chopped onion and 1/4 cup canned jalopenos in 1/3 cup olive oil until onion is transparent and soft.  Place in a large mixing bowl with 4 cups of roughly chopped corn kernals, 3 cups of polenta, 250ml of buttermilk, 2 1/2 cups of grated cheddar cheese and 2 tsp of salt.  Gently fold 9 egg yolks that have been whisked until creamy into 9 egg whites that have been whisked to soft peaks.  Fold egg mixture into the corn and onion mix and pour into 2 lined bread tins or a ovenproof frying pan.  I used a cast iron frying pan.  Cook in a 160C oven for 45 mins until golden and firm.

Slice as you need and brown up on a grill to serve.

Below is the turned out cornbread and also a few friands that I have been cooking quite a few of lately.

Heston at Home

We and 2 other couples have been hosting each other for dinner for 15 or so years.  We are all into our food and wine so these are the nights when the good bottles of wine come out and quite a bit of thought and effort goes into putting a menu together.   These dinners are not quite culinary wars but we do strive to impress.

Last night I cooked from Heston Blumenthal at home.  This as it turns out is a pretty good book.  I would say of the five courses I cooked, time management and prep are the things you need to look out for rather than the cooking being super tricked up (though I did use sous vide for one course and dry ice to make ice cream in another).

First up I served Red cabbage gazpacho.  Can’t say I’ve juiced a cabbage before, but I have now.  This dish is successful because of the combination of the acidity of the red cabbage juice/mayonnaise mixture balancing with the sweetness of a scoop of mustard ice cream.  A  fresh start to a meal.  The gazpacho is poured around the ice cream at the table.

Red Cabbage Gazpacho – wine match 2011 Grosset Polish Hill Riesling

Then it was on to snail porridge.  Sounds bad, tastes great.  This dish is all about savoury flavours and texture.  The oats are swelled with stock then flavoured with parsley butter. Parma ham, sautéed snails and fennel on top.  I love it.

Snail Porridge – wine match 2010 Cape Mentelle Chardonnay

For main we had salmon with bois boudran sauce.  The bois boudran sauce is essentially a spiced up tomato and onion sauce containing sherry vinegar, worcestershire sauce, soy sauce, dijon mustard, olive oil, tarragon and parsley.  On top of the plated sauce were crushed potatoes followed by the salmon which was cooked sous vide for 15mins at 50C before having the skin quickly browned up in the frying pan.  The salmon was vacuum packed with olive oil prior to being cooked.  The texture of the fish was terrific.

Salmon with Bois Boudran sauce – wine match 1996 Domaine Fourrier Gevrey Chambertin Combe Aux Moines 1er Cru

We had a Heston interlude at this stage to enjoy a 1994 Henschke Mt Edelstone Shiraz (which was drinking beautifully) with some hard goats cheese from the Vic Market’s French Deli.

I think the next dish, Pain perdu with bacon and egg ice cream, was probably the hit of the night.  And also the best fun to make.  The ice cream was a three day process.  Firstly milk is infused with cooked bacon overnight.  Then a very eggy custard with 24 egg yolks is made (yes, lots of meringues and friands to make today).  Finally the mixture is turned in to ice cream by the addition of crushed dry ice.  With all the vapour flowing out of the mixer, it looks like a mad science experiment, but the result is very smooth, yummy ice cream.  The pain perdu is caramelized french toast I guess, but again the process takes a day.  Served with a slice of caramelized bacon.

Pain perdu with bacon and egg ice cream – wine match 2002 Three Bridges Botrytis Semillon

Finally, as if we hadn’t eaten enough, liquid centred chocolate puddings.  The liquid centre is achieved by placing a block of frozen chocolate ganache  inside the cake mixture before cooking.  Works a treat.  Did I need to eat the whole pudding?  No.  Did I?  Absolutely!

Liquid centre chocolate pudding – wine match Jones Olorosso

La Cucina

La Cucina purports to be Italy’s most complete and authentic cookbook.  It may well be.  900 odd pages, no pictures, more than 2000 recipes each referencing region of origin makes it a mighty reference, the type of book I like to have a few of.

I also like eggplant, especially deep fried – the crunch and flavour of the skin is wonderful.  So I was able to combine this craving with the requirement to keep pasta up to a hungry rower by making Pasta alla Norma from La Cucina.  I’ve made variants of this before but this recipe also required ricotta salata which I substituted with feta.

Its a fairly simple recipe.  Most of the time and effort is spent deep frying the eggplant in batches.  While you are doing that, make a tomato sauce of 2 cans tomato puree, 1/4 cup of olive oil, 1 sliced onion, salt and pepper.  Cook this in a pan until it has reduced by 1/3.  Cook your pasta (I used Barilla Casarecce).  Drain and add 50 g crumbled feta, the tomato sauce, a handful of basil leaves and some more pepper.  Combine well.  Serve up and top with eggplant some more feta and a few basil leaves.

We have also been continuing on with our Isola Farm beef pack.  We used one of the 1.5kg mince packs on the weekend by making a cottage pie with Guinness on Saturday and burgers on Sunday.  For the burgers I made brioche burger buns using the recipe here.  The dough is quite wet so the moulds mentioned in the recipe would have been useful but I think they turned out quite well.

Bistecca

Tonight was the first look at beef from the Isola Farm Chianina meat pack.  I used a couple of the steaks – enough to feed our family of four.  So I guess this was as close to Bistecca Fiorentina that I was going to get without actually going to Tuscany.  The recipe is easy.  Cook steak to you liking, season post cooking and drizzle with some olive oil.

Good looking meat isn’t it!

Tasted good too!

I also cooked a side of Mixed roast vegetables out of Tessa Kiros’ Twelve – A Tuscan Cookbook.  This I think was her first cookbook but she has been prolific since then with at least 6 in total that I know of.  It’s a good looking book with lots of homely recipes.  Twelve presents Tuscan recipes divided seasonally by month and this recipe comes from August.

You will need 1 eggplant, 2 zucchinis, 1 red capsicum, 2 potatoes, 3 tomatoes and 1 red onion.  Thinly slice all the vegetables and in the case of the eggplant, salt and allow to drain.  Place 2 tbsp of olive oil in the bottom of a large oven dish and then arrange the veges in lines and layers.  Drizzle the assembled veges with 6 tbsp olive oil, add 3/4 cup of water and season well.  Cook in a 200C oven for 50 to 60 mins.

In My Kitchen

In my kitchen is…….

a box that I am very excited about….

from Isola Farm in the Gippsland – you can read all about the farm, the cattle and the beef here.  The farm sells 10kg packs of meat, so you receive a selection of cuts and some mince.  Here is what I received….

There are 3 TBones, an eye fillet, a silverside roast, a pack of chuck steak, topside steak, osso bucco and 3kg of mince.  Will be having the first look at some of the TBone tomorrow.

In my kitchen are…..

4 jigsaw plates that arrived for Valentines Day – small plate, medium plate, big plate – take your pick.

 

In my kitchen….

a lot lately has been Thomasina Mier’s “Mexican Food Made Simple”

This is a great book – good recipes, pictures, layout and extra info.  I have made recently an easy peasy peanut mole, a delicious chicken and avocado salad and a killer guacamole a few times.  If you like Mexican food, get this book!

Also check out other In My Kitchen posts on Celia’s site here.

Cooking while on the bike

We had friends over on Sunday for lunch, but I also had to fit in a ride on Sunday morning.  So what better time to do a slow cooked lamb shoulder.  Got up at 530, put the lamb in the oven and took off for 4 hours.  Uncomplicated, simple cooking that delivered an excellent result.

I chose the recipe from Maha.  Maha is a restaurant is Melbourne run by Shane Delia serving Maltese/middle eastern food designed to share.  Its a great little restaurant and like many in the Press Club group has spawned a cookbook, but in this case I am grateful for it.  There is a good mix of recipes with a modern slant and traditional family cooking.

This recipe has 2 distinct parts, spice infusion and cooking.   4 500g pieces of lamb shoulder are called for so I bought a lamb shoulder from Jago meats in the Vic market and they quartered it for me.  I then made a ras el hanout spice mix as per the cookbook and rubber 80g of it into the lamb and left to infuse overnight.

Next morning I sliced 3 onions and halved 2 garlic heads, combined and placed in bottom of a casserole.  On top I placed the lamb and poured in 1.5l of chicken stock – enough to cover 3/4 of the lamb.  Lid on and into a 100C oven for 5 hours.  After 5 hrs, I removed the lid and increased temp to 120C and cooked for another 1 1/2 hrs.  Then it was time to remove the meat, strain out the solids from the stock and return the meat to the casserole with 500ml of stock.  The the casserole went back into a 220C oven for 40mins and I basted the lamb every 5 mins or so.

The result was very tender and tasty – not that you would know from the photo below.  What appears as 4 chunks of charcoal was in fact very tender meat with a dark, sticky, almost crunchy coating.  I served the lamb with an heirloom tomato salad and the meal was accompanied by a bottle of 1986 Chateau Tahbillk Cabernet Sauvignon which was absolutely singing.  Thanks J&K!