Oxtails!

I have another practical exam coming up this week.  This means that I go into the kitchen and demonstrate that I can do what we've learned.  It's like a test in chemistry class where you rattle around the test tubes.  We're finishing up how to cook meats.  The meats we'll be working with are beef oxtail, beef shoulder top blade, pork loin and pork tenderloin.

Since I've never done anything with oxtail I decided that I should probably practice by cooking them at home.

I chose to make osso bucco but with oxtail instead of veal shank.  You cook it the same way, by braising it.  Braising is a long, low cooking process for meats that are tough but will become tender and flavorful with the low and slow cooking.

Here we go!

You'll need:


oxtails, red wine, celery, onion, shallot, garlic, carrot, a can of crushed tomatoes, beef broth, tomato paste, flour and salt and pepper.   Preheat the oven to around 220.  Yes, two hundred and twenty degrees. This is going to be low and slow.

Prepare the vegetables like so:

Chop the onion, carrot and celery.  You'll want twice as much onion as carrot or celery.  This is known as mirepoix (mere-eh-pwah) and is used in many of the classic sauces and in just about all stocks.

Mince up the garlic and shallot.

Put all those chopped veggies in a bowl and set it aside to use later.

First, I cooked up some bacon because bacon is the cat's meow!  Also, because I wanted to use the bacon grease to brown the meat and since I had no bacon grease on hand I needed to cook bacon to extract the grease.  I cooked it in my big, cast-iron dutch oven.  This style of bacon cookery is known in my family as "Grandma Gay style".  You toss the unseparated rashers of bacon in the pan and stir it around as it cooks.  I'm sure you've figured out by now that it's the way my Grandma Gay cooked bacon.

I fed the bacon to my family and my daughter's friend who happened to be at our house at the right time. Then, I seasoned some flour with salt and pepper and used it to dredge the oxtails.

I dropped them into the hot bacon fat and let them hang out.  My chef instructor will tell us 'Stop moving it!' while we're supposed to be browning meat.  "Stop moving it!  How's it going to get brown if you keep moving it?! You're trying to get a fond! Leave it alone!"  (a fond is the lovely, crusty, yumminess on the bottom of the pan that happens when you brown meat or chicken or whatever)

I left them alone until, turning them every now and then until all the sides were brown.  While that's happening you'll want to get all your stuff together and in easy reach so when you are doing the upcoming steps you don't have to run around getting your ingredients and all that.  Putting all your ingredients in the little bowls, all ready to go is called 'mise en place' (meez-ahn-plahz)  or mise in my culinary class.  "Mise! Mise! Mise!" my instructor tells us.  "Get mise'd you guys!"  I hear that in my dreams.  "Is your mise done?"  Mise us, please us!

I took the meat out of the pot and set it aside.  Into the hot fat I dumped the veggies that we cut up and put in a bowl before.  Move these around until the onion is tender, be careful not to burn the garlic.

After the onion is tender and the veg is smelling good, add a couple tablespoons of tomato paste.  Smear that around in the bottom of the pan and let it cook until it starts to turn a golden orange and smells sweet. That's the sugar caramelizing and is known as a rust.

Once your rust is achieved it's time to deglaze the pan, meaning to add liquid and scrape all that yummy, crusty, brown fond up off the bottom of the pan.  We're going to use red wine, about a cup.  I think.  I mean, it looked like a cup after I poured it in.  I can't tell you how much of the bottle I used because I drank some right after that.

Ideally, this should be done off the heat but my cast-iron cauldron is heavy and it's not practical to hold it off the flame to dump the wine in.  When the wine hits the hot pan it should shout and make a bunch of noise.  While it's complaining use a wooden spoon to scrape up the fond and redistribute it into the rest of the stuff in the pan.

Now it's time to put the meat back in the pan.

Add in the can of crushed tomatoes and then enough beef broth to bring the level of liquid about 2/3s of the way up the sides of the meat.  Don't cover, that's stewing.  We're braising.

Bring this up to a boil on the stovetop then put a tilted cover on the pot and stick the whole kit-n-kaboodle in the oven.

Don't even think about looking at it for at least an hour and a half.  This gives you the opportunity to watch "Paranormal Activity 3", which is now available at Red Box.  I suggest watching this flicker during the day, which is why I mention it here.

Once your movie of choice is over, open up the pot and turn the meat over so the other side is submerged.  Let that cook for an hour and a half at least.

This process take a long time.  A LONG time.  The tail meat is tough and needs the long cooking time to break down the connective tissue and make the meat tender.  As my instructor says 'We're going to cook it to death."   The meat is done when a fork slides into the meat easily and then slides out easily.  When the fork is turned while it's in the meat, the meat should break apart easily.  When it's pretty much done, take some of the cooking liquid out of the pot and strain it into a saucepan.  Put the veg and stuff back into the braising pot.

Put the cooking liquid on a burner and bring it to a happy simmer to reduce it down to a thicker sauce.  This will take awhile as well, but be patient and reduce it by at least half.

Now we're going to do something called "mounting with butter".  It means to drop some butter into a sauce and swirl it around in the sauce until it melts in.  This gives richness, thickness and deliciousness to the sauce.  Once that's done you could have the sauce for dinner with bread to dip in it.

Take the meat out of the oven and place one of the rounds on top of some pasta or rice and put the sauce on top.  Voila!  Oxtail osso bucco!

Do I have a photo of a finished dish?  No.  I don't have one because we were all so hungry from smelling the stuff cooking all day we fell on it like we hadn't eaten in days instead of mere minutes.


Get someone else to do dishes.

See ya!