Monthly Archives: January 2012

January 19, 2012 · 5:00 pm

Braised Short Ribs

Step two of Chef Keller’s Beef Stroganoff is braising the short ribs. I picked some ribs up at West Side Market, but as I hadn’t planned ahead properly I managed to get the wrong thing. Rather than getting a whole boneless short rib, as Chef Keller calls for, I was stuck with individual bone-in ribs, but I decided to go ahead and just braise them anyway. It’s braised beef, how bad could it be?

The mise for this one is pretty simple. You chop some leeks, onions, carrots, shallots, and mushrooms, and toss in some parsley, thyme, garlic, and peppercorns.

Put that all in a Dutch oven with a bottle of red wine (I used a cabernet) and simmer for 45 minutes to make a glaze.

While that’s reducing, coat the short ribs in flour, season with salt and pepper and brown in a sauté pan.

While the beef browns, chop up yet more onions, carrots, and leeks. When the reduction is ready, stir them in. Then you make a nest with some cheesecloth to place the meat on. I was running a bit low on cheesecloth so I couldn’t double it up, but close enough.

Cover with a parchment lid and toss in the oven for a couple hours and here’s what you get:

At this point the recipe continues a little if you’re serving the short ribs, but I was making them for the stroganoff. So at that point I simply put the meat in a bowl and strained the braising liquid over it.

And that’s it. I let the meat to stew in the braising liquid overnight. It was tough not to eat it all immediately because it was so tasty, but being as I had much less than I wanted for the stroganoff (on account of the bones) I forced myself to let it go. In the next post I’ll tell you if it was worth it.

Beef Stock

This weekend I started what is sure to be my most time-intensive recipe yet, Thomas Keller’s Beef Stroganoff from the Ad Hoc at Home Cookbook. It’s made in three parts (I’ve completed the first two, with the third coming tonight) and I’ll post it as such. Step one is to make the beef stock.

Stocks are all pretty similar. The main difference between them is sometimes you roast the bones and/or vegetables and sometimes you don’t. With beef stock it seems you generally do. (With chicken stocks it appears you generally do not, and veal can go either way.)

For this one I started by roasting some neck and leg bones in my All-Clad Roaster. While the bones are browning, Chef Keller also instructs you to char half of an onion. I don’t know if this is something you can do properly in a non-stick pan (I don’t own any) but if you have one I’d give it a try because I spent longer scrubbing the resulting black marks out of my beautiful D5 sauté pan than I did charring the damned onion in the first place.

Once the bones are roasted I set them over a colander to drain…

and drained the fat from the pan. Then I deglazed with water.

I Next I put the bones in the stockpot, poured in the water and brown bits from the pan, plus another 5 quarts of cold water, and simmered along with the charred onion half for 5 hours.

Toward the end of the simmering it was time to roast the vegetables.

Then I added them to the stock along with half a head of garlic, some herbs and peppercorns, and simmered for about an hour longer.

During this whole process I was skimming the stock. At first it was quite frequent, then later probably every half hour or so. When I made the chicken stock I skimmed as well, but I fished out far more impurities from this one. I was actually surprised at how much came out of there. It’s important to skim regularly since the impurities can, if left there long enough, dissolve back into the stock and make it cloudy, so even though beef stock isn’t a whole lot of work, you have to assume you’ll be spending the day at home while you make it. It’s not like a spaghetti sauce that can be left to simmer for hours unattended.

After that all that is left is to strain it a couple times…

cool in an ice bath, and then toss in the fridge. After the stock gets cold the remaining fat will solidify at the top for easy removal. I don’t know how there could be any given how much skimming and straining I did, but there was plenty.

Overall I feel like this one was worth it. The total time was about 7 hours, though most of that was just skimming in between doing other stuff. The result was quite a bit better than than what you’d buy at the store, which is typically labeled “beef broth” and I think therefore not made from bones.

Next up, braising some short ribs. Yum.

Marcella Hazan’s Chicken Cacciatora

This winter I took a part-time job at Williams Sonoma, entirely for the employee discount. The very first thing I bought was a set of All-Clad d5 pans, and it came with a book called Essentials of Classic Cooking by Marcella Hazan (and also a nice lasagna pan and some oven mitts). I assumed at first it was just some crap you get when you buy a set of pans, but I took a second to look up the reviews on Amazon and found that it was exactly the book I’d been looking for, a compendium of Italian recipes. I’d thumbed through Amazon looking for such a beast and somehow had missed it, in fact hadn’t found anything close, and here it had just fallen into my lap.

While not the first recipe I made from it (that was the Bolognese sauce, which I’ll post as soon as I make again and snap some pics) Chicken Cacciatora was probably the one I was most excited for. I like a good Cacciatora, but the only time I see it on the menu is the once every year or two I find myself at somewhere like an Olive Garden and it’s rarely worth eating. I knew homemade had to be much better.

The prep work was quite simple. I had my butcher break the chicken down into 6 pieces. I thinly sliced a bell pepper, then ran a carrot, half a stalk of celery, and about half of an onion through a mandoline slicer. Dice up a little garlic, measure out some wine and a can of tomatoes and you’re ready to go.

The first step is to coat the chicken in flour and brown in vegetable oil.

After that’s done you’re left with a light roux to cook the onion in. Once the onion is gold, you add in the wine (I used a Sauvignon Blanc, as usual) and deglaze.

Finally, you put the chicken back in . The recipe calls for keeping the breasts until 10 minutes before serving but mine were enormous and I didn’t brown them too deeply so I put them in about halfway through. Then I tossed in the vegetables and tomatoes, brought to a slow simmer, and covered. The pieces simmered for about an hour (the breasts for less) during which time I turned them and basted with the juices.

The result is a fantastic dish that’s not really quick to make (it takes maybe an hour and a half with prep) but isn’t difficult either and only uses one pan. It’s got lots of simmer time toward the end which gives you ample opportunity to make a side dish, though I’m not sure what you’d want to serve there.

Monthly Archives: January 2012

Braised Short Ribs

Beef Stock

Marcella Hazan’s Chicken Cacciatora

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