Sasha's Kitchen: Oxtail Bourguignon

I love boeuf bourguignon. It is one of my favorite French dishes, and we had the best boeuf bourguignon when we were in Paris on vacation in August. I have made the dish before, but this time I decided to try a variation of the Bon Appetit recipe for oxtail bourguignon. I made a bunch of minor changes, the most significant that I substituted organic turkey bacon for regular bacon, because, being Jewish, well, that's how I roll (or, is it don't roll, as per the Big Lebowski?) Anyhow, if I was to use regular bacon for this recipe, you are supposed to use only the fat. However, turkey bacon is much healthier and does not use load's of far, so instead I used canola oil, and added the turkey bacon in as part of the dish. Oxtail is a great meat to cool with in a stew of this nature, and it is a nice, inexpensive cut of meat. I bought mine from Fresh Direct.

Oxtail Bourguignon (derived from this recipe)
8 slices of organic turkey bacon
olive oil or canola oil
3 large fresh parsley sprigs
2 large bay leaves
3 large fresh thyme sprigs
1 T plus 1 1/2 cups all purpose flour
1 T butter
1/4 tsp nutmeg
4 lbs meaty oxtail pieces, trimmed of excess fat
2 cups chopped onions
2 cups of baby carrots
4 large cloves garlic, peeled; 1 minced and 3 left whole
1 3/4 cups beef broth

1 1/2 cups red burgundy wine (I used an inexpensive Pinot Noir)
1 lb baby bella mushrooms, cut into 1/4 inch slices
6 small shallots, peeled and diced

Cool the turkey bacon until brown and crisp. Transfer to plate, and add some canola or olive oil to the dutch oven. Place parsley, thyme and bay leaves in a sachet. Meanwhile, combine the melted butter and tablespoon of flour into a paste and set aside. This will be used later to thicken.

Combine the 1 1/2 cups of flour wtih the sat, 1/2 tsp of pepper and nutmeg and toss the oxtails in it to coat. Working in batches, sear the oxtail in canola oil until brown on all sides, about six minutes in total for each batch.

Add the chopped onions, carrots and minced garlic to the pot and saute for about 6 minutes until the onions are soft. Return the oxtails to the pot and add the bouquet, broth and wine. At this point, I also returned the turkey bacon to the pot, since I wanted it to be part of the dish (just too good to waste!). Bring to a boil, and then cover and simmer in the Dutch Oven until the meat is almost tender. This took about two and a half hours for me. At this point, mix in the mushrooms, shallots (I preferred mine diced rather than blanched), carrot chunks and whole garlic cloves. The return to a boil and then simmer for about 30-45 minutes.  Skim off any excess fat, and stir the flour paste into the stew. Simmer until the sauce thickens slightly, stirring occasionally for about 6 to 8 minutes. Season wtih salt and pepper and serve.

Sasha's Kitchen: Oxtail Bourguignon

Molly D.'s Kitchen in Seattle: An Introduction, and Oxtail Tacos

Introduction to My Kitchen

Hi from Seattle! I was all set to write my recipe for today, but as I thought about it I realized my cooking style needs a bit of an introduction:

I'm a lazy cook. I don’t want to plan my grocery shopping way ahead so that I can follow a recipe, and I don’t want to wash a mountain of bowls and measuring implements when I’m done.

I have a diverse background of food influences and I like trying new foods. My refrigerator door is full of Asian condiments, I have over 20 types of sweetener, and I’ll buy unfamiliar items because they sound interesting. But a home kitchen can only stock so much, and many items only stay fresh for so long, so I don’t count on having on hand standard recipe items like parsley and chicken breast.

I love understanding how techniques and ingredients work and what they do for a dish--what to put together and how to do it. In most cases I’m happier doing something on my own than following a recipe.

What this all adds up to is that my cooking tends to be thrown together based on what I have and what I feel like eating. Sometimes what I make works and sometimes it doesn’t, and I hope that as I develop my cooking sense, I’ll make fewer mistakes and more great meals! Today's post is one experiment that worked.

Oxtail Tacos

This afternoon I took the bus to Pike Place Market, one of my favorite places to find unexpected ingredients, and spent several hours wandering through the maze of little shops. By the time my feet hurt, my bag was full of chocolate bars, fresh corn tortillas, little bags of ground ginger, cinnamon, and cloves, a palmier, a jar of brined lemons, Turkish delight, ground chipotle and pasilla peppers, piloncillo, and a new-to-me hot sauce.

When I got home I was starving, and I figured I should start in on the huge stack of tortillas. I decided to combine them with the oxtails I’d been thawing in the fridge, and while I’d never cooked oxtails before, I had been told to go with braising, which was also perfect for chilly late fall. I know relatively little about Mexican cooking and even less about Latin America’s wide variety of peppers, so the pasilla was also an experiment. As usual, I put what I had on hand into the braising liquid. The combination and cooking method might not be authentic, but I chose flavors that would complement each other and taste good reduced into a rich, savory sauce.

Here’s the basic recipe; measurements are guesstimates.

Ingredients

3 oxtails

1 leek, cut into big chunks

2 or 3 cloves garlic, sliced

1/4 c rice vinegar

1 T ground pasilla pepper

1 T ground chipotle pepper

1 tsp. cinnamon

2 tsp. salt

Corn tortillas

Directions

1. Stand oxtails on their ends in a medium-sized pot/saucepan with a lid and put all other ingredients except tortillas into the spaces around them.
2. Pour water into pot until it reaches halfway up the sides of the oxtails.
3. Place on heat and bring to boil, then turn heat down to low and cover pot.
4. Come back every so often to make sure water hasn’t all boiled out and to turn the oxtails over once or twice during cooking.
5. After two or three hours (this recipe involves minimal work but a lot of waiting), the meat should be tender enough that you can push it off the bones into the reduced liquid.
6. Spoon chunks of meat into tortilla. Dip each bite into a vinegary, spicy hot sauce to cut the richness and add heat. So good.

 Serves two.

Notes on the Ingredients

• Vinegar: There wasn’t enough flavor initially, so, inspired by adobo, I added the vinegar. I’m sure it would be fine with a different type of vinegar or without any at all, but I wanted tang without extra flavors, and rice vinegar was the mildest I had in my pantry.
• Pepper: At first I used only the pasilla, but I found it too mild so I added the chipotle for heat and smokiness. I’m sure other pepper varieties or Latin-American-inspired spices would taste great, just different.
• Leeks: I had leeks on hand, but onions would probably serve just as well.
• Cinnamon: I had just bought the cinnamon and remembered it from other Mexican dishes so I thought I’d throw it in, though I can’t tell if the amount I used made any difference.
• Corn tortillas: I love flour tortillas, but I suspect they’d be a bit bland and doughy next to the deeply flavored oxtails. Also, I understand that there are several ways to soften tortillas, and I went with steaming because it was convenient. We ate our tacos over the still-simmering pot of oxtails, so I softened each tortilla one at a time by laying it over the little tripod of oxtail bones and covering the pot. Depending how much steam there was, the tortilla was tender but not yet gummy after anywhere between 30 seconds and a couple minutes. (This is also why there are no photos of the finished, plated dish--there were no plates!)

Notes on the Final Result:

• The oxtails turned out great. The braising liquid reduced into an incredibly rich and savory sauce for the chunks of meat.
• The best surprise was that the leeks totally collapsed into the richness of the sauce. I’ve never been a huge fan of leeks, but each time I picked one out of the sauce it felt like a treat.
• The fat and long simmer really tamed the heat of the pepper, so the final product was way less spicy than when I tasted it earlier in the cooking process.
• This recipe serves two, but it doesn’t make a lot of meat. Because it’s so rich you only need a couple tablespoons of meat per tortilla.

Molly D.'s Kitchen in Seattle: An Introduction, and Oxtail Tacos

Sasha's Kitchen: Braised Oxtail - Sweet Spiced Oxtail, Duck Confit Salad, Goan Spiced Crabcakes and Better Guacamole

Tonight's dinner is a recipe I first made sometime around late 2007 when I first bought the Tabla cookbook, by Floyd Cardoz, who specializes in American food infused with Indian spices at his New York City restaurant, Tabla.

Like most of his recipes, this one infuses some great Indian spices and has a strong and wonderful cinnamon flavor which complements the oxtail well.

What is oxtail - it is exactly that the name implies. Interestingly, although oxtail has become somewhat of a culinary delicacy in recent years, it is very affordable. It's not something I have been able to find in most manhattan or brooklyn meat markets (hence I have not made it since late 2007). However, fresh direct now carries it. I purchased about 2 lbs of oxtail from fresh direct earlier this week which I have now defroasted, for about $13.

The recipe, on page 159 of Cardoz's book, requires a spice blend of cloves, cinnamon, peppercorns, coriander, cumin, mustard seeds, chile, turmeric and a small amout of cayenne). I suggest adding about half of the suggeted amount of the peppercorns - they're a bit strong for my taste.

In addition to the oxtails, the braise also requires canola oil, onion, garlic, celery, carrots, ginger, red wine, tomato paste, brown sugar, vinegar, thyme, rosemary and bay leaves. These are all pretty ordinary ingrediants for any braise. However, what makes this recipe unique is the spice mixture. This particular recipe, like much of Indian cooking is a bit on the sweet side, but not overpowering. And it's an interesting mix between the Indian spices and the oxtail.

I should mention that there's a couple other recipes in this book that I highly recommend - and which I will include in this entry, since I have made both within the last two weeks - goan spiced crabcakes and the waldorf salad with duck confit.

As far as the crabcakes, this recipe involves a tomato base that incorporates some interesting spices as well (cumin, corinander, turmeric, cayenne, ginger and garlic). I made this recipe awhile back for our foodie friends Eric and Lauren, and Eric indicated that essentially this is a homemade variation on a tomato curry, meaning that the mixture of the spices themselves is how you make curry. This was certainly news to my husband who loves this dish but had always professed to hate curry. The recipe then calls for lump crabmeat, as well as a small amount of whitefish mouse. The whitefish mouse is easily made in a miniprep food processor (one of my favorite kitchen toys) by pureeing the 3 oz of whitefish with egg and egg white. In addition, salt, pepper, lime juice and panko bread crums are incorporated into this recipe.

There are a number of ways to serve this - the book suggests serving with guacamole, which they refer to as an avocado salad (page 18 of the book). I've long made my own guacamole in a mojete and I have always made it with 2 avocados, 1 tomato, some onion, a couple tablespoons of lime juice, a but of jalapeno to taste (depending on how spicy you want it), and dashes of salt and pepper. However, since reading the Tabla book, I satarted adding a teaspoon of cumin to my guacamole and it's wonderful - it just enhances the flavor in a truly wonderful way. I feel like I finally perfected guacamole. The mojete is essential - you cannot make real guacamole without one. It maximizes the surface area of the avocado or something like that, and enables you to puree the avocados and mix the guacamole the way it is suppose to be made. I believe we got ours from crate & barrel. The mixture of the crabcakes and avocado/guacamole is wonderful and the two flavors complement each other well.

Other ways I have served it include a red pepper sauce which I have made (and one day will blog about, I am sure), or various types of chutney which are certainly worth experimenting with. I am sure one day I will have to devote an entire blog entry to various chutneys, but that is best saved for another day.

On to the duck confit salad. This is basically an american recipe ( a waldorf salad) with a bit of a twist. This is found on page 29 of the Tabla cookbook. However, I have not followed most of the recipe at all, but simply use it as a guide. The first step is making the dressing - a spice orange juice reduction. Basically, I reduce the orange juice with star anise, cinnamon, cloves and ginger. This creates a very flavorful orange juice reduction. The dressing calls for adding a chicken stock/ginger/shallot reduction as well - I don't get this at all. It adds very little to the dressing and in my opinion, it not worth the time spent reducing the chicken stock. So, I skipped this part and simply mixed the OJ reduction with some canola oil and that's my dressing. Then, I cut up some gala or honeycrisp apples for the salad. Recently, I've been getting these from the local farmers market here in Park Slope. Then I added the duck confit, walnuts and a bit of Chaat masala to the salad and that's it. I don't usually bother with the cilantro, chives, chile and other ingredients as I do not feel they are necessary. This salad is a great dinner salad and it works as a weekday meal since it doesn't take a very long time to prepare.

Sasha's Kitchen: Braised Oxtail - Sweet Spiced Oxtail, Duck Confit Salad, Goan Spiced Crabcakes and Better Guacamole