Beef – Page 3 – Writing With My Mouth Full

Homemade Pappardelle Pasta with Slow-Cooked Beef Shin Stew

I know a slow-cooked beef shin stew is not really the way to welcome the official start of summer, but the dish lasted me a few days and rescued me from cooking during the past rainy (and lazy) week. I publish a lot of braised recipes here, but I opted to slow-cook this dish on the stovetop. I didn’t plan to hand-roll the pasta with it, but the timing just worked out perfectly.

When rolling out the dough, the original recipe called to divide it into 2 balls (Step #5 below). I ignored that note (rebel!) and had a gigantic piece to work with. If you have a large work space, keeping it in one large ball works quite well; I had to maneuver around me to continue rolling the dough out into a thin sheet. The thing with homemade pasta is that you need practice. This was my first time making papperdelle and they came out imperfectly, but I think their unequal shape made them more rustic. Your old-school Italian grandmother may disapprove, but my tummy was all for it.

Ingredients:
2 lbs of boneless beef shins, chopped into 2-inch pieces
flour
oil
1 large red onion, roughly chopped
1 small bag of mini-carrots
3 sticks of celery, roughly chopped
a few sprigs of fresh rosemary
2 bay leaves
4 cloves of garlic, unpeeled
1 cinnamon stick
a small handful of dried porcini
1 can of peeled plum tomatoes
1 bottle of red wine
salt and pepper

For the pappardelle pasta:
1 3/4 cups flour, plus more for dusting
1 cup semolina flour, plus more for dusting
6 large eggs at room temperature
4 teaspoons olive oil
salt

1. Prepare the cubed beef shins. Toss the beef pieces in a bowl with a little bit of flour and shake off excess. Set aside.
2. In a large Dutch oven, heat a splash of olive oil and sauté the onions. Add all the vegetables and the herbs with the garlic, cinnamon sticks and the mushrooms and cook for 5 minutes.
3. Add the floured beef and stir everything together. Add the tomatoes, the wine and season with salt and pepper. Slowly bring to a boil and then lower the heat to a simmer and cook for at least 2 hours, or until the beef falls apart with a gentle prod of a fork. Remove the cinnamon sticks, the rosemary sprigs and the bay leaves before serving.

Making the pasta:
4. While the beef is cooking, make the dough for the pasta. Sift both flours together on your work surface and make a well in the center. Place the eggs, olive oil and a pinch of salt in a bowl, then pour into the well. Using a fork, break up the eggs, then slowly mix the wet ingredients into the flour mixture until combined.
5. Knead by hand. Gather the dough into 1 large ball. Flour your work surface. To knead each piece, push the dough away from you with the heel of your hand and fold the dough over itself. Continue pushing, folding and turning until the dough is smooth and elastic, 4 to 5 minutes, on all sides of the dough.
6. Let the dough rest. Flatten slightly, wrap in Saran wrap and refrigerate for at least 30 minutes or overnight.
7. Roll out the dough when ready. Flour your work surface again. Place the dough and dust with more flour. Starting in the middle, push away from you with a rolling pin and continue rolling the dough into a sheet until you can see your fingers through the bottom. Feel free to dust with more flour as necessary. Let dry about 10 minutes.
8. Cut the pappardelle: Dust the top of the sheet of dough with flour and loosely roll it into a cylinder. Using a sharp knife, cut into 3/4-inch-wide slices. Dust with semolina and gently toss to separate. Place on a sheet pan and cover with a tea towel until ready to cook, or freeze in freezer bags for up to 2 months.
9. To serve, boil some salted water in a large pot and add the freshly-made pasta. Cook for no more than 15 minutes or until al dente. Drain and put the cooked pasta in a serving dish and top with the slow-cooked beef shin stew.

Beef Stew Both Ways

It’s spring. No, it’s not; it’s still winter. It’s warm and I’m wearing a light jacket. Oh, it’s going to be cold this week, let me unpack my winter coat again.

Mother Nature has been playing with us here in New York City. One day, it’s warm enough to walk around without a jacket, the next day my neck is so cold because I didn’t carry my scarf with me. The good thing about this beef stew is that for warmer weather, you can lighten it up by skipping the potatoes and adding more broth so it’s more liquid than sauce-y. If it’s cold outside and you want something heartier, serve this with potatoes, pasta, bread or rice and you got yourself a heavy meal.

I prefer the lighter version served with a few jigs of Tabasco sauce for a little kick. In either version, you mix all the ingredients together and simmer. You don’t even need your silly crockpot to replicate them.

Ingredients:
oil
1 pound of stewing beef, cubed
4 cloves of garlic, minced
1 white onion, chopped
3 sprigs of thyme
1 large carrot, chopped
1 large can of whole tomatoes
vegetable broth
salt, pepper
1 can of corn kernels, drained
a handful of parsley, roughly chopped

1. In a large heated Dutch oven, add some oil. When hot enough, brown beef cubes by cooking and stirring occasionally until most of it has changed color.
2. Add garlic, onions and thyme and sauté with the beef. Add carrots, plus the whole tomatoes with its juice and enough vegetable broth for most of the beef to be submerged. Season with salt and pepper. Cook in low fire for 30 minutes.
3. When beef cubes are tender enough that the meat gives with a soft prod of a fork, add corn kernels and parsley. Cook for another 10 minutes just to make sure corn is well-combined with the rest of the stew. Season with salt and pepper to taste.

Related post/s:
Skirt steak salad with endives recipe

Jamaican Beef Shank Stew

Back in the day, I sat across the table at work from George Weld, now chef-owner of egg in Brooklyn. I was a Web designer then and George was a poet who wanted to try his hand in writing code rather than rhymes. I remember asking him what a crock pot was because a friend told me she was buying one to give as a birthday present. Crock pots, I was told, worked like a rice cooker. Anything you put in it would cook for a long period of time in heat so low you don’t have to attend to it. So it’s like braising? Yes, George confirmed, but what’s the point of braising if you don’t brown first? I whole-heartedly agreed.

Reading about the Jamaican oxtail stew recipe from Golden Krust in the New York Times reminded me of this conversation. When I first read it, I found several things that I knew wouldn’t work out for me. It called for cooking stovetop for a couple of hours–so why not just braise and put it in the oven? And I love oxtail as much as the next guy, but shanks just have more meat so I opted for them instead. When shank meat falls off the bone, you get the melt-in-your-mouth goodness. I also thought melting the sugar would just caramelize and not mix with the meat too well. I was right, so I occasionally added hot water while I was browning the meat to avoid the sugar from hardening. (I was also thinking of the clean-up I have to do afterwards.) And one Scotch bonnet pepper? Why not try three? I did and the entire dish had a really nice kick to it. You can rummage through the pot after the first hour of braising to remove them, but I totally forgot and they just sort of melted in the sauce. The bonus? I cleaned the stewy-sauce bottom of the pot with rice.

Ingredients:
5 pieces of large beef shanks
salt
pepper
3 tbsps light brown sugar
1 large white onion, roughly chopped
half a head of garlic, minced
1 knob of ginger, peeled, chopped
3 Scotch bonnet peppers
4 sprigs fresh thyme
3 tbsps allspice powder
1 bunch scallions, chopped
2 tbsps white sugar
3 tbsps soy sauce
1 tbsp Worcestershire sauce

1. Preheat oven preheat oven 350º. Season shanks aggressively with salt and pepper. Heat a large Dutch oven over high heat. At the same time, boil some water in a separate pan so it’s next to your pot. Add brown sugar to the pot and melt, stirring with a wooden spoon, until it darkens and starts to smoke. When sugar is dark brown, add 2 tbsps boiling water. It will splatter, so have your pot cover handy. Stir to mix.
2. Working in batches, add the shanks to the pot and brown both sides so they’re covered with the blackened sugar. Spoon in tbsps of hot water when the sugar gets too sticky and hard to avoid burning sugar. Remove shanks to a large plate.
3. Add half of the onions, garlic and ginger to the same pot, along with the pepper, the thyme, the allspice and a third of the scallions, and stir to combine. Allow to cook until softened, approximately 5 minutes.
4. Return the shanks to the pot along with any accumulated juices and put water into the pot so that they are almost submerged. Bring to a simmer and then cook, covered, in the oven for an hour, stirring occasionally.
5. After an hour, stir in remaining onions, scallions, garlic and ginger to the pot. Add sugar, soy sauce and Worcestershire sauce. Stir to combine and cover. Continue to cook until the meat is yielding and loose on the bone, approximately one hour longer.

Longganisa, Filipino Breakfast Sausages

Filipinos like their meat, but we especially love our pork. We love it so much that we will eat it three times a day–for breakfast, lunch and dinner. To start a traditional Filipino day, longganisa (also longaniza), or Filipino sausage, is one of the meat choices that pair up with eggs and fried rice. All three in one dish combined make longsilog: longganisa for “long”; sinangag, or fried rice, for “si”; itlog, or egg, for the “log”. All over the Philippines, you will encounter different combinations of -silogs.

I usually dash out of the apartment during the week and eat a simple breakfast of yogurt with fruit or Three Sisters cereal when I get to work, but on weekends I splurge on time and make myself a huge breakfast especially if I’m coming from a morning bike ride around Central Park. That breakfast always includes eggs and some type of meat, be it bacon or leftover steak from the night before. I rarely have cooked rice at home (it’s a lot to waste when you’re living on your own), so my fallback is usually a salad or a type of vegetable, even if it’s a pickle. Down the list of breakfast meats after bacon that I like comes longganisa because it has a touch of sweetness and tastes so damn good with a dash of vinegar. My mouth is watering just thinking of sticky-sweet longganisa and runny fried eggs on top of hot fried rice.

I promised myself that before the year ends, I will make my own sausages and use the attachments that I bought for my KitchenAid stand mixer. So during the long Thanksgiving weekend, I stayed busy in the kitchen and finally made them. I had asked my mother for a recipe because she’s originally from the province of Pampanga where longganisa is famous. She showed me an old copy of a Filipino recipe that used phosphate and food coloring! Fail! I then turned to my copy of Memories of Filipino Kitchens and substituted the rice wine and the rice vinegar for plain white vinegar and added brown sugar for the sweetness that I crave in these sausages. Their recipe also used lime zest which I thought was pretty interesting even though it got lost in the mix, so I have eliminated it from this version.

I learned a few important things when I made my own sausage links for the first time:
1. Making sausages is hard work, so another pair of hands is always helpful.
2. Keep lemon handy. The smell of meat will stay on your fingers for several hours and I found only lemon juice removed the odor.
3. White bread was invented to clean off your food grinder and sausage stuffer attachments.

This is a two-type recipe for longganisa. One is the easy way without any equipment or casings which makes the sausages naked, or hubad in Tagalog. The other is for sausage links which requires both the food grinder and sausage stuffer attachments with your KitchenAid stand mixer, plus sausage casings from your well-stocked butcher shop.

Ingredients:
2 tbsps vinegar
2 tbsps brown sugar
3 cloves garlic, minced
salt
pepper
oil

If making them naked:
1 pound pork belly, grounded
1/2 pound lean beef, grounded

1. Add all ingredients together in a large mixing bowl and mix with your hands. Knead the meat until it holds together and you can shape the mixture into patties. Wrap in wax paper to store in the fridge or keep in the freezer.
2. To fry longganisa patties, heat some oil in a deep skillet. Add longganisa and fry using low-medium fire until both sides are browned. Crumble and break into pieces and serve with two eggs, preferably over easy.

If making links:
1 pound pork belly, cut into 1-inch chunks
1/2 pound lean beef, cut into 1-inch chunks
sausage casings, soaked overnight in cold water, rinsed
white bread slices

1. Combine all the meats with the spices except the oil. Massage with your hands to mix well. Marinate for at least an hour or overnight in the fridge.
2. When ready to make links, assemble the food grinder and sausage stuffer attachments with your mixer. Select a length of casing and run water from the tap through it in order to clear out any excess salt and spot any holes. Trim to remove the holes. Run the casing between your fingers to remove excess water. Stretch the open end of the casing around the attachment’s nozzle and gradually slide the rest of the casing onto the nozzle, an inch or 2 at a time, trying not to twist. Leave about 3 inches at the knotted end dangling free. This will be your end knot.
3. Ground the meat and stuff the casing. Put the meat mixture in the hopper of the grinder and turn it on to speed 4. Hold the dangling casing with one hand, and with the other, feed the meat into the hopper with the plastic or wooden pestle at an even pace. Your stuffer will slowly stuff the ground meat into the casing. Gently guide the rest of the casing off the nozzle to aid the stuffing of the sausage. When you have 2 inches left at the other end, stop stuffing and remove the free casing from the nozzle. This is your other end knot. Repeat this process until all of the sausage meat has been used, pushing out the last bits of meat with a slice or two of bread. Discard grounded bread.
4. Run your fingers over the casing to distribute the sausage evenly. Pinch every 3 inches or in empty spots and gently twist it to form separate links. Feel free to tie end knots.
5. To fry longganisa links, heat some oil in a deep skillet. Add longganisa and fry using low-medium fire until all sides are browned. Gently pierce empty casing that bubbles up to avoid bursts of sausages! Serve with two eggs, preferably over easy.

I realize that this is probably the longest recipe I have on this site, so I hope these photos will guide you to making your own sausages at home.

1. Stretch the open end of the casing around the attachment’s nozzle and gradually slide the rest of the casing onto the nozzle, an inch or 2 at a time, trying not to twist. Leave about 3 inches at the knotted end dangling free.

2. Hold the dangling casing with one hand, and with the other, feed the meat into the hopper with the plastic or wooden pestle at an even pace. Another pair of hands is always helpful.

3. Your stuffer will slowly stuff the ground meat into the casing. Gently guide the rest of the casing off the nozzle to aid the stuffing of the sausage.

Please excuse the innuendos from the video above (which may not show up on your phones); they made sausage-making more fun though.

Gamjatang, Korean Rib Soup

After a harrowing ten-hour trip from Chicago, the Dr. was craving kalbi-tang, or Korean short beef rib soup, the next day. We had stopped by Joong Boo Market on Belmont Avenue before we continued to the airport and among our purchase was a package of fresh perilla leaves. I thought of gamja-tang, pork rib soup, because it’s what I always order when I’m in Hanbat in Koreatown. I ended up buying short beef ribs and beef neck bones and then using a pork-rib recipe. I think combining the two soups in this one recipe was a pretty good compromise even though Maangchi may slap my hand if she ever reads this.

If we knew we were to spend all afternoon and all night trying to fly back to New York City–our flight was cancelled without any notification and all 180 passengers were vying for the next three flights to La Guardia–we would have bought the soups from the market’s deli and enjoyed them at the airport.

Finally home and caught up on sleep the next night, I searched for online recipes for both soups. All of them require boiling the bones and then rinsing them before boiling again. This step removes all the impurities and the fat from the boiled bones, but it’s sacrilege if you’re Filipino because it’s the fat that makes my people’s soups whole. Sometimes though, I do what I’m told even if the order comes from an older Korean lady. To keep my stubborn streak however, I skipped an extra rinsing step so at least some of the fat is preserved in the broth.

Needless to say, I scared the crap out of the Dr. who was impressed with how the soup turned out: he had two full large bowls for dinner while the negative aspect of our Chicago trip dissolved in pieces.

Ingredients:
5 short beef ribs, rinsed
4 beef neck bones, rinsed
5 perilla leaves, chopped in 1-inch pieces
1 napa cabbage, sliced into 4 pieces
2 potatoes, peeled, sliced
1 bunch of scallions, chopped
4 pieces dried shiitake mushrooms
1 large knob of ginger, peeled, chopped
1 yellow onion, quartered
2 tbsps soy bean paste

Sauce:
5 perilla leaves, chiffonade
6 cloves of garlic, minced
a dash of hot pepper flakes
2 tbsps hot pepper paste
4 tbsps cooking wine
3 tbsps fish sauce

1. In a large Dutch oven, boil some water. Add the beef ribs and neck bones. Lower the heat and let impurities rise to the top. Using a strainer, remove the impurities and discard. Simmer beef for a total of an hour before rinsing them out with cold water.
2. In the same washed Dutch oven, return the beef with some more water. Add ginger, onion, soy bean paste and mushrooms. Simmer for another hour.
3. In the meantime, in a separate pot, boil some water and blanch the cabbage for a minute. Remove from the pot, squeeze out the water and set aside.
4. Make the sauce as well while you’re boiling the beef. Combine all sauce ingredients and mix thoroughly. Set aside until needed.
5. When the beef is done, remove the mushrooms and let cool. Slice them and return to the pot with the rest of the vegetables. Cook for another 30 minutes in low-medium fire to make sure most of the meat is falling off the bones and the potatoes are cooked.