Braised Beef Shin
With roasted bone marrow, parsnip purée, glazed carrots, and some hot takes on the benefits of superfoods.
Setting the Table
Welcome new readers!
The cookbook search continues. For those of you in the UK, I discovered this week that HMV is (1) somehow still in business; and (2) actually a great place to shop for cookbooks.
The selection is a little limited and I’m not buying a Gwyneth Paltrow cookbook anytime soon, but there’s actually some good stuff on there (Ottolenghi / Emily Roux / Brindisa) and it’s heavily discounted at £7-8 per cookbook (i.e. 50-70% cheaper than Amazon). I picked up The Basque Book by Alexandra Raij, Rich Table by Sarah & Evan Rich, and Scook by Anne-Sophie Pic.
If you’ve been here before, skip ahead! For the benefit of first-time readers, cookbook recipe write-ups are structured as follows: (1) Amuse-bouche - the history and provenance of the dish; (2) Starters - an intro to the fancy Michelin version of the dish I’ll be cooking; (3) Main courses - the actual cooking process; (4) Desserts - thoughts and conclusions on what worked, what didn’t, and most importantly, what tasted good; (5) Petit Fours - footnotes and references.
Amuse-Bouche
Beef shin (aka beef shank) is one of the traditional cuts for braises and stews1. It’s in French boeuf bourguignon, Northern Italian ossobuco, Hungarian goulash, Viennese goulash (a rather different dish altogether from its Hungarian relative), Chinese jiang niu rou, and many more.
The shin is a fantastic cut for a couple of reasons:
It’s a heavily worked muscle, which helps it develop a ton of flavour and enables it to hold up against other rich, hearty ingredients like red wine, onions, and tomatoes.
It’s packed with connective tissue (tendons, sinews, ligaments), which are rich in collagen, making these cuts very tough, at least initially (which is why we don’t use cuts like brisket, ox cheek, and shin for steaks). After cooking for an extended period of time, collagen breaks down into gelatine, which is much softer. Gelatine is also highly hydrophilic (it attracts and retains water), which is why the meat in a good stew is so juicy and tender2.
Lastly, a quick note on the second key ingredient in this dish, bone marrow. It’s yet another ingredient (along with its close cousin, bone broth) to enter the pantheon of ‘Superfoods’ because it contains collagen and stem cells that will make your skin glow, strengthen your immune system, improve your digestion, and even treat cancer, which, ha, I’m sorry, but I can’t keep a straight face.
Umm, no. This is all pure marketing. Repeat after me: Superfoods. Don’t. Exist3. Ingesting collagen doesn’t even make sense from a mechanistic perspective, because your digestive system breaks down the collagen into its constituent peptides and amino acids - the same ones you get from just eating… shocker, a balanced diet. Unfortunately for celebrity nutritional therapists, dietary supplement manufacturers, and peddlers of artisanal handcrafted bone broth in cute mason jars, there isn’t a lot of money in pushing a regular balanced diet.
Anyway, I’ll get off my soapbox now and return to our regularly scheduled programming.
Starters
By Hand & Flowers standards, this dish is quite conventional in that it’s essentially some braised beef with some carrots and mash. Very standard pub fare.
Except that the braised beef involves: (*deep breath*) scooping out the bone marrow from a giant beef bone, mixing it with the braised beef shin, stuffing it back into the bone like a beefy devilled egg, precariously arranging paper thin potato slices on top of a bone that you’re trying to balance upright despite the lack of any discernible flat edges, wrapping it all together in a layer of caul fat, braising it in the oven for a second time, and basting continuously while trying to avoid burning your hand on the inside of the oven.
So, straightforward stuff, really. Oh, and there’s a parsley emulsion, glazed carrots, parsnip purée, and a beef shin sauce to make as well.
Main Courses
Shin and bone marrow parcels
Starting with the star of the show, the beef shin begins life by marinating in a bottle of red wine overnight, before braising in chicken stock, red wine and mirepoix (that’s onions, carrots, and celery). Extremely conventional stuff so far.
It’s then elevated with some classic concepts and techniques - (1) scooping out an ingredient and re-stuffing it (my favourite variation of this concept is a banana crème brûlée that pipes the banana custard back into a split banana skin with the brûléed sugar on top), (2) making a reduction sauce using the braising liquid, and (3) using a caul wrap that allows the beef shin parcel to steam gently while self-basting in the caul fat4.
Hand & Flowers carrots and parsnip purée
Both the carrots and the parsnips were very straightforward preparations. The carrots are Tom Kerridge’s signature Christmas carrots (as featured on the BBC). Using a scouring pad to sand down the peel marks is a bit extra, but aesthetically very pleasing.
The parsnips are a standard purée. As the saying goes, boil ‘em, mash ‘em, stir in a metric ton of butter and pass ‘em through a fine mesh sieve.
Parsley emulsion
Ah, herb-infused oil emulsions, my old frenemy. I’ve learned some lessons from my last attempt (the treacle-cured chateaubriand), which reduced the prep time to 20 minutes vs. over an hour previously. Still painful, but like, an acceptable level of pain.
The one minor issue was that the emulsion didn’t have quite enough time to set in the fridge and collapsed when I tried to pipe out a ripple pattern (as you can see from the main picture above).
Desserts
So, a longish but leisurely cook of five and a half hours, which is about par for the Hand & Flowers book. A lot of the time was just spent waiting for things to heat up and cool down, as is the case with many complex haute cuisine dishes. Very linear cooking as well, which was a welcome change from the usual high wire act of juggling seven different components at once.
My tasting notes:
I almost wish last week’s cold snap had lasted longer. Because this is one of the heartiest and most scrumptious mains I’ve had in a long time. Every bite fills you with warmth, cosiness, and indulgence - it’s like a big hug, if that hug was made out of the most unctuously tender beef shin and decadent bone marrow.
Big bollito misto energy. Bollito misto (literally, mixed boiled meats) is a traditional Northern Italian stew made with tough cuts of meat that’s typically served with one of my favourite sauces, salsa verde. It’s a killer combination where the brightness and herbiness of the parsley cuts right through the richness of the stew, and those flavours harmonise brilliantly here.
Prepare yourself for a food coma. The portion size was deceptively small in appearance, but (obvious in hindsight) it’s actually extremely filling given all that fatty bone marrow, buttery sauce, and buttery carrots. Did I mention the metric ton of butter in the parsnip purée? One of the very rare occasions where I wanted to have a second helping, but physically couldn’t muster another bite.
As usual, I’ll be sharing my adaptation of the recipe later this week. I’m definitely leaning towards the salsa verde idea (which conveniently sidesteps the challenge of making the dreaded parsley emulsion), as well as a few practical adjustments like subbing out the caul fat, and reducing the recipe length to something that isn’t five and a half hours. Until then, happy cooking!
Petit Fours (aka the footnotes)
A braise and a stew have a lot in common - they’re both cooked low and slow in a liquid like stock, beer, or wine. In case you were wondering what the difference is, in a braise, the meat is cooked in larger pieces and only partially submerged. In a stew, the meat is cooked in smaller, uniform pieces, and fully submerged in the cooking liquid.
If you’ve ever had a bad stew, the meat can be very dry, which seems paradoxical given it’s been sitting in a pot of liquid for hours. The culprit is that while the collagen is breaking down into gooey, moist gelatine and absorbing moisture, the muscle fibres are contracting from the heat and squeezing out moisture, like wringing out a sponge. Like so many things in cooking, it’s all about balance. Heston explains in further detail here.
I’ll concede the existence of nutrient-dense foods with high bioavailability. But ultimately, our bodies break down everything we eat into the same, basic fungible nutrients. So it doesn’t really matter where you’re getting those nutrients from - that’s why people can live a perfectly healthy life (albeit one totally devoid of joy) surviving entirely on meal replacement shakes like Huel or Soylent.
Caul fat (aka lace fat, omentum, crépine, fat netting) is a membrane that surrounds the internal organs of some animals, typically pigs. Traditionally used as a natural sausage casing, it’s a gem of an ingredient that allows food to be wrapped up to retain moisture, and boosts flavour as the fat melts away from the membrane.