Braising!

Okay, I've been promising a post on braising - so here it is! We are still just getting into winter, so there will be plenty of nice gray, stormy, Sunday afternoons to spend getting cozy and cooking an awesomely good meal.

 To braise meats, you don't need too much.  You should have some fresh bone broth, a dutch oven, oven, red wine, meat, aromatic veggies, and seasoning.  And time; this is a slow cooking meal and that's what makes it sooooo good.  I have had short ribs cooked in a pressure cooker, and it just doesn't compare.  Cooking this way really lets all of the flavors penetrate the meat and meld together to make a nutrient dense aromatic, warm, gravy with a depth of flavors.


First, well after making sure that you have some good bone broth on hand, is to get some meat to braise.  We like to braise short ribs, but any cut of meat that would be otherwise tough is a good choice for braising.  I get my short ribs from The Weir River Farm when they sell their meats. Grass fed meats can definitely be more gamey than factory farmed meats, so they braise really well...although if you can think "low and slow" for any grass fed meat, you will have a better result all around.

When we braise meats, they are cooked in liquid at a low temperature for a long time.  The amount of liquid you use, will therefore determine how thick the resulting sauce will be.  We like to have extra gravy to add a punch of flavor to sauces or crock pot dishes later, so we tend to use a fair amount of liquid.  If you want a thicker sauce you could easily cut the liquid recipe in half.  Also, the size of your dutch oven will determine how much meat and sauce you can cook at once.  We have a large 12 quart dutch oven.  Our previous one could not have handled this recipe. 

For this particular recipe, we used 8 good sized short ribs, olive oil, 1 cup of red wine, probably 3-4 cups of broth, some aromatic veggies - I think we used 2 carrots, 2 celery, 3 whole shallots, 10 cloves of garlic, and an onion.  And a hefty pouch of herbs like parsley, thyme, oregano, rosemary.  You can use onion, leeks, or other aromatics you have on hand.  We also used some flour (my special gluten free corn free flour blend) to thicken the gravy at the end.  And that's it!

The first thing you want to do is brown the meat.  To do that heat some oil in the dutch oven so that it is hot.  Brown each side of the meat.  Use enough oil so that it doesn't burn, but enough that you get some good meat "bits" on the bottom to get some really good flavor.

After the meat has been browned, remove it from the dutch oven.  Add chopped aromatic veggies and saute for 5-10 minutes or until softened...reserve the garlic until the last few minutes to avoid burning it.  While the veggies are cooking, pour about 1 cup of red wine into a pan and heat.  You can touch a match to the wine to burn off the alcohol, then let the wine reduce by about half.  Deglaze the yummy goodness in the dutch oven by adding the wine and making sure that all of the yummy bits from browning the meat are scraped off the bottom of the pan.

Then you can position the meat in the dutch oven and cover with broth.  We got some herbs from the garden and wrapped them in cheesecloth so that the twigs wouldn't get mixed in the sauce, but you still get all of the flavour.

Bring the broth up to a simmer, then put the entire dutch oven in a 250 degree oven.  Let cook for about 4 hours, checking half way through to skim off fat if there is an excess (there shouldn't be with grass fed meat).  When you take the meat out, it should fall off the bone, and you will have an AMAZING sauce to work with.

Most often we eat this with some dumplings, red cabbage, sauerkraut, and an array of veggies.  And then the sauce is made into a gravy which is used with this meal, and then to flavor many meals thereafter.  I wish I had a nice picture of a plated meal, but after waiting THIS LONG to eat, I didn't pull the camera out! We just devoured it.  And you will too!