Beef Cheeks Bourguignon: A Hearty Stew

Boef Bourgignon aka Boeuf à la Bourguignonne is a classic French dish originating, as its name indicates, from the Burgundy region, as do a number of other dishes incorporating red wine, such as coq au vin and oeufs en Meurette. I've been meaning to try the latter ever since our last trip; I'll try and blog that one soon.

So back to the beef: this hearty stew is characterised by a slow braise of beef in red wine, which renders the meat tender and succulent, and the addition of bacon, pearl onions and button mushrooms. Most recipes use shoulder or stewing steak and combine beef stock with red wine for the braising liquid.

I decided to use beef cheeks, as I love the way these break down with slow cooking. I used shallots instead of pearl onions. And I substituted some dark ale for the beef stock, just because. These slight variations on the traditional version turned out extremely well!

This is a very easy dish, though you'll need some time at the start, to prep all the ingredients and separately brown the beef pieces, mushrooms and shallots.

The amounts are flexible, to make it easier to do your shopping. These minor variations really won't make a difference to the final result! Even if you're cooking for one or two, I recommend making this recipe in the quantities below and freezing the extra portions for another time.

Kavey's Beef Cheeks Bourguignon

Serves 6

Ingredients
1-1.2 kilos beef cheeks, trimmed and cut into 2-3 inch pieces

2-3 tablespoons seasoned flour
Vegetable oil for cooking
200 grams bacon in cubes or short strips
200-300 grams button mushrooms, cut in half if large
300-400 grams shallots
2 medium-large onions, diced
1 bottle full-bodied red wine
250 ml dark ale
1 sprig fresh thyme or teaspoon dried
2-3 bay leaves
1 sprig fresh thyme or teaspoon dried

Method

• Dredge each piece of beef in seasoned flour.
• In a large lidded casserole dish – big enough for all the meat, onions, mushrooms, wine and liquid – heat a little cooking oil and fry the floured beef pieces until the surfaces are crusty and brown with caramelisation. Do this in batches so the meat doesn't steam. Set aside the browned beef.
• Add more cooking oil if necessary to brown the mushrooms in the same pan, then set aside.
• Now do the same for the shallots, and set them aside with the mushrooms.
• Again, add more oil to the empty pan, if necessary, and fry the bacon and onions until the onions soften and the bacon takes on a little colour.
• To the bacon and onions, add back the beef pieces plus the bay leaves, thyme, red wine and dark ale.
• Leave to simmer for 3 hours, with the lid on.
• Add the mushrooms and shallots back to the dish and cook for another 30-45 minutes, uncovered, on a gentle simmer. The time depends on the size of your shallots, as you want to ensure they are cooked through and soft. Leaving the lid off will also allow the sauce to reduce a little further.

Serve with buttery mash potatoes, or plain steamed potatoes if you want to be more traditional.

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Empanada! Leith's Meat Bible

The Leith's Meat Bible is, as you'd expect from it's name, a hefty and thorough compendium about choosing, storing, preparing, cooking and carving meat.

With over 450 recipes covering beef, veal, lamb, pork, poultry, game and exotic meats (alligator, bison, camel, elk, impala, kangaroo, llama, python, zebra to name just some) it's certainly comprehensive and the recipes are sourced from all over the world.

The introductory chapters on Understanding Meat (structure, colour, hanging, storage, factors affecting tenderness) and Methods of Cooking Meat are a helpful primer and certainly filled in a few gaps for me.

For example, brining tenderises meat because the salt causes meat proteins to disarray and soften, allowing them to more readily absorb water moisture. Although much of this water will be lost again on cooking, some of it will be retained.

Each different meat chapter then provides more detailed information (such as history, common breeds, different cuts, preparation and cooking methods and troubleshooting for common cooking problems) before listing many varied recipes.

I bookmarked several recipes as I worked my way through the chapters including beef short ribs braised with cider, steak and mushroom pie, veal escalopes with rosemary, Hungarian veal medallions with aubergine, lamb noisettes with roast butter beans and tomatoes, Lancashire hotpot, mutton pies with herb scone crusts, chorizos, Greek lemon chicken, chicken in creamy garlic sauce, yakitori chicken with ginger and lime dipping sauce, chicken and coriander filo pie, boned stuffed duck, duck confit, balsamic-glazed chicken livers on coriander toasted brioche, mi-cuit foie gras terrine and maybe even llama stew!

Following these meat chapters are a selection of Basic Recipes including stocks and sauces, recipes for pastry and pasta and Accompaniments including ways with potatoes, polenta, rice and classics such as Yorkshire puddings, caramelised shallots and red onion marmalade.

Nigel Slater calls Leith's Meat Bible "the best friend you can have in the kitchen" and whilst that's a title that goes to my husband, I can understand why he endorses the book – it's likely to earn itself a permanent home on our bookshelves.

Leith's Meat Bible - Empanadas

(Makes 8)
Ingredients
1.5 quantity shortcrust pastry (recipe provided elsewhere in the book) or 500 grams shop bought
1 teaspoon paprika
2 tablespoons vegetable oil
1 small onion, finely chopped
1 clove garlic, crushed
450 grams minced beef
150 ml water
1 teaspoon Cajun spice
pinch ground cinnamon
pinch ground cayenne
200 grams chopped tomatoes
salt and freshly ground black pepper
1 egg, beaten, to glaze

Note: the teaspoon of paprika is to be added in to the shortcrust pastry recipe. As we used shop bought, we omitted this.
Note: we didn't have a ready-made cajun spice mix so made up our own spice mix for the minced beef filling.
Note: as we grow our own, we used fresh rather than tinned tomatoes.
Note: we didn't bother egg glazing the pastries, nor using egg to seal the edges.

Method

• Make/ buy pastry. Divide the dough into 8 equal pieces, roll each into a 15 cm round, wrap with cling film and chill.

• To make the filling, place half the oil in a sauté pan and stir in the onion. Cover with a piece of dampened greaseproof paper and cook over a low heat until softened, about 10-15 minutes. Remove the paper and turn up the heat slightly to brown the onions. Stir in the garlic and cook for further 30 seconds. Remove from pan and set aside.

Note: we didn't bother with the dampened greaseproof paper when cooking the onions.

• Place the remaining oil into the sauté pan and brown the beef over a medium heat. Using a slotted spoon, transfer the meat to a sieve set over a bowl and allow any excess fat to drain away. Remove any excess fat from the pan.
• Add some of the water to the hot pan and scrape up any sediment. Return the meat to the pan, stir in the spices and cook for 1 minute. Add the tomatoes and the remaining water, then stir in the onions and garlic.

• Transfer the mixture to a saucepan and cook at a low simmer for an hour, or until the meat is tender and the sauce is no longer watery. Season with salt and pepper. Allow to cool.
• Lay the pastry circles on the work surface in a single layer. Brush 1 cm of the edge with the beaten egg.

• Divide the filling between the pastry rounds, then fold to make half-moon shapes. Crimp the edges.

• Lightly grease 2 baking sheets.
• Brush the pastries with the egg glaze. Chill until the pastry is firm.
• Meanwhile, heat the oven to 200 degrees C.
• Brush the pastries again with the egg glaze, place on the prepared baking sheets and bake for 25 minutes, or until golden brown.

• Serve warm.

The empanadas were lovely, we'll definitely be making them again and varying the spice mix to find a nicer Cajun seasoning mix. I also want to try them using an Indian keema filling – a cross between empanadas and samosas!

We had the leftovers cold for lunch the next day, and though they worked really well cold too, so a good lunch or picnic option.

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Leith's Meat Bible, published by Bloomsbury, is (currently) available from Amazon for £22.49 (hardback).

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Snowflakes, Schnapps & Meatballs With Vodka

Snowflakes and Schnapps by Jane Lawson has a Scandinavian feel about it, focused as it is on hearty dishes with a winter theme. But actually, Australian-born Lawson covers a much wider swathe of Europe in this tome.

The book's blurb invites us to "Join Jane Lawson as she takes you on a culinary journey through the magnificent cold-climate cuisines of the snow-cloaked regions of northern, central and eastern Europe. From the seaside towns of Scandinavia, to the alpine villages of Austria, from the ski fields of France, to the fairy-tale castles of Germany, and as far afield as the white-blanketed cities of Russia and beyond, comes this enticing collection of traditional recipes with contemporary flair."

All in all Lawson visited Germany, Austria, Hungary, Russia, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Czech Republic, Sweden, Denmark, Finland, France, Switzerland and Italy during the research for her book.

It's a beautifully solid, sturdy book with an elegant embossed and spot-varnished cover, with the occasional spot-varnished snow flake drifting subtly across the thick pages and vivid, slightly retro-styled food photography showcasing a wide range of intriguing recipes.

Many of these catch my eye – potato flatbreads with smoked salmon, doughnut balls with mocha soup, gingerbread-spice coffee, almond hot chocolate, spiced buttermilk waffles with rhubarb molasses and orange whipped butter, pork and cabbage cakes with sweet onion relish, garlicky pelmeni with brown butter, herbs and yoghurt, slow cooked lamb shanks with Janssen's temptation, coriander roast chicken with walnut sauce, quark fritters with honey syrup, balsamic-glazed veal sweetbreads with white bean and sage fritters, veal cutlet with wheat beer sauce and winter vegetable strudel, beef fillet in parmesan pastry with truffle butter sauce, molten black forest puddings with cherry compote and kirsch cream, prune filled pancakes baked in caramel with spiced cookie cream, roast goose with apple, cider vinegar gravy and golden potatoes…

But whilst the book is beautiful, I think the styling may have been taken a little too far. Chapter titles are a little too cute for comfort: Baby It's Cold Outside (snacks, soups, and warming drinks); Warmed To The Core (breakfasts and slow-cooked dishes); Diamonds And Fur (more decadent recipes, bringing out the bling for entertaining); and Dreaming of a White Christmas (presumably dishes fit for seasonal and celebratory feasting).

And it's disappointing, in a book described as a culinary journey, to find no introduction or even description of the recipes at all, let alone the places, peoples and cultures they hail from. Whilst it's clear that Lawson has taken broad artistic license with the recipes, taking inspiration from the cuisines of the countries she visited rather than producing a faithful record of authentic methods and ingredients, this lack of background information makes it much harder to connect to the recipes, to understand their textures and flavours and be drawn into making them.

Perhaps it's for this reason that I went for the familiar, a dish that I already associate with the snow-covered reaches of Northern Europe and remember from the many visits to Sweden I made during my childhood.

Lawson's meatballs with vodka dill sauce may not be exactly the same as Swedish köttbullar but they look pretty close.

Meatballs With Vodka Dill Sauce

Ingredients
160g fresh white breadcrumbs
185ml pouring (whipping) cream
350g minced beef
350g minced pork
1 large egg
1 onion, very finely chopped
1/4 teaspoon freshly grated nutmeg
a pinch of ground allspice
1 teaspoon sea salt
1/4 teaspoon white pepper
2 tablespoons butter
1 tablespoon oil
1 tablespoon plain flour
435 ml hot beef stock
1 1/2 tablespoons chopped dill (plus extra to garnish)
80 ml vodka
Lingonberry preserves to serve

Method

• Combine the breadcrumbs and 125 ml of the cream and leave to sit until the breadcrumbs have absorbed all the liquid.
• Add the beef and pork mince, egg, onion, nutmeg, allspice, salt and white pepper and combine well.
• Roll the mixture into 3 cm balls and place in a single layer on a baking tray lined with baking paper. Cover and refrigerate for 3-4 hours to allow the flavours to develop.
• When ready to cook, heat half of the butter with the oil in a large heavy based frying pan over a medium-high heat (do not use a non-stick pan).
• Cook the meatballs, in batches, for 4-6 minutes each, or until browned all over. Remove and set aside.
• Add the remaining butter and the flour to the pan and stir.
• Gradually whisk in the hot stock and the remaining cream, scraping up any cooked-on bits.
• Add the dill and 3 tablespoons of the vodka, and bring to the boil, whisking continuously until smooth and thickened slightly.
• Return the meatballs to the pan, along with any resting juices, and cook for 10 minutes or until tender.
• Stir through the remaining vodka and season to taste.
  
• Garnish with the fresh dill and serve with lingonberry preserves as a condiment.
• Tip: Serve the meatballs over some sautéed or mashed potatoes or buttered noodles, with the lingonberry preserves on the side as a condiment. A shot of Vodka is a must!

Notes

We made a few changes to the recipe, mainly because we had 600 grams of minced beef and the same again of minced pork in the freezer. We scaled up the quantities of all the meatball ingredients, making a whopping 52 meatballs, 36 of which we froze for later use.

The remaining 16 (yes, we're greedy piggies) we cooked as per the instructions, the only omission being dill, which I don't like. Having forgotten to defrost any of our home-made stock from the freezer, we used a beef stock pot, which worked fine for this recipe.

Our sauce wasn't as dark as the photograph in the book, perhaps because we didn't brown the meatballs enough or maybe because our stock wasn't as dark as Lawson's. However, the taste of the meatballs and cream sauce were very much in tune with my memories of Swedish meatballs and gravy.

My only negative would be that adding so much of the vodka into the sauce right at the end gave the finished sauce a somewhat too astringent vodka taste. In future, I'll either add all or most of it before bringing the sauce to the boil or simply use less overall. (And this coming from someone who rather likes boozy sauces).

On the basis of this recipe, I'm hopeful about the success I might have if I tried some of the others, though many of them seem to be more complicated and time-consuming than I have patience for.

The problem for me remains the lack of any introduction to each recipe, and the lack of background information overall about the countries Lawson took inspiration from and the original dishes she used as a starting point for her own recipes.

That said, it is a beautiful book, the very epitome of coffee table food porn and the kind of book any food lover would surely love to receive as a gift, whether or not they go on to make many of the recipes. And I have always been rather a sucker for spot-varnishing, as my husband can attest – I've been known to sit stroking such varnish with a demented grin on my face. So you can only imagine how happy little dainty snowflakes of shininess have made me…

Many thanks to Murdoch books for the review copy.

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Snowflakes and Schnapps, published by Murdoch Books, is currently available from Amazon for £14.99, cover price £25.

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John Torode's Aunty Mary's Beef Pie

A few months ago I reviewed John Torode's Chicken And Other Birds. This time it's the turn of his his latest book, Beef And Other Bovine Matters. Which has a pie on it's cover – fantastic!

The chicken pie we made to his recipe was a thing of beauty. Would his Aunty Mary's beef pie be as good?

Whereas the chicken pie recipe called for ready-made puff pastry this time John advocates a home made lard pastry which looked simple and struck me as a better match for the beefy pie filling. (The puff pastry was spot on for the chicken pie).

John Torode's Aunty Mary's Crusted Slow-Cooked (Beef) Pie

Ingredients
-beef filling
2 kg stewing steak (skirt, shin, brisket, cheek or tail) trimmed of excess fat but leave in all the gristle, then cut into 3 cm cubes
80 grams plain flour
salt and pepper
50 ml vegetable oil
2 large onions, roughly chopped
1 litre stock or water
50 ml Worcestershire sauce
4 large potatoes, peeled and cut into 3cm chunks

-lard pastry
200 grams lard, at room temperature
400 grams self-raising flour, salted
1 pinch salt
180 ml cold water
1 egg (for glaze)
a little milk (for glaze)

Note: With no tips on what size pie dish to use, we looked at the volume of meat and decided to halve the recipe. We used the kilo of beef cheeks we had in the freezer, left over from Pascal Aussignac's Cuisinier Gascon braised ox cheeks recipe. We used water in place of stock.

Method

• Shake the meat and the flour in a plastic bag with some salt and pepper – a quick way of coating the meat in the flour with no mess.

• Heat a cast-iron or other heavy-based pan over medium heat and add the oil. When hot, fry the onions for about 3 minutes. Add the floured meat and cook until coloured, about 10 minutes.

• Pour in the stock or water and add the Worcestershire sauce. Bring to the boil, reduce the heat and cook for about 2 hours.

• Add the potatoes and cook gently for a further 1 hour.

• Meanwhile make the pastry. Rub the lard into the flour and salt, or put into a food processor and mix, until resembling breadcrumbs. Add the water bit by bit and mix to form a dough. Let rest for 20 minutes.
  
• Check the meat – when ready it will be soft and break apart when squeezed. The sauce should be rich and thick. Season as necessary.
  
• Heat the oven to 190 C.

• Three quarters fill an oven proof dish with the meat mixture.
  
• Roll out the pastry to 3 cm thick and cut into a shape large enough to cover the top of the dish.
  
• Beat the egg and milk together and brush over the rim of the dish (we omitted this step).
  
• Press the edges of the pastry down firmly.
  
• Brush the pastry with the egg wash (we omitted this step).

• Cut a small hole in the middle to allow steam to escape.
  
• Bake for 40 minutes. If the edges of the pastry become too brown, protect with some foil.

• Remove from oven and eat!

The recipe and instructions are precise, clear and straightforward to follow. The only additional information I would have liked is an idea of the size of pie dish required – it's difficult, without experience, to estimate volume of filling just from the list of ingredients.

With so few ingredients, I had wondered whether the filling would be a bit bland but I needn't have worried.

The beef was very tender. The richly meaty gravy had just the right thick, glutinous consistency. The potatoes retained their shape but were soft all the way through. All in all it was a very tasty pie filling. The pastry was firm on top and softer underneath, where the moisture of the beef stew gave it a touch of gooeyness.

This was a mighty fine pie!

There are a number of other recipes in the book that are on my list to try including beef skewers with a peanut and coconut satay sauce, cevapcici (Yugoslavian sausages) and anchovy, fontina and meat sauce calzone.

Thanks to Quadrille for my review copy.

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John Torode's Beef, published by Quadrille, is currently available on Amazon for £8.99. (RRP £14.99)

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Chocolate & Chorizo Chilli Con Carne

We love visiting our friends Mark & Martine, not least because we always eat well and it's nice to have a late night soak in their outdoor hot tub after a day pottering about. We've known them since uni days (longer ago than needs to be mentioned). Back then, I'd never have pegged Mark as someone who'd get into cooking in such a big way, especially the baking and puddings! Then again, I'd never have put Pete and I down as such enthusiastic kitchen gardeners – our glee at our new greenhouse a couple of years ago verged on the demented!

One of the lovely meals Mark cooked for us last year was a chilli con carne recipe with chorizo and chocolate. It was delicious – the spicy flavour of the chorizo and the bitter-sweet cocoa gave the finished dish a wonderful, complex flavour.

Mark gave me a copy of the Nigella recipe he had used, with tips on some adaptations. I've made quite a few more tweaks of my own (including switching cubed beef shin for minced beef) and have re-written the method too.

It took me about 10-15 minutes to measure out and prepare all the ingredients, then about 30 minutes to do all the stove top steps before popping the dish into the oven for three hours.

Chocolate & Chorizo Chilli Con Carne
Adapted from Nigella's Choc Chip Chilli from Nigella Christmas

Ingredients
250 grams cooking chorizo, chopped into small pieces (I used Unearthed's Spanish cooking chorizo)
800 grams minced beef
Approximately 250 grams (2 medium) onions peeled and chopped
2 large cloves garlic, peeled and finely chopped
2-3 tablespoons vegetable oil
Seeds from 1 large brown cardamom pod
1 teaspoon ground cumin (see Notes, will use 2 teaspoons next time)
1/2 teaspoon ground coriander (see Notes, will use 1 teaspoon next time)
1/2 teaspoon ground cinnamon (see Notes, perhaps 1 teaspoon next time)
1/2 teaspoon my home-made very very hot chilli powder}
1-2 tablespoons double concentrated tomato puree
1 can red kidney beans, drained (400 grams can, 250 grams drained weight)
800 grams tinned chopped tomatoes
40 grams dark chocolate, chopped
Additional water, as required (I added about 250 ml)

Method

• Preheat oven to 300°F/150°C.


• Finely chop the onion and garlic.

• Heat the oil in a large, heavy oven proof pan with a lid and sauté the onion and garlic over low heat until soft (about 10 minutes).

• Add the cardamom seeds and the cumin, coriander, cinnamon and chilli powders and stir thoroughly.

• After a couple of minutes, add the chorizo pieces and fry until they leak their aromatic orange oil.

• Add the minced beef in batches, to make it easier to brown the meat. Cook until all the beef is nicely browned.

• Add the tomato puree, drained kidney beans and chopped tomatoes and stir well. Add water at this point, if there's not much liquid.


• Bring to a boil. Once boiling, stir in the chocolate.

• Cover and bake in the oven for 3 hours. (Check once an hour through the cooking time and add water if looking too dry).

Chocolate & Chorizo Chilli Con Carne

Notes

I was pretty happy with the result, and Pete really loved it. The chorizo gave it's unique, smoky flavour to the finished dish. The chocolate wasn't obvious – it blended in completely but no doubt added to the richness.

My only change will be to double the amount of cumin and coriander, next time, and maybe up the cinnamon too, to give a stronger punch of that traditional chilli con carne taste.

Addendum: we've made this again several times and have indeed always doubled cumin and coriander from the amounts listed above. Works beautifully.
If you have any chilli con carne recipes or tips, please do let me know in the comments below! Thanks!

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Cuisinier Gascon: Braised Ox Cheek Bordelaise

I've been desperate to cook some of the delectably tempting recipes in Cuisinier Gascon by Pascal Aussignac since I got my mitts on it just before leaving for the Falklands.

It's a really, really beautiful book, full of mouth-watering recipes and beautiful images, not just of some of the dishes but also of life in Gascony. And I find it's pretty (hard back) cover and thick pages very appealing. Inside, as well as recipes, it gives some helpful advice about some of the ingredients used - buying and preparing foie gras, for instance and the different classifications of Armagnac. There are sweet little passages about traditional life, farming and cooking in the region at the start of each chapter. And I like how the recipes are divided - we have la route de sel which Aussignac translates as "snackings". Then a chapter about cooking with produce from le potager (the kitchen garden), followed by one on rivière et océan. After these come prés et pâturages (fields and pastures, which are the landscapes Aussignac associates with duck, geese, game plus pork, lamb, beef and veal) and forêt et prairie (forest and meadow, which represents mushrooms, truffles, eggs, snails and cheese). Finally, there is a chapter called gourmandises full of wonderful sweet treats.

As usual, as soon as I sat and looked through the book, I started depositing liberal numbers of my sticky note bookmarks, identifying the recipes that grabbed me the most.

I quickly got it into my head that I wanted to start with the Braised Ox Cheeks Bordelaise recipe and once I'm set on something I really put on my tête de mule!

But it took a little time to settle back in from our holiday, especially as our first focus was on some urgent DIY so that our new fitted bedroom could be installed just a few days after our return. After that, however, it was time to turn to the ox cheeks!

Note: I'm not really sure why cheeks and tails are still referred to with the ox- prefix rather than simply beef, but rest assured, ox cheeks = beef cheeks!

I have discovered that finding ox cheeks isn't that easy. Whilst pig cheeks have recently made it into a few supermarkets, ox cheeks seem harder to find. I've often lamented the lack of a decent local butcher here in North Finchley, and this search of mine drove that home to me once again.

I do have a most wonderful online source for good British meat now, but my freezer was too full to fit in a minimum order from Paganum this time, so I turned to a new twitter friend who makes weekly visits to Smithfields and Billingsgate to pick up choice meat and fish for trade customers.

Before too long, I finally had 2 kilos of meaty ox cheeks in my mitts. I used half to make this recipe, which serves 4.

I made my beef stock night before, roasting some beef bones before popping them in the slow cooker overnight with a couple of bay leaves, a small onion, a carrot (both halved) and water. The stock was strained and reduced in the morning, resulting in a wonderfully deep beef flavour.

Braised Ox Cheek Bordelaise
Ingredients
800 grams ox cheeks (I used 1 kilo)
a little olive oil
2 tablespoons plain flour
100 grams sugar
1 x 75cl bottle red wine
500 ml fresh beef stock
2-3 sprigs fresh thyme
2 bay leaves
2 fat garlic cloves, crushed
sea salt and freshly ground pepper (I used table salt)
500 grams shallots, sliced lengthways (I used round shallows cut in half)
4 marrow bones (optional), soaked in cold water for 2-3 hours (I used 2)

Method

• In a saucepan (large enough to hold the cheeks, stock and wine), fry the ox cheeks in the oil until nicely caramelised and brown.
  
  
  
  
• Mix in the flour and sugar.
  
• Pour in the red wine and beef stock. Though the recipe doesn't specify, I chose a Bordeaux, as I felt it fitting to use a wine from the region!
  

• Add the herbs, one of the garlic cloves and some seasoning.

• Bring to the boil before turning down to a simmer. Cover and cook gently for about 4 hours, until the meat is tender.

• Once the meat is tender, strain a ladle of the cooking liquid into another saucepan and cook the shallots and remaining garlic until the shallots are soft and the liquid has reduced to a syrupy glaze.

• Drain and steam the marrowbones, leave to cool before scooping out the marrow. Chop and set aside.

• To serve, slice the ox cheeks, and serve with shallot glaze and the chopped marrow scattered on top.
  
  We didn't make too much effort with presentation as, having got back late from lunch out, it wasn't ready until about 9pm and, having smelled the tantalising cooking aromas all afternoon, we were ravenous. So the various elements went onto the plate in somewhat haphazard distribution!
  

On the same page, the book provides a recipe for parsnip and white chocolate puree, to serve with the cheeks, but as that didn't appeal, we didn't make it.

The ox cheeks were incredibly tender and moist, absolutely gorgeous, though quite subtle in flavour. The shallots and glaze were superb.

The recipe leaves you with a lot of leftover cooking liquid . As we'd cooked enough for 2 meals, we kept the liquid in a second box in the fridge, with half the meat and the shallots in a first box. The next night, as well as re-heating the meat and shallots, we reduced lots more of the cooking liquid to make a beautifully unctuous, very richly flavoured sauce. This gave the meat an added punch of flavour, alongside the shallots, and next time I make this, I shall definitely do the same as it really lifted the dish another level.

On visiting a friend a couple of months ago, we were treated to a dessert of camembert with spiced tarte tatin apples, also from the book. Utterly delicious and I think it would be a lovely dessert after the ox cheeks.

Cuisinier Gascon is usually £25 but is currently available on Amazon (at time of posting) for just £14.90.

My thanks to Absolute Press for the review copy.


This was my first time cooking with ox cheeks and I am already thinking about recipes for the kilo left in the freezer.

Do you have any great ox cheek recipes?

Please do share them with me in the comments below or provide a link if they are available online. Thank you so much!

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