Whole Foods at the Kentlands finally had bone-in beef shanks so I think that will be my preparing for a winter storm cooking tonight.

I might even share with Mr. BLB...

Now...if I only I had confidence that we will keep power during the ice storm... Sigh...

Jennifer

I was happy to find boneless short ribs at The Springfield Butcher this weekend, over two pounds for around $16. I made Thomas Keller's Beef Bourguignon on yesterday for dinner on Tuesday (It taste better after sitting a few days). Now I know why his restaurants are so damn expensive, all that refinement takes a lot of work, and it calls for throwing away about 2lbs of vegatables. I love the Bouchon cookbook, it's a lot of work, but the results are always worth it. Only Thomas Keller and turn beef stew into a 3 day event.

Like MDT said, in the oven at 200 works great. I've done it at 225 or 250 with the same results. I also do it on the stove top at a bare simmer, which for my stovetop is the lowest of the low setting.

Slow cookers are great and all, but you can't do the initial browning of the meat and you can't sweat the veggies either. I have one and have wondered why I browned the meat in a pot, and then put it in the cooker. Why bother? Just leave it in the pot. I guess there are good recipes out there where you just throw everything in at once completely raw, and then cook it all day. But you wouldn't get any of that delicious caramelization.

the slow cooker saves you some money on your gas bill, but i like you prefer to braise either in the over at 200/225, never quite sure or the lowest heat possible on the stove top.

Like onions? While I haven't used this particular recipe, Genovese is grand.

ETA: Oops! Corrected link to recipe from someone trustworthy. Genovese is a Neapolitan answer to brisket. You cook beef (usually, though Alberto, here recommends pork) forever under a mound of onions and serve the meat as a second course after pasta covered with the melted oniony goo.

Good grief, that's expensive meat. I get boneless shortribs from SFW for aboutg $3-4/lb.

I bought beef shanks today without knowing what to do with them. Would it be appropriate to cook them as I would beef short ribs? Similar technique?

Well, not knowing how you cook short ribs, I'd have to say a qualified yes. Beef shank is a tough cut of muscle, and so requires long, slow cooking in liquid, in order to become tender.

Beef shank to me is the quintessential beef soup base.

My favorite recipe for braised short ribs is from an issue of Fine Cooking and involves white wine, whole tomatoes and their juice, carrots, celery, pancetta, onions and about 3 hours of cooking time. I went ahead and tried it. The whole mess is about 45 minutes into the process. I'll let you know how it goes.

Dinner about 8:30, then? Sounds delicious. Can't wait!

Pretty much. It's out of the oven and I'm waiting for it to cool down a bit. When I last turned the meat and ensured the liquid was still covering it, the beef shank was already fork tender. Nice! I'll soon skim some fat, remove the meat from my dutch oven and then reduce the liquid a little bit.

I have now braised short ribs twice, both times using this recipe. I used boneless short ribs the first time, and it turned out well. (Maybe not quite fork-tender, but tender enough for my novice-level expectations.) Last night, I made it with bone-in short ribs. We found the result way too gristle-y. I noted that after the bones fell out (or were nudged out by me), the inside of the rib, which formerly touched the bone, was basically a layer of connective tissue. I know that short ribs are heavy on such stuff, and that's why we braise them. But this stuff was nowhere near tender. Some ribs were better than others. For the two ribs that were on my plate, I left half uneaten.

So did I get bad short ribs? (Got them at Shoppers Food.) Or does the recipe call for an insufficient braising time (about 2.5 hours, on the stovetop)? Or did I mess up somewhere along the way?

Not a huge fan of the meat at SFW and that could be why the meat was overly gristle-y, but most likely the connective tissue did not have a chance to dissolve. It sounds like the temperature of your simmer was too high, they key is slow and low. Was the liquid bubbling? If so, that is too high a temperature. It can be difficult to keep the temperature low and even on a stovetop so you might want to try putting the pot in the oven. Set you oven for 200F and put the pot in the oven after searing the outside of the meat and creating the simmering liquid.

You've probably got the correct diagnosis. It was bubbling. In fact, there was a point at which I had inadvertently let it rise to a virtual boil. (I hate to lift the lid to check too often, you know?) Next time, the oven it is.

Both household cooks are now working outside the house, that is to say, I got a job. And now find myself looking for shortcuts. Thus, I dusted off the slow cooker. And you know what? It does a perfectly acceptable job braising beef. So far I've made pot roast, beef stew, corned beef, and daube. Tastes remarkably like the same dish braised in the oven.

I hesitated to mention it before, but now that William-Sonoma is selling an upscale slow cooker, I reckon it's time to come out of the closet. Not that I am going to spend $300 for a "gourmet" slow cooker with a steel cooking pot that allows one to brown the meat on the stove top. If I wanted to brown the meat, I'd use a saute pan, then my ceramic lined slow cooker, and to get all the fond into the cooker, just deglaze the pan.

Mark Bittman uses a slow cooker.
http://www.e-cookbooks.net/articles/slowcook.htm

Dunno about chicken yet but my office is only 15 minutes from home during the lunch break so it's do-able to run home at lunch, take the pot out of the fridge, and start up a chicken dish on high.

Even at high, the contents of the pot never bubble, just simmer.

Learning as I go.

Interesting article on braising without stock from Chef Daniel Patterson. He purees the remaining braising liquid, vegetables, and fat (!) to make a sauce.

Costco has reasonably priced boneless leg of lamb, but all the lamb stew recipes I see call for lamb shoulder. Would it be a mistake to cut up a leg of lamb instead? I mean, on a par with braising beef steak?

I've used leg of lamb to make stew. I wouldn't pay a premium price for it, but if you're getting it inexpensively, why not? I sometimes make lamb stew out of leftover roast leg of lamb, as well.

Pulled a pork loin roast (with bones) out of the freezer the other day and I am going to braise it in milk using Marcella Hazan's recipe. I will report back on the results.

I have done that and liked it. I was just looking at the recipe again recently because someone elsewhere was looking for pork loin recipes. It reminded me that I hadn't made it in a long time.

It turned out nicely and the pork was easily fork tender. The pork was from Cedarbrook farms and was very tasty, but the resulting sauce was a bit blah for me. Not sure that I would make it again.

I've only made it a few times, but I recall that what I served with it seemed to make the difference. I think I may have liked it served with spinach and garlic, but I don't seem to have notes on that. I keep notes rather erratically on the recipes I make, which can be frustrating when I can't quite recall something on my own.

Let me put in a plug for "flap meat" from Costco, about $4/lb, not a lot of connective tissue or fat compared with, say, beef short ribs, cooks in about 2 1/2 hours, as the basis of a braise.

I was ill this weekend so DH cooked instead of me, did not cook as I had planned to, with red wine, tomato paste, and dried porcinis, but very tasty. I will give the other half pack (now frozen) a go next weekend.

I had hoped to cook several pots of various things including beef with red wine, lamb stew, and white bean stew, to nosh on during the week, but there's always next weekend.

I used to make this dish frequently, using Madeleine Kamman's recipe. I looked at Marcella's recipe, which seemed one-dimensional compared to Kamman's. Kamman's recipe calls for roasting the pork (shoulder/butt in her recipe) for twenty minutes first, before braising. And reducing four cups of milk down to three, with aromatic herbs (bay, thyme, parsley, sage), and sauteing onion and garlic in the braising pot before pouring the milk into the braising pot with the pork. After the meat has cooked, the sauce is strained and thickened, and I thought it was very flavorful.

Well that sounds much, much better than Marcella's recipe. I will look it up and try it, thanks.

Mmmm, flaps.

I've got a flat cut brisket braising with a sauce I've been curious to try for a while now. The braise is chili sauce, (beefy) onion soup mix and coke. It smells like heaven now- about half way through. I'm going to add some potatoes and carrots (the Farm at Sunnyside) shortly.
I'l report back later in the dinner thread

has anyone tried any of the recipes from daniel boulud's "braise" cookbook? i'm thinking about making 'spicy oxtails w/ pears and sweet potatoes' or 'ham hocks with lychees and bok choy' or 'lamb shanks w/ mint, prunes, and bourbon'

any hits? misses?