Back to Danny Meyer’s Second Helpings again this week.
This time, I went looking for a recipe to match an ingredient. I had some square-cut bone-in beef shortribs that I picked up a while back that I decided to thaw this weekend.
There’s really only one way to do bone-in shortribs cut in the usual American style, at least to start, and that’s a braise. You can grill them afterwards, but they are just too tough even with a marinade unless you do some kind of long, slow cooking before a finishing.
Meyer’s book has a good basic recipe for them that involves marinating them overnight in red wine and vegetables, so this has been under way since yesterday. I feel a bit restless with the recipe as given, but I’ll stick with it. There’s a nice touch in calling for some garam masala to go in for the main cook. I was toying with adding crushed tomatoes as well, but that seems if anything even more “oh yeah that’s the way it’s always done” and it’s not in the Meyer recipe. I’d almost rather do them in a Korean style but I’m trying to stick with the Meyer book to give it one more chance. I may save the creative urges for an accompaniment—maybe some farro with mushrooms?
When I was a kid, I really did not like the taste of braised or stewed meat, and I keep thinking about that feeling every time I cook that way now. A lot of the time, I can remember past food aversions in almost intellectual terms—that I didn’t like food this way or that way because of something conceptual, or even just because I hadn’t tried it before and was suspicious of it. But braising is a more visceral, sensuous memory where I can remember what about the taste used to bother me—I can taste the former taste—and yet somehow also really like it now. One thing that I know makes a difference for me is the comparison between meat softened or stewed in a pressure cooker versus meat and vegetables that have been browned in a Dutch oven and then are braised down in an oven. The soft, texture-less feel of the former flips me over hard to my youthful disgust; the latter technique lets my current liking win out.
In a lot of restaurants, short ribs and similarly tough cuts are done in a sous vide cooker and to me that always has the taste and mouthfeel of the pressure-cooker/slow-cooker even if someone’s gone over the surface with a propane torch. There’s a real difference between a cut browned beforehand and then roasted in liquid in the same pot it was browned in and something kept sealed in warm water and browned at the last second. No matter how clever the chef is about the meat in the sous vide, it just never has the flavor that a braise in an oven provides, and the texture is just different. I rarely order anything in a restaurant that claims to be slow roasted or braised because I just plain disbelieve that this is how it’s been cooked—the technique is being used as a conceptual modifier, not an actual description of the cookery. And I get it—not only is it a challenge to time a braise for a restaurant service, but it often creates an overwhelmingly strong aroma that might overwhelm everything else the kitchen is pushing out. In a home kitchen, that’s the other great thing about doing it—and again, something an Insta-Pot more or less prevents from happening.
Image credit: By Tim1965 - Adapted from BeefCutRib.png, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=48096804