It's too cold for chitchat, so let's talk braising
It’s winter, and it’s cold as all hell, and you’re poor because you blew your paycheck buying “Ice Road Truckers” DVDs for your obnoxious brother-in-law’s Christmas gift, and now you’re hungry and want a big mound of steaming meat and root vegetables.
You want stew, beef bourguignon, or pot roast, or oxtail, or coq au vin, and you want it to be ready when you walk in the door.
Guess what? You need to learn to braise. It’s really easy. Let’s teach you.
Braising is, in short, the combination of dry and wet heat, and it’s an ages-old and time-honored method of turning tough, lousy pieces of meat into something tender and wonderful. Coq au vin, for instance, isn’t traditionally the nice, pink supermarket chickens raised on grain and water and salt-injected for easy consumption; it’s rooster — gamey, gristly, testosterone-jacked, otherwise inedible rooster that, through the magic of braising for a long time in red wine, becomes not only edible but transcendent.
(You can braise vegetables, but as their structure and chemistry is different — they have a lot more water, for one thing — let’s keep our discussion to the braising of meat.)
To braise, you first need to sear. Braising without searing isn’t braising. It’s boiling (or, if you prefer, poaching), and while you can certainly poach a chicken, it’s not going to be nearly as tasty as one you braise.
Searing accomplishes two things: first, it browns the meat, during which something wonderful called the Maillard reaction takes place. On a chemical level, the Maillard reaction is when amino acids react with naturally-occurring sugars in the meat via application of heat, and their product gives you the pleasing and idiosyncratic complex of aromas and flavors and textures we associate with cooked things. Second, a good sear will provide you a platform for cooking in liquid; while we want the end result to be fork-tender, we don’t want liquefied meat.
Sear with salt. Always. Salt will firm up the surface of the meat and aid in the browning, and it will taste better than heaps of salt added afterward. Snobs like to point out that salt leaches natural juices out of the meat, but you’re cooking in liquid anyway, so a dearth of juices won’t be a problem. Toughness will. Use salt. Pepper is optional, but you should use it anyway.
Go ahead and sear over high heat in whatever pan you’re planning to use for the braise, whether a Dutch oven, a big stainless-steel pot or just a large pan. You’ll save yourself trouble in cleaning up, and the deglaze done after the sear will unlock all sorts of delightful brown bits. Sear in a bit of oil for a few minutes per side of meat, making sure that each side has browned sufficiently, and then add your liquid.
Liquid for a braise can be anything, as long as it’s got a little acid to it: red wine, white wine, beer, vinegar, or tomato juice. Remove your meat, add the liquid to deglaze while at high heat, return the meat and cover it with liquid, reduce your heat, cover the pot tightly and cook at a low simmer for a really, really long time. I’ve made braised dishes in restaurants that really weren’t their best until they had over 12 hours of braising — and a traditional daube Provencal calls for three solid days of cooking with a full day of cooling between each — but two to four hours should be good for your purposes.
What we’re doing here is turning collagen, the tough connective tissue in inexpensive cuts, into gelatin by a process called hydrolyzation — that is, we’re irreversibly breaking it up with the extant water in our braising liquid and the help of the acids therein. Gelatin is a lot softer than collagen, and it’s what makes braised meat tender.
And now I’ll tell you a very important secret: Collagen turns into gelatin at between 180 and 190 degrees Fah-renheit, while the proteins in meat begin to form new complexes, meaning they link together and toughen up, around the boiling point of water, at 212 degrees. So keep that heat low.
The addition of vegetables to your braising liquid, whether they’re onions or carrots or garlic or celery or, really, whatever you want, help aid the complexity of the dish. This is because, as your meat is breaking down, so are they, and as the hours pass, the interplay between sugars and acids and proteins that exist in each of them will increase, and so will the character of the dish.
Traditionally, a braised dish makes its own sauce, which is part of its appeal; the gelatin that has broken down and oozed out of the braising meat will help firm up your braising liquids, and a quick reduction over high heat after removing the meat or an addition of roux will give you a simple, extremely tasty pan sauce.
So what can you braise? Anything, really, but the cheaper cuts deserve it and will benefit from it more. This means chucks, rumps, briskets, shoulders and flanks. Any chicken is, in my opinion, better braised than dried up and carbonized on the grill, and a lamb shank turns into something darn near mystical with liberal application of dark beer and sage. It’s a simple, two-step process with myriad ways to vary it based on cut, liquid, seasoning and time. I suggest you play around.
HONEY STOUT BRAISED LAMB SHANKS
Yield: 4-6 servings
4 lamb shanks, whole, or 8 crosscut portions
Salt & Pepper
1 tablespoon rubbed sage
1 large onion, roughly chopped
2 large carrots, roughly chopped
3 celery stalks
5 sage leaves
1/4 cup honey
2-3 pints stout beer, divided (Bristol Winter Warlock preferred)
1 pint chicken or veal stock (optional)
Procedure:
1. Clean lamb shanks, removing excess fat and silver skin. Pat dry and dust liberally with salt and pepper. Sprinkle with rubbed sage. Preheat oven to 300 degrees.
2. Coat oven-safe pan with olive oil and place over high heat. Once pan is hot, add lamb shanks, browning 3-5 minutes per side. When evenly browned, remove lamb and deglaze pan with 1 pint stout, scraping to remove browning residue. Replace lamb and add onions carrot, celery and sage leaves. Add remaining beer and stir in honey, covering meat fully. (For a less bitter sauce, replace one pint of beer with stock.)
3.Cover tightly and place oven. Cook, turning every hour or so to keep meat immersed in liquid, for 4-6 hours or until meat is uniformly tender.
4. To make sauce, remove meat and pour braising liquid through chinoise or fine-mesh strainer into a hot pan. Reduce by half over medium heat, adding salt, pepper and honey to taste. Mount with butter to finish — the sauce should be quite dark and thick enough coat a spoon.
5. Serve over potatoes or egg noodles.
Aaron Retka is a chef at The Conscious Table in Colorado Springs.
