Meaty and hearty winter casseroles

Beef and beer casserole is a heart-and-soul-warming winter meal.

by MICHELLE VOLLEMAERE
It’s winter. It’s cold. I’m thrilled. Truly. It’s my favourite season, because chilly weather gives me the perfect excuse to wear big, chunky jumpers, cosy jackets and long scarves to disguise the curves that weren’t there when I was younger, and to wear high-heeled boots to compensate for my lack of height, which was.

Beef and beer casserole is a heart-and-soul-warming winter meal.


Speaking of big and chunky and perfect excuses — and no, I’m not talking about me anymore — the other great part of the cold winter weather is the compulsion we have to eat steaming hot, heart-and-soul-warming, just-like-your-grandmother-used-to-make, food. Vegetable soups thick with barley and lentils, pot roasts slowly simmered in their own juices, steamed puddings sticky with hot jam or syrup oozing down the sides and dark, hearty stews with great chunks of meat and vegetables piled into bowls with generous hot ladlefuls of rich gravy.
Stews, casseroles, ragouts, tagines, cassoulets — call them what you will — are all variations of the same theme. Meat (usually but not exclusively), vegetables, strong aromatic seasonings and some type of flavoursome liquid combined in a pot and cooked slowly at a low heat until magic happens and the ingredients are transformed into the perfect antidote to winter’s chill.
Cheap cuts of meat do make the best stews. Don’t be tempted to waste your money substituting expensive sirloin steak for good old gravy beef, shin, chuck or flank, which with all those strange sinews and what the butchers call “connective tissue” during the low, slow cooking become soft and sticky and delicious.
I have a dozen recipes or more for some sublime casseroles using such mouth-watering combinations as chicken and enough garlic to make your mind boggle, pork and tamarillo or goat with Moroccan spices, but I am sharing my family’s two favourites: Osso Buco, thick crosscut pieces of beef shank with the marrow bone still intact cooked with tomatoes and orange zest, and Beef and Beer Stew, gravy beef, thyme and mushrooms slowly simmered in a dark ale.
As always, you will find these recipes on the website. Have a great winter, eat well and stay warm.

RECIPES below

Recipes
Osso buco
Osso buco is Italian for “bone with hole” and refers to the marrow-filled bone at the centre of the cross-cut shank. Most butchers and some supermarkets sell these. Whether you like to eat the fatty marrow or not, it adds a superbly rich flavour to the stew. Authentically made with veal, but beef shanks work just as well. The quantities in this recipe will serve 4 people.
4 pieces of osso buco
2 carrots
1 brown onion
2 celery sticks
2 garlic cloves
5-6 sprigs of fresh thyme leaves
250ml white wine
2 tablespoons tomato paste
400 gm can chopped tomatoes
500ml beef stock
1 orange
salt and pepper
Olive oil

Finely dice the onion, carrots and celery and crush the garlic cloves. Strip the leaves from the thyme sprigs and finely grate the zest from the entire orange.
Preheat oven to 150C and, on the stove top, heat about 2 tablespoons of oil in a heavy-based casserole dish. Cast-iron cookware is ideal for this but any saucepan with a tight-fitting lid, flameproof handles and a heavy bottom will work.
Season the osso buco pieces with salt and pepper and brown on both sides in the casserole dish, cooking in batches to ensure it browns rather than stews at this stage. Remove and set aside.
Add a little more olive oil to pan and gently sauté onion, carrot, celery, garlic. You will want these vegetables to be softened and golden brown. Add the thyme leaves near the end and cook for another couple of minutes.
Add the wine to the dish and stir the liquid making sure you collect any stuck on bits at bottom of pan. Add the tomatoes, tomato paste and stock and bring to the boil, stirring often.
Return the osso buco pieces to the dish, top with the finely grated orange zest.
Cover the casserole with a lid and cook in the oven for two hours.
Serve with green vegetables, broccoli and beans are perfect, and polenta, rice or mashed potatoes.

Beef and beer stew
The hardest part of this recipe is persuading the beer drinker in the family to part with a bottle for you to cook with! The meat doesn’t even need to be browned first. I always make two batches of this at the same time and put one in the freezer for another day. This recipe will serve 4-6 people.
500gm of gravy beef or other stewing beef
330ml bottle of beer – stout or dark ale
2 sticks celery
2 brown onions
2 carrots
400gm can of chopped tomatoes
2 cups of Swiss brown or field mushrooms
2 tablespoons of plain flour
I tablespoon each of tomato paste, Worcestershire sauce, brown sugar
½ teaspoon each of mustard powder and salt
Thyme sprigs
Bay leaves
6 peppercorns
6 juniper berries (optional)
olive oil

Chop the onion, carrots and celery into chunks. The mushrooms can be thickly sliced, quartered or left whole depending on their size and shape and your preference.
Cut the beef into biggish cubes. If the pieces are too small they will dry out so it is better to cook them in bigger pieces to cut up later.
Preheat oven to 150C and, on the stove top, heat about 2 tablespoons of oil in a heavy-based casserole dish.
Add the celery, onion and carrot and cook for about 10 minutes until golden brown and softened.
Add the beef pieces and cook for a further five minutes.

Add the flour and mix through the meat and vegetables until everything is coated.
Crush the juniper berries and peppercorns under the blade of your knife and add to the dish.
Pour the whole bottle of beer into the dish and stir and mix for a few minutes making sure you get all the flavours off the bottom of the dish.
In a jug, mix together the tomatoes, tomato paste, Worcestershire sauce, brown sugar, mustard powder and salt and add to the dish.
Tuck a couple of bay leaves and some sprigs of thyme into the dish before covering it tightly and transferring it to the oven.

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Michael Otto

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