Beer with Four-Legged Friends

Ann and I love living in Bend. One of the attractions for us is one of the best beer scenes in the country, especially if you love West Coast IPAs as much as we do. We've lived here in Bend now coming right up in days on two years. And we spent much of the first  year exploring all the outlets for great beer in town.

In year two, however, we really stopped making the rounds of breweries. We stopped because we have found a home away from home at Crosscut Warming Hut across the street from the Box Factory. We know the staff there and a lot of the regulars with whom we sit and catch up. And we appreciate the daily-changing line-up of great Oregon beers with the occasional beer from Washington or California.

Just last week, we were taking advantage of our rather mild weather by sitting out at a fire pit in front of Crosscut right on Industrial Way. It was late afternoon (not all that late in the day given that the sun is now setting before 4:30pm) when I looked up and spied four mule deer emerge out of the trees just feet across the street from us.

Now there is certainly nothing unique about this: mule deer are everywhere in Bend. But even to our somewhat deer-jaded group around the fire pit, there seemed to be something magical about the deer being in such close proximity, despite our seeing them almost daily. Ann was moved to take a few photos with her iPhone; sadly they are grainy because of the low light conditions.

Despite having hit a deer a year ago and despite having to scout the roadway very carefully, especially in the fall and early winter during rut, we still love having these gentle creatures around. We feel very fortunate to live in a town where we see deer walking down the sidewalk in front of the house, not ten feet away from us. We look forward to spring (late May and June at this elevation) when the spotted little fawns will accompany the adults.

And I will never forget back in October when driving home from Crosscut that a massive buck and two does walked right across the street in front of my truck, forcing me to stop. The rack on this guy was as wide as the hood of my truck. I have never seen such a venerable old beast as he.

Beer and deer: two great reasons to live here in Bend, Oregon!

Porcini Onions for Steak

Ann loves steak. Ed does not love it. What to do?

When I say that I do not love steak, it does not mean that I do not like the flavor of it, that I have some moral objection to it, or that I will not eat it. To the contrary: I like the flavor of steak; I am OK that we raise these animals for food; and, I certainly will eat steak, but I prefer pork or lamb or duck.

Strip Steaks with Porcini Onions and Beurre Rouge

My not loving steak has to do with a few things, I believe, if I am to dig down in my mind. First, as a retired professional chef, I have cooked many thousands and thousands of steaks. Perhaps familiarity breeds contempt. Perhaps also, it annoyed me that so many people ordered steak rather than the more creative dishes on the menu. Ultimately, we stopped serving steak altogether at the restaurant, moving more to a seven-course tasting format that had no room for honking slabs of beef.

Also, braising is my favorite style of cooking. There is something incredible that happens when you cook a tough protein slowly for hours and hours that elevates that protein to food nirvana status. I love the fork tender nature of long-cooked beef and for me, that texture wins out each time over steak.

More importantly though, I think, is that my palate loves flavor and big, bold flavor at that. And while I appreciate the umami-laden flavor of a finely raised, aged, and cooked steak, there are a gazillion other foods that would appeal more to my palate.

Finally, I grew up without money. Beef in general and steak in particular were luxuries that never graced our table. Historically, the fiscally conservative part of me had always found that steak was priced out of my budget. It was more important to save money for my kid's college education than it was to eat steak.

But fast forward to the present day in which I do the grocery shopping for our house. My doing the shopping really started during COVID when Ann was confined to the house for fear of infection and has continued ever since. Prior to that, I was running a restaurant and Ann did the food shopping. I was never home during meal times, however.

Truth also be told, Ann does not like my style of shopping which is to make an exact list of what I want in the order that it appears on the store's shelves, to get in the store and make a beeline from one needed ingredient to the next, and to get out as efficiently as possible. I am certain that this stems from the restaurant days when I had almost zero time to make weekly forays to buy certain things at retail that were not available from our farmers and foragers or not convenient to order from distributors.

In contrast, it seems to me that shopping for Ann is more closely akin to entertainment. It seems to amuse her to bounce all over the store looking at everything quite apparently at random. Given that I find little joy in the chore of shopping, we chafe at each other's shopping style. But I digress.

Because I do the shopping and the bulk of the weekly menu planning, beef really isn't ever on my shopping radar, which has caused Ann to become increasingly more vocal about the lack of beef in our diet. I believe that she would eat steak several nights a week if she had her druthers.

Knowing that I am not the sole arbiter of our diet, I have been making a conscious effort of late to bring home beef from the store at least a couple times a month. To wit, I made ossobuco last week and this week, I brought home some decent looking strip steaks.

We were sitting on the sofa, both knowing that steak was on the night's menu and sipping a rare bottle of Cab (generally, too heavy for us and we prefer lighter grapes such as Nebbiolo, Pinot Noir, and Sangiovese). Suddenly, Ann mentioned somewhat wistfully and seemingly out of nowhere, "I'd really love some mushrooms with the onions for the steak."

We had already discussed onions for the steak and I was going to quasi-caramelize some to have with the beef. Mushrooms were a new wrinkle and one that I was almost unprepared for.

I do not like and cannot really abide the ubiquitous common mushrooms in both their color forms: white mushrooms (champignons de Paris) and the brown portobello/cremini form. My dislike is mostly textural; unless these mushrooms are seared really hard, I find them off-puttingly rubbery. And there is also the flavor that I cannot tolerate; even the smell of these mushrooms makes me gag a bit.

Interestingly and paradoxically enough, I do really like a lot of wild mushrooms as well as cultivated shiitake. Kings among the wild mushrooms for me are porcini, which I mainly love in their dried state as drying really concentrates and improves their flavor. So, I always keep a canister of wickedly expensive dried porcini in the pantry.

To sate Ann's desire for mushrooms, I grabbed the remaining handful of porcini from the pantry and put them to rehydrate in a bowl of water. And to keep dinner simple, I decided to chop those porcini and add them and their rehydrating liquid to a couple of sliced yellow onions that had been sweating and nearing caramelization on the range for the past hour.

The outcome, once the porcini liquid was reduced to nothing, was an incredible mushroom and onion umami bomb for our steaks. Now having discovered this, I want to keep it in my culinary arsenal and that means keeping it top of mind, hence this post.

Over the years, we had done many onion-based condiments for steak at the restaurant, all much more complex than simple mix of porcini and onions. For example, we used to cook down an incredible onion and bacon jam with stout. I loved it as a condiment on its own, but something always nagged at me about the smoky bacon flavor with steak. I love bacon on my cheeseburger, but I always found that the bacony jam clashed a bit with our fantastic steaks. I think I have silenced that little nagging inner voice (chefs are highly self-critical) forever with this simple mushroom and onion condiment.

Good Times: A Mutt of an Italian Meal

Ann and I, like most Americans, love Italian food, especially peasant food, cucina povere, for its simple and honest flavors. Unlike most Americans, however, we would almost never go out to eat at an Italian restaurant. Why pay for food that is so easy to make better at home? Although I don't think we necessarily set out to have an Italian-themed dinner, it turned out so and the saga follows.

What's Better Than Chianti Classico?
A Jeroboam of Chianti Classico Riserva!

Ann's a full-blooded Italian, no matter how you slice it. She's adopted. Her birth parents are both napoletani and her adoptive parents are calabrese and barese (pugliese) respectively. So she's spicy and opinionated southern Italian through and through. You would think that the menus that she comes up with would be southern-inflected, but really, she has no problem mixing and matching from the various corners of Italy, something that would be frowned upon in the old country. I don't know that she set out to have an Italian dinner, but that's where we ended up after she asked me to make braciole.

Such is our menu planning that Ann asks "Will you make this?" and I do. Sometimes I throw in an idea or two or a refinement here and there, but mostly because I can and will cook anything, more often than not, I leave the broad strokes of the menu to Ann. If it pleases her to have a dish, I am pleased to make it for her. I think I may have suggested gnocchi alla romana as a sop for the braciole braising sauce, but I no longer remember. It was a tag-team effort in both menu composition and cooking.

The menu in this cold, pre-Christmas season for our quasi-holiday dinner before our friends all get wrapped up in their own holiday travels and plans is pretty much all down to Ann. We split the cooking. For our antipasto, I whipped up a batch of bagna càuda from Piemonte via Provence in France. For dinner, Ann made a primo of baked polenta, also from the north in Lombardia and neighbors, while I made a secondo of braciole, a dish from Calabria and Sicilia (where the little meat bundles are called involtini). And for the dolce course, Ann made a ricotta cheesecake, cosmopolitan to Italy with Greek origins. So, quite naturally, the wine we selected was from Tuscany, just to further mix up the regions!

Hence the title of this post: a mutt of an Italian meal. And I mean this is the best of ways. Although there can be some pejorative meaning to the word mutt, as dog lovers, Ann and I know that the non-purebred dogs, the rescue mutts from the shelters, are often the best dogs combining the best traits of many breeds. And by extension, we hope our menu combines the best of the many regions of Italy.

Ann decided for this dinner that we should be a bit more formal than most of our meals that are consumed around the island in the kitchen, so she set a beautiful, simple, and tasteful table in the dining room. 

As guests Rob and Dyce and Michelle and Andreas were arriving, I was reheating the pot of bagna càuda on a low flame so that it would be good and hot for our appetizer course. If you speak any Romance language at all, you will recognize the term bagna càuda in the piemontese dialect means "hot bath." And indeed, bagna càuda is a hot bath into which to dip bread and/or crudités, typically bitter vegetables such as chicories (endives) and cardoons. For our little soirée, I used what I had in the refrigerator: sweet peppers, carrots, celery, and cucumbers.

Unappetizing Looking Bagna Càuda

Now on to what bagna càuda is for those of you who have not experienced this culinary delight that looks much like oily mud, nearly off-putting in appearance by all accounts. It is a mix of three ingredients: anchovies, garlic, and olive oil. The amalgam of these three ingredients is way more than the sum of the three individual ingredients, but you have to allow yourself to try it without prejudice. Only then can you decide if it is for you.

If you think a salty, funky, umami-laden oily mix of anchovies and garlic is a culinary delight, you are welcome at our table. Otherwise, maybe take a hard pass on dinner at our house where we make food for people who like to eat anything and everything.

My canonical recipe (actually, it is a ratio, not a recipe) for bagna càuda is one head of garlic to 3 tins of anchovies (90-100 grams) to one-half cup (100-125ml) of extra virgin olive oil. Step one is to soften the garlic so that you can make a paste of it. I like to do so by poaching it in milk and after the milk is drained away, I mash the garlic with a wooden spoon. Then I add the anchovies and heat them a bit over low flame to get them falling apart, then add the oil. If you like (as I like), rather than stirring and stirring, use an immersion blender to smooth out the sauce. Serve warm to hot.

Poaching Garlic in Milk

Mashed Garlic Awaiting Anchovies

While we were in the kitchen dipping our veggies in bagna càuda and washing it down with the double magnum of Chianti, the braciole and the polenta were both in the oven finishing up. At some point in the evening, I pulled them both out of the oven and we grabbed our glasses of wine and headed to the dining room to grab our plates to fill them with dinner.

Pork Braciole in Marinara, Baked Polenta

Pork Braciole in Marinara

Baked Polenta

Making braciole is relatively simple, but it does take some effort and patience. While it is more traditionally made from beef, such as flank cut thin, I prefer to make it out of pork shoulder which I find more flavorful and more tender. Although you can buy in some meat markets thin slices for braciole, I prefer to buy a roast and cut and pound my own. Below, you see a deboned pork shoulder on my cutting board along with my industry-standard meat pounder, a small frying pan.

I've been in a bunch of restaurant kitchens, and by and large, every cook I've ever seen pounding out meat used the bottom of a frying pan to do so. Slice your roast into quarter-inch steaks and then flatten them to an eighth of an inch. To pound the meat, place a slice on the cutting board and cover it with a piece of film wrap, then use the flat of the frying pan to gently persuade the meat to flatten out. It doesn't generally take a lot of force.

Pork Shoulder with Ersatz Meat Pounder

Pounded Pieces of Pork Shoulder, Trim Cut for Carnitas or Ragù

Braciole are quite often stuffed with a bread crumb mixture. For this dinner, we needed to keep the filling gluten-free, so Ann and I kicked about ideas, landing ultimately on white beans which Ann asked if I would flavor with guanciale, cured hog jowl. To start the filling, I smoothed out 3/4 of the beans to a purée in the robot coupe while rendering a really fine dice of guanciale on the stove. After removing the almost browned guanciale from the pan, I cooked a really finely diced onion in the guanciale fat. To the cannellini purée, I added the browned guanciale bits, the onions and their oil, a bunch of pesto, and the remaining quarter of whole beans, for texture. Naturally, I salted to taste.

Rendering Fine Dice of Guanciale

Braciola Stuffing: Cannellini Purée, Whole Cannellini, Pesto, Guanciale,
Onions Cooked in Guanciale Fat

You roll braciole exactly as you would a burrito or an egg roll. Place a small amount of filling toward the top center of the meat and fold the top down and over the filling. Fold the sides in to the center to encase the filling, then roll from the top down to close the packet. Secure with one or more toothpicks. I prefer the longer wooden drink garnish picks; the extra length means that I only need one to secure the packet. Sometimes this takes two toothpicks.

Once the packets are assembled, brown them in a pan on all sides and remove to a braising dish. Meanwhile, make a marinara. My braising pan typically takes a half gallon of sauce to cover the meat that I am braising. Marinara is trivial to make (and we used to make it on the fly at the restaurant whenever a parent would request pasta marinara for a child). For a rough half gallon, put two 28-ounce cans of tomatoes in your blender along with four large cloves worth of minced garlic, a pinch of salt, a tablespoon of dried basil, and a pinch of pepperoncini (crushed red pepper flakes). Blitz it and voilà!

Starting to Brown Braciole

Browned Braciole Ready to be Covered in Marinara

After covering the browned braciole in marinara, cover the brasier (I use aluminum foil, unnecessary if you are using a dish with a cover) and place it on a sheet tray; braciole love to bubble over and create a mess on the bottom of the oven. Braise in a moderate oven for 2 to 3 hours. You'll know they're done when they are fork tender.

To accompany the braciole, I wanted a starch to act as a sop for all the leftover marinara. In Italy, the sauce would often be ladled over pasta as a first course with the meat served afterwards. Ann and I, we wanted something more elegant for our dinner and I proposed gnocchi alla romana, made by cooking semolina, letting it set up on a sheet tray, cutting out rounds, and baking those rounds nicely arranged in a gratin with a sprinkle of cheese until prettily browned.

How silly of me to propose that, given that we needed to keep the dinner gluten-free and semolina is ground wheat. How fortunate though that Ann mistakenly grabbed the container of polenta (which is ground corn) from the pantry instead of the container of semolina! Not trusting the polenta cooked in milk and augmented with egg yolks and butter to fully set up enough to be cut into rounds, Ann put it directly into a baking dish and we baked the whole thing under a thin crust of pecorino romano.

Stirring Polenta

Polenta Ready for Cheese and the Oven

Ann's final contribution to our dinner was a ricotta cheesecake, made without a crust to keep it gluten-free. You can make cheesecake with almost any soft unripened small curd cheese: cream cheese, farmer cheese à la the German quarkkuchen, or ricotta in the Italian style.

Cheesecake is one of the simplest desserts to make and I have made untold hundreds during my career. Here are some tips born of experience.

The basic formula is to figure out how much cheese your springform pan requires and work from there. Naturally, at the restaurant, we were making several cakes at a time; fortunately, the basic ratio scales quite well. At home, our 10" x 2.5" springform mold holds four pounds of cheese without breaking a sweat which works out quite well for ricotta which comes in convenient 2 pound containers. The ratio continues with 2 eggs per pound plus an additional egg for every two pounds, thus 10 eggs for this batch. So, 7-8 eggs for a three-pound brick of cream cheese, if you are going that route.

For each two pounds of cheese, three-quarters of a cup of sugar seems to be about right, though I always add less to start and add flavorings to taste. The amount of sugar can vary based on how sour the cheese is (cream cheese tends to be much more tart than ricotta) as well as the flavorings you are adding. If your flavorings are sweet, you might need less sugar; bitter, such as espresso, you might need more sugar. For additional flavorings, Ann added a good slug of Mexican vanilla and the zest of three lemons.

As an aside, you may not want any sugar at all if you are making a savory cheesecake. We used to make blue cheese cheesecakes with walnut crusts that we would bake in shallow tart pans to pair with certain sweet wines. These cakes required no to minimal sugar. I can remember making black olive and rosemary tarts to accompany wild boar. Your imagination is really the limit with cheesecakes.

Although I always baked my cheesecakes in a slow oven in a water bath (covering the bottom of the pan with aluminum foil to avoid water infiltration), you can certainly bake them in a slow oven without a water bath, which is what Ann did in this case. In any case, 325-350F is about right, though we never had a thermometer on our ovens at the restaurant. You will almost certainly have to tent the top of the cakes with aluminum foil to keep them from burning, simply because the top is going to brown long before the center is set. So, cook your cheesecake uncovered until it is as brown as you would like, then tent it for the duration with aluminum foil.

How long a cheesecake requires in the oven depends on way too many factors to give a hard and fast rule, so do as we did in the restaurant and as Ann did with this one: cook it until it is done. At first, the center of the cake, when you shake it gently, will be liquid and will slosh back and forth. As the cake cooks, it will set from the outer edge and move towards the center. As the cake cooks, the batter will puff up. When it is evenly puffed all the way to the center, you can be pretty certain that it is done. Do not be surprised when the cake settles as it cools.

When cheesecakes come out of the oven, I like to let them cool a few minutes, then run a spatula between the cake and the side walls of the mold. Then I'll crack the mold open, but leave it in place on the cake and let it finish cooling. Separating the mold from the cake in the early cooling stages will help avoid cracks in the cake as it cools. Cheesecakes shrink slightly as they cool and if the edges of the cake adhere to the sides of the pan, the center may shrink away from the edges and tear cracks in your beautiful cake.

Mad Scientist Flavoring the Batter

Done to Perfection

Dusted with Espresso Sugar

Freaking Delicious Ricotta Cheesecake with Hints of Lemon and Espresso

We, the six of us, all had a wonderful time and enjoyed our meal thoroughly. After dinner, Andreas, Rob, and I held forth at the dinner table while the other three, the youngsters of the group, disappeared to the family room. Next thing I knew, the family room erupted in 80's and 90's pop and hip-hop and there was a full-fledged dance party going on! Some parting shots below.

'Tis the Season!

Shout Out to the Chianti Classico Consortium

Playing with Halibut

Contrary opinion here: halibut has no place on my table. It is in the same class of insipid and boring white proteins as chicken breast. No thank you. Ann feels the same way. You are allowed to feel differently and you can go pay $30-40 per pound for it if you like, but Ann and I, we're going to pay $4-6 per pound for local Pacific rockfish.

Aside: lots and lots of similar and related species are lumped under the moniker rockfish and none of them are to be confused with the amazing Striped Bass on the East Coast which also goes by rockfish, at least in the Chesapeake Bay area from where I come.

Dry-Brined Halibut with Roasted Broccoli and Curry Butter

Ann and I do make an exception to the no-thank-you halibut rule: both the cheeks and the collars are delightful and worth every penny that we pay for them. But they cook up and taste way different than the insipidly dull and low-fat fillet meat.

So why am I even posting about halibut? Because I have a freezer full of it. And why do I have a freezer full? Because, when we were in Alaska, I wanted to go halibut fishing for the experience of it; I love fishing especially out on the ocean. And I have a rule about hunting and fishing: if I am going to take an animal, I am going to use every piece of that animal that gave its life so that I could eat. So, I am going to cook and eat every piece of halibut (the cheeks are long, long gone) in the freezer.

Another aside: halibut fishing is pretty damned boring and I don't need to ever do it again. You anchor and put a bait just off the bottom and the halibut takes your line. Then you use brute force to haul the fish, feeling like a barn door on the line, to the boat. There's no fight and not a lot of skill in taking a halibut; it's just brute force work.

As a chef, I do not have much experience in cooking halibut because I have never really cared for it, but more importantly because my restaurant was located on the mid-Atlantic Coast where we have no halibut fishery. I wasn't going to waste the jet fuel in flying these fish in from Atlantic Canada, Scandinavia, or the West Coast, not when I could make a nightly call to the nearby docks, talk about the day's landings, and have my order arrive the very next morning.

So, ever since Ann and I landed our limit of halibut in Alaska, I have been playing with it trying to make it as palatable as possible. I have learned some things that other chefs more well versed in halibut probably already know. First, dry-brining does help the fish have better flavor and retain a bit more moisture. Second, halibut is extremely temperature sensitive and I am having the best results when I pull it at about 120 degrees Fahrenheit, then rest it just like a steak. Third, it's a fish that really demands a fatty sauce.

With those things in mind, I dry-brined the latest batch by giving them a good coating of a 2/3 salt, 1/3 sugar mixture and letting them sit for 45 minutes before roasting them to 120F and then letting them stand for 6 minutes, just like a steak. And then, I topped them with a simple sauce of melted butter into which I had mixed and gently cooked a spoonful of Madras-style curry powder.

Final aside: I use curry powder in my Indian food as often as Indian cooks do and that is never. I keep a little bit of it on hand for American dishes such as curried chicken salad. For Indian food, I use a mix of individual spices keyed to the particular dish that I am making. But for a simple butter to adorn a plate of roasted halibut and roasted broccoli, it worked just great.

This was the most successful halibut fillet that I have ever eaten. Still, I cannot wait for it to be gone from my freezer.

Dreaming of Italy

Ann and I have been planning a big vacation for years now, ever since our last major vacation of nearly two weeks in Alaska (Anchorage area and the Kenai) in 2021 during a gap between COVID outbreaks. Our next big trip will be next fall, tentatively a big circle of northern Italy from Firenze to Bolzano and back, taking in sights in Toscana, Emilia-Romagna, Lombardia, il Veneto, and the star of the show, i Dolomiti (Tyrolean or Dolomitic Alps) of Trentino-Alto Adige (Südtirol).

A goal of this trip for me as a chef will be to get off the beaten path and sample local dishes that will continue my education into and expand my repertoire of Italian regional cuisine. As an aside, I doubt very much that I will be ordering classic dishes in Italy as I have cooked them all and so they no longer pique my curiosity.

Because of all this trip planning, we are thinking of all things Italian. It is perfect timing then, that this week when looking through the meat section of the grocery, I saw some particularly good looking beef shank cut for osso buco, the classic braised dish of Lombardy and Milan, in particular. I don't think our itinerary will include a stay in Milan, but still, I never can resist making this milanese classic when I have the opportunity. Served on a bed of risotto milanese (saffron risotto) with a bottle of Barbaresco, this dish was a delightful counterpoint to our crappy snowy and rainy winter weather last night.

Ossobuco on Risotto Milanese

I've made several posts on this blog and I'm sure other posts on the restaurant blog about osso buco. I've made lots and lots of very different versions from many different kinds of meat (veal, beef, elk, venison, bison, pork, cinghiale (wild boar), and others). This post goes over the way that I most often make it at home, braised in wine, tomatoes, and aromatics. This is in contrast to at the restaurant where it might have been braised in demiglace and porcini and then finished with truffles. In other words, this is my rustic, casalinga version.

Home-Style Ossobuco

This recipe describes braising the ossobuco in a slow cooker. There is absolutely no reason why this could not be cooked slowly on the stovetop or in the oven using a dutch oven or other covered braising pan. At the restaurant, we used flat hotel plans covered in aluminum foil; in other words, no fancy equipment needed. If you are going to braise in a pan, you can (and should) brown the meat and the aromatics directly in the braising pan.)

1/4 cup all purpose flour

1/2 teaspoon Kosher salt

large pinch coarse black pepper
2 large shank portions (mine were extra large and weighed in at 2.8 pounds/1.25 kg)
olive oil to film a skillet or sauté pan
1 large leek, finely chopped
1 large carrot, in small dice
1 large stalk celery, in small dice
6-8 large cloves garlic, minced
1 sprig fresh rosemary
1 sprig fresh thyme
1 tablespoon dried thyme
1 cup/250ml (1/3 bottle) dry red wine

1 28oz can of diced tomatoes and their juice

The steps, illustrated below, are simple. Dredge the shanks in seasoned flour and brown. Cook the aromatics and herbs. Add the remaining dredging flour and cook it a bit. Deglaze with red wine and add the tomatoes. Combine all the ingredients and cook slowly until the meat is fork tender.

When selecting ossobuco, if you have a choice, always look for the slices that are more meat than bone. There is little more disappointing than being served a piece of ossobuco that is almost all bone, which is sadly what a lot of grocery store ossobuco amounts to. Too bad that we have no place to buy veal ossobuco, however, the beef ossobuco in the photo above is as pretty as I have ever seen.

Mix the flour with the salt and pepper and cover both sides of the shanks in flour, knocking off any excess. Brown over medium heat until well colored on both sides.

While the beef is browning, if you have decent knife skills, you will have plenty of time to prep the aromatics. In the winter when leeks are in season, I prefer to use leeks rather than onions. Of course, onions work just great too. I prefer fresh herbs in general for this dish. The exception is basil in this winter season when fresh basil is scarce.

Seasoned Flour, Red Wine, and Tomatoes

I'm really picky about my tomatoes and I have my favorite brand. I tend to use very finely diced tomatoes packed in juice, though it would be no problem to use whole romas and crush them slightly using your hands or a food processor. As for wine, I do not cook with the same wine that I want to drink with the dish, the opposite of what some people recommend.

The wines that I like to drink are far too expensive and delicate to be cooking with. Moreover, the reason for the wine in the dish is simply to supply some acid to help break down the meat, and any reasonably priced well made wine will do this for you. For white cooking wine, I buy inexpensive dry box wine because we never have any leftover white wine (for we rarely drink white wine and pretty much never in winter).

For red wine, we are always buying sample bottles to see if we want to buy case quantities for the cellar. Invariably, we have bottles that while being decent wines, simply are not to our taste. Those become cooking wines. The Matthews wine in the photo above, we bought on a lark merely because that is my surname. Sadly, it was not to our taste despite being highly rated by the wine talking heads.

After the meat is browned, cook the aromatics and herbs in the same pan, being sure to scrape up all the brown meat bits off the bottom of the pan. These bits have amazing flavor that you want in your braise. When the vegetables are soft, add the remaining dredging flour, stir it in, and cook it for another minute or two. Then deglaze (use the liquid to get any solids off the bottom of the pan) with the red wine and add the tomatoes. Stir all the ingredients well. Then if you are using a slow cooker, pour the sauce over the meat. If you are braising on the stovetop or in the oven, nestle the meat into the sauce. Cover and cook at low heat.

Above, you see the meat after it has been browned, then covered in sauce before cooking, then after braising for seven hours. The meat was done after about six hours on low in the slow cooker, but I wasn't ready to eat then, so I let it go for another hour. On the stovetop or in the oven, I would guess that the dish would be ready in about three hours. To tell if it is done, stick a fork in it and if you meet no resistance, it is ready.

A final note about salt. You will notice that this dish contains but a half a teaspoon of Kosher salt, not enough to season it. So, when it is done, you will need to taste and season the sauce according to your liking. I specify seasoning the dish after cooking because when you braise, you gradually lose liquid volume to create a silky, unctuous sauce. If you season to taste before the liquid cooks off, the finished product is going to be hella salty.

Parting Shot: Risotto Milanese Starting to Cook

As I mentioned before, I served the ossobuco on risotto milanese with a great Nebbiolo wine, a Barbaresco. Sadly, I cannot really go into making risotto in a blog post. It, like making biscuits or handmade pasta, takes hands-on experience to learn the feel of the dish.