Ossobuco alla Milanese

The last two weeks have been terribly boring here in Jena, at least from the weather side: snow, snow and... guess what? More snow! I like snow, don't get me wrong. It awakens the child in me. It's just that after you've gone through the standard snowball fight, snowman building and sleigh riding it starts to get a bit on my nerves. Streets and sidewalks constantly covered with either sludge or smooth ice anyone?

At least cold wintery weather has a good side. It gives me the perfect excuse to stay at home cooking some nice hearty dish on the week-end and to open a nice bottle of full bodied red wine to go with that. Polenta is always nice when it snows, either served simply with cheeses or with a few different braised meats. Some nice rich German dish like Sauerbraten can also be a good warm-me-up. The best thing is to wrap yourself in enough clothing -till you look like the Michelin man possibly- and roll downhill to the market, see what's on sale and pick a dish. The pick of last week was a nice ossobuco, to be used for the classic ossobuco alla Milanese served with saffron risotto.

Ossobuco is one of those fantastic slow cooking dishes that fills the house with its mouthwatering aroma. After the initial browning of the meat you just have to wait, flipping the veal shanks maybe every 30 minutes or so. It gives you plenty of time to prepare the perfect match for the dish, risotto alla milanese. I'm not an ossobuco expert, so I won't be arguing if the soffritto should have only onions, or additions of one or more between garlic, pancetta, celery, carrot, sage or even anchovies. I've seen so many recipes before cooking the dish that I just decided to follow my own taste. A good tip I read in Allan Bay's "Cuochi si diventa", one of the most succesfull cooking books of the recent past in Italy, is to pick veal shanks from veals older than 8-9 months, otherwise you might end up with a hockey puck. I'm not sure it makes sense to me, after all ossobuco is a braised dish and with the right cooking time even meat from somewhat older animals should be fine. Still, I followed the advice, checking with my butcher, and the dish came out really nice. I messed slightly up, adding too much tomato to the sauce, but that's just me being mister clumsy.

Stimulated by the fantastic smell of the ossibuchi cooking, I picked a nice wine from Piemonte from my tiny wine collection a 2001 Barbera d'Alba from Bruno Rocca: fruity with cherry, plum and blackberry aromas, followed by just a touch of spice, full-bodied, the high alcohol (14%) nicely balanced by the acid and fine tannins, and with a very long and pleasant finish. Not exactly the Barbera my granddad would buy in large casks and bottle himself. It made a nice match for the rich ossobuco and even managed to balance the intense aromas of the gremolata. The ossobuco itself turned out very tender, delicious in its sauce, but the very best part of this dish remains for me digging some bone marrow out of the shank bone, placing it on top of a little risotto and just enjoy. Fat's heavan

Ossobuco alla Milanese
serves two

2 veal shanks, 3-4 cm thick
a small onion, finely diced
1/2 a carrot, finely diced
1/2 a celery stick, finely diced
1/2 glass of dry white wine
2 cups beef broth, possibly home made
2 canned peeled tomatoes, chopped
1 Tb butter and 2 Tb EV olive oil salt, pepper and a little flour
The zest from 1/2 a lemon
a handful of parsley
a garlic clove

make three-four cuts on the side of each veal shank to prevent it from curling up during cooking. Dust sparingly with flour.

Heat the butter and 1Tb oil in a pot large enough to contain the shanks. Brown the shanks in the hot fat and set aside.

Cook the chopped soffritto (onion, celery and carrot) over a low flame in the same pot, using the fat left over from browning the shanks plus the remaining oil, till the vegetables start getting soft.

Add the shanks back to the pot, season with salt and pepper. As soon as the meat starts to sizzle add the wine, deglazing the pan in the process. wait for the alcohol to evaporate then add the tomatoes (mistakes in the amounts of tomatoes will not terribly ruin the recipe, even if caused by extreme and repeated clumsiness), and after a couple of minutes half the stock. Cook covered on the stovetop over a low flame: the liquid should slowly bubble without actually boiling. Cook for about two hours, or until the neat is fork tender, flipping the shanks every thirty minutes and eventually adding stock as needed.

Once the meat is done the sauce should be thickened up nicely. (If you feel it's too runny remove the veal shanks and reduce till the desired consistency is obtained.) Finally make the gremolata: chop the parsley, lemon zest and garlic clove finely together. Add the gremolata to the sauce, cook for a further two minutes and serve.

Serve with risotto alla Milanese, made using this recipe if you wish.

Comments

[savina]

I think Allan Bay's book is one of the most overrated editorial events of the past few years. His writing and his explanations are at times unclear, unnecessarily detailed and frankly boring and pompous and at others, on the opposite, taking too much for granted. This dislike of mine might be the cause, but not one of his recipes I tried has smoothly turned into a satisfying dish!

[Alberto]

savina, I absolutely share your opinion in regards to Bay being pompous, pretentious and at times just plain boring. I bought the book because of all the clamor around it, and was at least slightly disappointed. I would therefore agree with him being overrated. On the other hand I did cook a few dishes from his book with success. That is not to say they were great, but I found the recipes easy to follow and the result fine. There's much sadder examples of cookbooks in Italy, like the Slow Food recipe collections: almost every recipe has one or more ingredient amounts which are plain wrong. BTW, my ossobuco recipe is not from Bay's book, rather a mix of many different recipes.

[cucina testa rossa]

what a perfect dish for a cold snowy day! i know what i'm making for dinner tonight, especially since it's *still* snowing in paris...not enough to have a snowball fight but cold enough to snow!

[savina]

yes, I gathered you hadn't followed his recipe, I just wanted to vent and to know if you shared my impression. I didn't try many of his proposals, maybe just a couple, certainly the apple cake which I tried for a change from my usual perfectly satisfying one, with appalling results. It's maybe just the impatience his writing causes which somehow has very bad effects on my cooking, on the other hand patience is certainly one of the cardinal virtues in the kitchen, I believe. When you spek of gambero rosso I hope you don't mean la cucina di casa by annalisa barbagli, which I think is perfect for many ordinary & delicious Italian everyday dishes. And BTW, I have the impression that Italian book trade is very weak on cookbooks compared to other nations'. Do you have an explanation for that?

[Alberto]

savina, I didn't mention Anaalisa Barbagli's book anywhere. I was talking of the books edited by Slow Food (their various "ricette delle osterie di..."): their recipes can be great and then terribly frustrating in the same book.

You make an interesting point about Italian cookbooks, but I'm not sure if you're asking why Italians books are poorly made or why they sell little. My impression is that Italian publishers, with maybe a few exceptions, have seldom invested in a seriously made cookbook: with that I mean books where recipes are tested a few times by independent cooks before being published, with serious editing and fact checking, if any then great pictures (a few would be enough), and, most of all, well written so to make it interesting beyond the recipes. Maybe the scarcity of such books would answer the second hypothetical question too.

[girly]

i've always found it ironic that americans have such a nice variety of cookbooks to choose from with our appalling eating habits, but maybe that's why. we have no reason to think we know better than some foody hack. where italians...