I’ve been a braising madman this winter. Florida doesn’t have the weather issues the rest of the country is experiencing right now, but winter is the season to braise — slow cooked meat, with root vegetables and a kick of canned peppers.
My heritage is Northern European — Polish, German, Latvian, Russian (with an antipodal dip into Capetown, South Africa a few generations back). So economical cuts like oxtails are natural to me, because I’ve been eating oxtail soup every winter since I could hold a spoon. To me, oxtail soup/stew speaks of Poland, but when I lived in Atlanta, I found oxtails were a lot more culturally widespread than I thought. I bought some one winter from the local grocery, and the African-American cashier and I got into a discussion about the best way to cook oxtails, and compared childhood stories of cold nights and beefy stew. Since then, I’ve found that oxtails are also popular from Korea to Italy.
The oxtail is, indeed, meat from the tail of cattle. It may be an actual ox (usually a castrated bull), or these days, any cattle. It is high in gelatin, and usually cut into segments. It’s highly prized for soups and stews as the slow cooking makes the meat tender, the gelatin provides a ton of body and succulence, and the meat and bones provide a deeply beefy taste.
My mother has honed her oxtail soup recipe for as long as I’ve been alive. It’s my preferred comfort-food recipe, but rather than try to duplicate hers, I thought I’d play with the idea a little this last weekend, and I decided to to do a more continental-classic braised treatment, then simmer it into a stew. I got interrupted in my cooking, so I actually refrigerated the oxtails after the braise, then continued the stew the next day. This is no problem, and in fact, an enhancement when it comes to braised meat, and the stew probably benefited from the extra day of flavor.
So, here’s a great winter meal, sure to warm up a chilly evening or two:
Boil and Bubble
