Osso buco

Tuesday, October 21, 2008

Antipastos had these lovely osso buco.*
The dish is from Milan but now popular everywhere. We've had them in a lot of restaurants but never done them at home. The one thing that most recipes won't tell you is that osso buco comes with a thick membrane encircling the meat, which looks as if a plastic bag had been fused to the muscle. DO NOT TAKE THIS OFF. It holds the meat on the bone and, after cooking for the requisite bazillion hours, just peels off. If the butcher has taken it off, you have to tie the meat back on with string (hence the instructions in many a book).

The preparation is simple. Here's the basics from Epicurious adapted:

4 pounds (1.8 kg) veal shanks, cut in 1 1/2-inch ( 4 cm) slices
salt and pepper
2 tablespoons olive oil
2 tablespoons butter
2 onions, chopped
1 carrot, chopped
1/2 bottle (375 ml) dry white wine
a 14.5-ounce (435 g) can plum tomatoes, chopped
2 garlic cloves, chopped

Brown the veals on both sides. No need to do veal bondage. No need to remove from pan. Add the vedge and brown that.
Deglaze with the wine. Add the tomatoes. Add the garlic at this point (so it's just a background). And following a good hint: toss in one (and only one) anchovy fillet (which increases the woodsy notes).
Cook stovetop for a minimum of 3 hours, adding more wine/water/etc. if it sticks.
Lots of recipes fart around with veal stock (fine), brown sauce (totally unnecessary), demiglace (a waste), tomato paste (a disaster), or do it in the oven (which is nice if it's a cold day, but watch the liquid levels).

Like any stoo, even better the next day.

You can add the gremolata if you want, but I've never really thought it added much. Instead, we thought it needed a bland thing to make it stand out, so we served an osso buco apiece on a pile of wonderful parsnips mashed in milk.
Dreamy and creamy.
This needs a big, big, wine. We tried the Megalomaniac Bravado. Lovely but not as meaty as the Sonofabitch.

*Usually treated as a single word in Italian: ossobuco and though the plural of osso is ossa, the plural is ossibuchi (and not as you'd expect †ossa buche). Old Latin neuters in -um tend to show up as masculine -o, but have a feminine plur. in -a: uovo, but due uova. For you keeping score at home.