Slow Cooked Red Wine Beef
Serves 4
Ingredients:
- 1 brown onion, diced
- 4 cloves of garlic
- 1 carrot, diced
- 3 stalks of celery, diced
- 75g of spec, diced
- 2 beef cheeks
- 250ml red wine
- a can of tomato paste
- 2 bay leaves
- 5 sprigs of thyme
- 4 cloves
- 1/2 tsp cinnamon
- 1/2 a bunch of parsley
- salt and pepper to taste
Method:
Preheat the oven to 160C.
In a cast iron pot (or any oven safe pot you own). Pour a drizzle of olive oil.
Salt and pepper the beef cheeks, then place them in the pot until golden brown all over.
Once the cheeks are ready, throw in the diced spec and cook for a couple minutes stirring occasionally.
Put the onion in and cook until soft.
Place the rest of the vegetables in and cook until they golden and slightly soft.
Pour the spices, cook for 1-2 minutes.
Pour the red wine in and allow it reduce by half.
Place the parsley and tomato paste in the pot and pour enough water in to just cover the meat.
Put the lid on, then place the whole pot in the oven.
After 2 hours, check the pot to see if there is still enough liquid in the pot and the meat is not burning. If so add just enough water to make it runny again. Check the softness of the meat and assess how much longer you need to continue cooking it for.
After 2 hours in the oven, I would check every 30 minutes to see if its ready.
At the 2 hour mark, is also when if choosing to, you can place more vegetables in the pot so they cook with the meat. These can be vegetables such as parsnips, celeriac or potatoes and you may need to adjust the water quantity according to this also.
Once the beef is completely falling apart, you can take the pot out of the oven and enjoy this dish with any side you like such as polenta, mash, pasta, garlic bread, roast veggies, sauted greens or mushrooms to name a few.
CHANGE IT UP!
As always, there are many ways to change this recipe up a little.
- Beef Cheeks: you can use any other stewing meet you prefer such as beef chins (osso buco), ox tail, brisket or chuc.
- Vegetarian: Yes you can absolutely make this vegetarian. Soak some chickpeas or a nice white bean overnight and slow cook them in this delicious red wine and tomato sauce. Add some eggplants and zucchinis or parsnips and spinach and just like that you've got yourself two different dishes!
- Parsley: you can change this to any herb you like/ have available to create a little change in the flavour of your sauce; basil, sage, rosemary mmm mmm mmmm.
- Spec : This is technically optional. It adds a little bit of fat and depth of flavour to the sauce, but if you don't want to use this you can use lard instead of oil, more oil when cooking, or some bones full of marrow that will melt into the sauce when it is cooking.
