Brasato di Cervo (Braised Venison)

Well that's Christmas over for another year, and for the first time in many years we've not been able to get to Italy to see the other side of the family and celebrate with them. There's a very good reason we've not been keen to travel far, the arrival of our Son, Max, but that doesn't mean we're not disappointed and feeling a bit low about it. The Italian trip has become something of an institution and it feels like something is missing somehow.

Luckily Nonna did manage to visit before Christmas and meet her grandson briefly in December, and she also brought practically an entire suitcase full of food for us, mostly local from the region. I swear she thinks I starve her daughter back here in England, and the food here is desperately in need of some hearty Italian additions! I have to admit I struggle to disagree given what she brought, the small crunchy breads called Bibanesi for example which I love and can't find in this country. There's also the wonderful Cotechino, a form of pork sausage that's probably quite bad for you but tastes delicious, especially when served with puy lentils cooked with vegetables and butter. There's also the truly local food, venison shot in the Italian alps by the Italians father or one of his friends - it's never entirely clear who shot what it seems. This time around we had mince and something labelled "Rosbeaf Cervo", which I think was some sort of topside joint. Either way I decided to do it in Nonna's style, something I've had many times when visiting the in-laws, a braised dish with root vegetables and wine.

Brasato di Cervo

The trouble with wild food is that you're never entirely sure what you're getting. Farmed food has the reliability of mass production at least, if not the flavour of wild, but it does mean that when a cut ends up on your kitchen sideboard you can't be 100% sure how best to cook it. Braising is something of a fallback in this respect, as there are very few cuts that won't be delicious after slow cooking in a moist flavour rich environment. This dish is something I've seen made a lot in Italy by the Italians mother as well, so I did have something of a head start on it, plus a handy recipe check just a phone call away.

The meat as it arrived - just what is this?!

Nonna is actually a fabulous cook, but in that home style way that is so often overlooked. She cooks simple food incredibly well, something which perhaps could be said is a hallmark of all great Italian cuisine, but something that can be tricky to replicate back home. I find the tendency is to overdo the frippary and miss  the more basic - but critical - aspects of the cooking, which is why proper Italian food is so hard to find outside of Italy. By that I mean the underlying aspects such as how long to cook each part of the recipe, and the correct quantities of each of the ingredients.

This brasato recipe is a case in point, deceptively simple, easy to make, but hard to master. You start with a quick sofritto, then spend some time browning the meat exceptionally well, next deglaze with white wine and then very slow cook until tender.

Step 1: Sofritto

Sofritto is the Italian word for what the French call a mirepoix, a combination of onion, carrot and celery chopped into small dice that is slowly fried in oil or butter to form the base of other dishes. Here is is used as the base flavour for the braise, and also as the sauce used to dress some pasta for the primo.

Often when I cook onions I prefer to do them long and slow, creating an underlying sweetness and mellow onion flavour, but seeing as this is a slow braise anyway there's not so much need. One thing that is important though is to add the ingredients one by one, not all together. This means you can more accurately judge different lengths of cooking for different vegetables, and also that you won't overload the pan cooling it down. The golden rule is:

• Onion first, 5 minutes or do
• Carrots next, another 5 minutes or maybe a few more
• Celerey, for just 3 minutes or even less

Now I should be using celery here, but a trick I've used a few times in the past is to swap this for celeriac leaves instead. I first started to do this as I had some celeriac leaves left over and didn't want to throw them away, but have found that they flavour just as well as celery and in some ways add more interesting notes and texture to a dish. I love the way the leaves end up as speckled flecks of green through the sauce.

Onions in first

Then the carrots after 5 minutes

Next some rosemary and bay

Now for the roughly chopped celeriac leaves

The finished sofritto

I also used a little garlic in this recipe, sliced thickly and added after the celeriac leaves. No need to cook it out, it will soften and flavour the sauce in the long slow braising. There's also some rosemary and bay, but you can add whatever herbs you like really or have available. I wouldn't bother adding dried though, there won't be much flavour left from them by the end.

Thickly sliced garlic

Step 2: Frying the Meat

Once the vegetables have been cooked till just softening it's the meat's turn. Simply turn the sofritto out into a dish on the side, and a little more oil into your pan and then get the meat frying.

Sofritto left on the side. Doesn't matter if it cools down a little, it'll soon be hot again.

Meat is often browned before cooking, and this was once thought to 'seal the meat', keeping it juicy by creating a crust on the outside that keeps moisture in. It's now pretty well known though that this simply isn't true, moisture can escape just as easily from browned meat, what keeps it moist is the cooking technique. What browning does do though is create the Maillard reaction, that wonderful rich dark brown colour imparts all sorts of delicious flavours to the dish.

As usual in many recipes the meat is first tossed in seasoned flour, which will act as a thickener for the sauce. Unusually though the meat is browned for a very long time, 15 minutes or longer. This is something that I've learned from Nonna, and is an absolutely critical part of this dish. It imparts such a deep an rich flavour to the finished brasato it has to be tasted to be be believed!

The meat tossed in seasoned flour

The very well browned meat

The wine has just been added, but the pan not yet deglazed.

Sofritto and meat together, ready for braising.

Once the meat has had it's 15-20 minute browning, delgaze with a generous glass of white wine, and then add the sofritto back in and it's ready for the long slow braise.

Interesting point here - the addition of white wine rather than red wine is another hall mark of Italian cooking that I've discovered. More often than not I'd have used red wine before I met the Italian, but have since learned that it is much more usual to use white wine even in red meat dishes, and I think it does produce a finer result.

Step 3: The long slow braise

Finally, time to do nothing! All you need do now is get the meat on a very slow heat, cover it and leave it alone. When I say very slow, you should be able to see the odd bubble coming up from the bottom of the dish but nothing more than that. The very worst thing you can do to a braise is cook it fast, nothing will toughen meat up quicker. As for timing, you should be aiming for at least 2 hours for a piece this size I would say, longer for larger. If it starts to dry out at all just add a tablespoon or two of water.

The finished dish, a couple of hours later.

Serving: Primo and Secondo

Back home in Italy this would probably be served in the traditional way, primo first then secondo, with the same dish providing the sauce for both. Pasta and rice are usually only served as a 'primo' course, not as a main, with meat and vegetables or salad as a 'secondo' course. A braise like this is perfect as you have a sauce for both.

First take out the meat and leave it to rest as usual - this will help the meat to become even more tender as it relaxes. For this dish I then blitzed some of the sauce in a food processor to make a smoother sauce for some fresh pasta, keeping about half the sauce in the pan with the resting meat.

Sauce on the left for meat, water boiling for pasta, and blitzed pasta sauce warming.

Fresh egg tagliatelle. Hand cut rather than machine cut this time, so a bit rough!

Fresh pasta like this really only needs a minute or so cooking, depending how thinly you've rolled it. I served the braise with some dauphinois potatoes left over from New Year's Eve's dish, so pretty easy food all in.

The primo, fresh egg tagliatelle with the sauce slightly blitzed.

Secondo, slices of braised meat and dauphinois, dressed with the braising sauce.

Hopefully this dish doesn't look too complex, and I hope you'll find time to try it. The flavours really are wonderful, and of course you get leftovers so you only have to cook it once and you can get several meals out of it.

P.S. There's a full library of images from this dish on my Picasa Web Album, Brasato di Cervo. This also includes pictures of making beef, red wine and wild mushroom ravioli - more left overs from New Year. When making pasta it's always a good idea to make a fair bit as you can either freeze it or dry it for another time. Making ravioli like this is a great way of using up leftovers too.

Traditional Roast Lamb with Roast Potatoes & Leeks in White Sauce

Lamb is not exactly a stranger to my table, but more often than not it'll be a shoulder that ends up gracing it rather than other cuts. There's something about a shoulder's combination of flavour, price and overall ease of cooking that hits the spot for me. But the other day at the butchers the legs of lamb looked too good to overlook, so I had to give one of them a try.

I usually like my lamb well done, and that's great for shoulder, but it's not really a great way to cook leg in my opinion. Leg doesn't have the fat content of the shoulder, so it's all too easy to create something dry and not so palatable when roasting a leg for a long time - generally speaking you're better off aiming for something pinker. That was my plan this Sunday, so after consulting the usual battery of cookbooks I decided on half an hour hot (220ºC) and then 15 mins per pound cool (160ºC)  for my 5 lb leg of (very well hung) Lamb. Nothing too special about this one - just coated in a very light layer of olive oil, well seasoned with salt & pepper and resting on 3 good sprigs of rosemary and a few cloves of garlic.

The meat out of the wrapping

The meat ready for the oven

As I was aiming for something very traditional this time around I decided to serve this with really crunchy roast potatoes and leeks in white sauce, and old favourite that I've grown up with. This time around I even got to use some of my Dad's leeks from Essex, as I managed to bring some back from there after Christmas. I braise the leeks just in butter for a good hour or so on a very low heat to get them really tender. Then I sprinkle in some flour and let that cook a little, before adding milk, salt & black pepper, and cooking until it thickens up - probably another 15 mins or so. This time around a little left over double cream went in as well, just to give that extra special something.

For the potatoes I reckon the secret it to get them really dry before they go in the hot oil/fat. I always parboil when I'm doing 'proper' roast potatoes, and do this well ahead of when they need to go in so that they can steam and dry out. A good shake in the colander is enough to give you a rough texture to pick up the fat - I normally use beef dripping, but didn't have any today, so used some of the fat from the lamb pan which was lightly flavoured with the rosemary and garlic from there. Ten minutes in the hot oven first gets the oil good and hot, then in go the potatoes (carefully!), a few turns to cover and then in for about an hour, depending how well browned you like them.

Parboiling potatoes

Finally there's the gravy to make. I rested this leg for half an hour in the end, to ensure it would be nice and juicy, and whilst it was sitting resting deglazed the pan with some wine and stock and cooked down the juices with a little flour to thicken.

Making gravy

Preparing the plates

All in all pretty happy with how this turned out. The potatoes & lamb were probably a little over done for my tastes, but lovely all the same. That's the price you have to pay, though, for nipping down the pub for a swift pint whilst your Sunday roast cooks :-)

Finished dish

P.S. These videos were all shot with my new Nexus One phone from Google - not bad I think, better quality than my previous phone that's for sure.

Slow Roast Salt Marsh Lamb with Onions, Garlic & Thyme

Seems everywhere's getting foodie these days - or then again maybe it's just the places I choose to go - and Exeter is no exception. We've got some great places to get food around town now, what with the Thursday farmers market, and streets full of quality shops like Magdalen Road, plus places like Chandos in town (although their attitude to pricing is ... well ... let's just say they like a good mark-up. A very good mark-up).

Until recently we also had the brilliant Foodeaze as well, which is sadly currently closed, but happily due to reopen even better than before - we hope. But the reason I'm mentioning all this is actually the annual Exeter Festival of Food & Wine.

I've been going since it started I think, and have seen it grow from a quite small affair with not really enough room for all the attention to a very professional set-up, with top name chefs, tents of food galore, and special night time events. True it may have lost some of the charm of earlier days, when the suppliers may have been a little more generous with their tastings, but it's still a great place to be. Hell, I even made sure I got back from Spain in time to attend!

This year I got my usual selection of goodies, the pride amongst them a shoulder of salt marsh lamb, a great piece of meat, well hung and full flavoured. I love lamb well done so I slow roasted it for about 4 hours at 150ºC (important that it's not a fan oven for this, otherwise it cooks to quick and can dry out) on top of about 5 sliced up onions, 6 or so cloves of peeled garlic and loads of fresh thyme, plus the usual salt & pepper. This was all pushed down into a big Creuset stewing pot. I'm really starting to fine tune this technique now for slow roasting - this time I used no liquid at all, just relied on the meat and the onions to produce liquid as they cooked, and sure enough it worked a treat. The secret is to try and make sure that the meat completely covers the other ingredients, that way it roasts and steams, and nothing gets burnt. The meat comes out beautifully tender and moist and the onions sweet and slightly caramelised.



Served this with buttered minty new potatoes, rocket salad, and a rape seed oil minty mayo. Oh, and a nice drop of Australian red ...



I have to say though that part of the success of the dish was the sheer quality of the meat, which I'm happy to say has been providing leftovers all week for various risottos and stuffed pittas and wraps. When you start with such a good product you really have to do something pretty spectacular to screw it up. Kudos to the supplier, The Thoroughly Wild Meat Co.

Roast Chicken with Goats Cheese & Wild Garlic

Well it's been an interesting few weeks roasting and boiling things. Top of the list has to be the famed Italian Bollito Misto which I've been itching to try for ages, and finally got round to the other week when my bro came down with his family. To be honest it wasn't all I had hoped for though, although I wasn't in the best of health and it's never a good idea to try and cook when you're not feeling great. I think I might have to revisit it another time though - ever since I actually had it in Italy I've been captured by how wonderful something so simple can be.

But back to last weekend and the title of this blog post. Ever since I did the turkey at Christmas, pushing butter and the skin to keep the bird moist, I've been eager to repeat the process and to try some more experiments. Thinking of what to cook this Sunday I decided to have a try with some goats cheese that needed eating, a free range chicken, and the now almost obligatory wild garlic.


The ingredients lined up ready to go


Getting your fingers between the breasts of the bird and it's skin is a doddle really, although maybe once you've done a turkey a chicken isn't a challenge! I decided the goats cheese wasn't enough by itself though (I used a crumbly Vulscombe with herbs) so mixed it ahead of time with some soft cheese and salt & pepper just to increase the fat content. It was going to get pretty hot after all. This went under the skin and then a good handful of wild garlic and about a quarter of a lemon inside the cavity.


The bird with the cheese mixture under the skin, seasoned and stuffed.

Then into a fan oven at 180°C for 15 mins per pound plus 15 mins (timing that I've worked out is good my oven, but as ever for this sort of thing your oven might be different).


Roasting away - about half-way through now.



And finally out of the oven, ready to rest for 20 minutes or so.

I served this with oven baked rosemary & garlic potato wedges and purple sprouting broccoli with a hot red wine vinaigrette. The broccoli was a little overcooked, but the vinaigrette came out really well, which I'd lightly spiced with cayenne pepper. Saw something vaguely similar on Saturday kitchen the morning before so thought I'd give it a whirl myself.


All plated up and ready for munching.


So how did it work out? Pretty good really. I thought the residue from the chicken pan was going to be too burnt at first to use for gravy, but it was actually really delicious, and the everything worked very well together. Opened a bottle of Beaujolais to drink and then was great too, in fact everything was kind of just right for the season, a real taste of spring. This whole "let's shove something under the skin of the bird and see what happens" lark could become a minor obsession with me I think!

Chicken with Lemon & Oregano

It's easy to feel that going back to chicken is a bit of a cop-out come Sunday lunch, but the thing with chicken is it's just so versatile and tasty. I think every time I do it I'm at a bit of a loss as to how to do it, but then pretty much every time it comes out great anyway - don't know why I bother worrying really!

I long ago gave up buying cheap chicken, waste of time that stuff really even without worrying about the conditions that most birds are raised in. Flavour is enough of an argument to get me to switch, but these days I do try and be a bit more vigilant in other chicken products that I pick-up. That's what the 'Chicken Out' campaign has taught me if nothing else, that the buggers will try and stick cheap, nasty, exploitative food in anything given half a chance. That tasty looking chicken madras, a quick chicken bap down town for lunch, even those biscuits you've been buying for years. Turns out they put battery reared food in lots of stuff. Anyhow, enough carping on about that. Back to the food.

This recipe was inspired by the fact that I had most of a lemon knocking about in the back of fridge looking to be finished up, and some left over new potatoes that weren't quite as fresh as they could have been - sometimes the smallest things can inspire good cooking. The lemon went inside the chicken cut into about eight pieces along with a couple of garlic cloves, and the potatoes were scattered around the bird along with a large cut up onion. Then the whole thing was liberally seasoned scattered with oregano and then finally some olive oil. Then into the oven for the usual sort of time whilst we went down the pub.

The chicken before going in the oven

The idea with this style of cooking, something I've been doing for many years now although usually with lamb, is that the juices from the meat and the oil will combine and the potatoes will get covered in all this extra flavour but also start to caramelise and crisp up a bit. It works a treat and so long as your roasting time is not too long your vegetables will get that extra depth and sweetness to them. The onions this time around were particularly wonderful, somehow tart and sweet, soft and chewy, all at the same time.

Served this with broad beans - our first crop from the mini-allotment at the end of the garden - together with some pancetta that we had in the fridge from B's village back home in Italy. The beans were very quickly boiled whilst I rendered off the fat from the pancetta. Most of the fat was put aside and then the beans and bacon (what a classic combination that is) just tossed together - no seasoning at all, didn't need it.

The chicken once roasted

I thought this need a little extra something so made some focaccia bread to go with it. Turns out the flour I used was brown, which I wasn't expecting (it was local flour from down the road we hadn't tried before) so instead of the usual rosemary focaccia I make I turned this into fennel focaccia instead, and it turned out pretty good and a good foil for the strong flavours of the bird.

Fennel Focaccia

All in all a damn good feed, and what with some untypical English Sunday Summer Sunshine (!) added some much needed sanity into what has lately been a bit of a demanding life.

Lunch is served!

You can see more pictures of this dish on my Facebook profile:

http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=43606&l=740ff&id=609271849

Lamb Roasted with Tomatoes & Orzo

Thinking about Greece for the next holiday and has fate would have it a brief wander around the local town the other day yielded two lovely Greek themed cook books from the local charity shops. One, "Culiniaria Greece", is a veritable tome on Greek cooking and lifestyle across it's many mainland & island areas, which will undoubtedly form the basis for our trip, but this recipe actually comes from the other book and was last Sunday's main course.

It's a sunshsine recipe and no mistake, and does capture something of the mediterranean and hopefully Greece in particular. You take a shoulder of lamb (unroll it if necessary) and flavour generously with salt, pepper, oregano, garlic and lemon slices. Roll up, tie, and pierce with garlic slivers (never really happy doing this bit, but hey ho I usually follow the recipe first time around at least), season and add a little olive oil. Now empty into a roasting pan a couple of tins of tomatoes, more garlic, a little water, a little sugar, more oregano, a bay leaf, seasoning and add the lamb. You're now ready for the oven.



Cook as normal for the lamb to start, i.e. 25 mins or so per pound depending how you liek it, but then (and I diverged from the recipe here a bit I'll admit) when you take the lamb off to rest add a bit more (boiling) water to the roasting pan and at least two good handfuls or orzo, which here means the pasta shaped like rice (or even barley) and not barley itself. This cooks in the sauce for the last 15-20 minutes or so whilst your meat rests.



Not too bad at all on the whole, although I could perhaps have increased the sugar and the seasoning in general but very tasty none the less. I've always liked lamb and lemon and it went particularly well here, and of course here you get pretty much everything you need in one dish bar a green salad on the side.



Not sure I'll be rushing back to this recipe, but I'm sure with one or two tweaks we'll be doing it again. Just made for hot summer days I reckon.

Chicken stuffed with Soft Cheese, Pesto & Asparagus wrapped in Prosciutto

Now I don't usually blog about anything other than Sunday Roasts, but this seemed too good to miss out on. After a bit of a disappointing experience at a place called Landewednack House in Cornwall (read more on Trip Advisor if you're interested) we came home looking for something really tasty but simple to throw together. What I turned out was a twist on an old Good Housekeeping recipe (no sniggering in the back please!) that always works well which combines simple ingredients in an oven baked dish.

Basically you take a chicken breast, slice it through the thickest part and then stuff with a blend of soft cheese and pesto. Then wrap it in the ham, add a little more pesto mix on top, wrap in foil and then bake for 25 minutes or so in a moderate oven. It comes out lovely and tender and all the juices mix together to form a (very watery) sauce which you can then dip into.



I served this with a twist on my usual rosemary roasties in that here I'm using pink fir apples cut a little differently, but of course the beauty of this is that you can cook the potatoes at the same time and so go off and read the paper in the meantime.

The chicken is free range from the local farm, stuffed with pesto we make as and when we need it from our own basil plants and a local cream cheese. I also added a little white wine to add flavour and increase the steam as I decided this time to include four asparagus sprigs in each of the chicken bundles as well. They turned out brilliantly, and I think may well become a regular feature when the season is right.



All in all a welcome return to Devon, and also a welcome confirmation that whatever over priced B&B's in the Lizard might think we can easily turn out food far superior to their offerings!

Pot Roast Chicken with Garlic

Picked up a recipe from another blog site last weekend, as I was looking for something to do with Chicken and garlic. Turned out really well - here's the recipe on their website:

http://www.cottagesmallholder.com/?p=205

Tweaked it a bit for my tastes, so left mine uncovered and didn't bother moving the bacon off. The fact that that meant I could nip down the pub whilst it was cooking was probably also a factor!

Here's how it looked before it went in the oven:



I served this with dauphinois potatoes, so that the creamy sauce from that would run into the garlicky juices from the chicken. Very tasty once it was done, plus lots of left overs for other things. A fair bit of it became a sort of chicken stronganoff with the addition of mushrooms, cream and parsley, and that went on for a fair few more meals in itself, especially good stuffed into pancakes, topped with a little grated cheddar and then under the grill for 5 minutes.

Moroccan Lamb

Just looking back through some old photos (at some point in the past I thought I would start keeping a photo record of what I cooked, but that didn't last for long) and found some nice shots of a Moroccan lamb recipe that I did some time ago. For once I actually remembered to do before and after pictures:

(you can see the chef has had a sneaky glass of wine already)

This leg of lamb was marinated overnight in lemon and saffron, plus others spices and oils, and I served it with spinach:

I'm a sucker for dishes like this - more or less one pot cooking, with everything pretty much ready in one dish, and loads of great flavours melding together into one. That lamb may look a little dry but believe me it wasn't, and the juices from the cooking made for an instant gravy.

A lot of recipes with legs of lamb suggest puncturing the meat and inserting slices or garlic or rosemary, which I've never been happy about doing and have stopped now, especially after one particularly dry result. I can't think of a better way to dry out a piece of meat than stick a knife all over it, and fail to see the point - you can get plenty of flavour on your plate without this technique. And why just lamb? You don't see anyone recommending it for beef, chicken or pork now. I think it's just become a habit, and to my mind can easily make a nice piece of meat far too garlic and herb ridden. OK, rant over!

Another recipe very similar to this one is the old English way of taking a leg of mutton to the butchers of a Sunday morning, and there's an Italian variant too - but more of them another time.