Fricando (Rich Braised Beef)

At the moment I'm still playing around with Anglo-Italian hybrids - seems only fair to the Italian to bring more of her type of food into the Sunday roasting. Was after beef this week, and as ever I hadn't decided on anything until I knew what meat I had to play with. For me the core of any Sunday roast has to be the meat itself, so there's no point planning anything until you know what quality of that you've got. The butchers had a nice selection of brisket this week, and being a big brisket fan I decided to plump for that.

Brisket - bit large for what I was doing, so cut a bit off for another time

Back at home it was time to dig in to my cookbooks for inspiration. I have a bit of an obsession with cookbooks, and although I rarely follow a recipe I love to be able to browse through ideas and techniques to inspire me. I recently did buy one by Anna del Conte though, The Classic Food of Northern Italy, and was bowled over somewhat by her style and clarity of writing, so decided to follow something of hers completely - 'Fricando'.

Anna does recommend following things quite closely, in order to reveal the true Italian style of the dish, so that's what I did. At least that's what I thought I did, until after the meal - but more of that later! Fricando is basically a braised beef dish, of either French (fricandeau) or Italian (fricando) origin, depending who's side your on :-) From what I understand it should really be veal, but the core of it seems to be a larded piece of beef that's then braised. Cloves also seem important, as well as a very long slow cook at low temperature.

Pancetta & Clove Studded Onion

The trick is to make incisions into the meat and push in quite a lot of minced/chopped proscuitto into it. You then brown the meat very well with olive oil and butter, and then leave to braise with one clove studded onion cut in half, half (or less) of a chopped up carrot, a good handful or two of celery (leaves only if you can), a (very) little stock and plenty of fresh parsley. After a few hours (I did mine for about four in the end, but it was ready earlier really - christmas beers down the pub delayed me somewhat) it should be done. All you need do next is take the meat out to rest, and then blitz the sauce smooth, either in a blender, sieve, mouli or whatever you prefer.

Minced pancetta, ready for pushing into the meat

The joint ready to go into the oven for it's long slow cook

The flavour has to be tasted to be believed. Absolutely wonderful. Always odd how such simple combinations can create such a sublime combination, but a real pleasure to eat. One of the best braised beef dishes I've ever made I think, if not the best. Served it very simply with some fresh greens and mashed potatoes (with a lovely celeriac risotto as primo, courtesy of the Italian).

Celeriac risotto

The leaves from the celeriac in the garden - used these in place of the celery it should be, and very tasty they were too!

The finished sauce

And the finished dish

P.S. I hinted earlier I cocked up a bit with this one - well the truth is I used pancetta rather than proscuitto. Looked at too many recipes, and since I had some pancetta to finish up in the fridge I guess I couldn't get it out of my head! Either way though it was delicious, but now of course I need to try it with the prosciutto just to check!

Mushroom Magic

Not strictly a Sunday roast post, but of interest all the same I figured ...

The other day we (well, B I should say) made mushroom risotto with some dried wild mushrooms that we'd gathered many months ago. Drying mushrooms for me is often the best bet as I'm never sure when they're going to get eaten, and most mushrooms dry very well. There's also the question of identification - whilst I'm pretty confident down the woods these days, and can easily tell the different between most dangerous and edible mushrooms, there's always that element of doubt for some! At least drying them means that you have a little extra time just to make sure you're right.

The risotto was made from parasol and hedgehog mushrooms though, two pretty unmistakeable types and if you're interested in gathering wild food then a good place to start. The parasol has size on it's side to mark it out, and the hedgehog is one of only a very very few mushrooms to have spines instead of gills or pores, so difficult to get wrong. But although the risotto was fab, that's not what I'm blogging about - it was the suppli/arancini we had tonight that has me up here typing.


The parasol mushroom



The hedgehog mushroom


Suppli/Arancini (same thing, different names, it's an Italian thing - very regional lot) are basically rice (often leftover risotto) formed into a ball around a central core, in this case mozzarella, coated in breadcrumbs and then fried. They look a lot like our Scotch Eggs. These were just wonderful, one of those moments in cooking where something allegedly simple transcends it's simple origins and is transformed into gourmet cuisine - I'd post a picture, but you'd never get the taste, and besides, I've eaten them all :-)


Some arancini - these aren't ours, but if I put ours next to this picture you'd be hard pressed to tell the difference


I should add before closing that these are also just about as cheap as you can get - considering the chief ingredient, mushrooms, was picked up for free from the forest floor (though you might want to do a little bit of research before you tread that particular path!). A bit of good cooking makes a little food go a long way.

P.S. On the gathering wild mushrooms note please, please don't take this as a message to go pick mushrooms without experience. This season seems to have been particularly kind to the Death Cap mushroom, which is just about as bad as it gets and is not named as some sort of weird joke. Death Cap may well kill you and doesn't look that bad if you're not familiar with it. I've always followed sage advice (Roger Phillips for example) and the best piece of advice above all has been to get to know just one type of mushroom and stick to that. Then get to know another and stick to that. And so on. If you don't know what it is, leave it alone!