Corduroy Orange

Sometimes the best results in the kitchen come when, like a jazz musician, you are willing to improvise along familiar themes and discover new interpretations while the notes are being played.

Yesterday, I started a 2-day cooking process on some beef short ribs.  I seasoned the meat with some of my coffee steak rub, and seared it in a large cast iron pan.  Meanwhile, I put a quart of chicken/ham stock, a pint of applesauce (both pulled from my freezer), and a cup or so of red wine into a saucepan to heat up, intending to use them as braising liquid for the beef.

Once the meat had browned, I transferred it to a roasting pan with a rack in it (like I already mentioned, there’s a lot of fat in these ribs, and I didn’t want them frying in it) and slotted them into a 200F oven for a long, slow, low cook.  Then, I deglazed the cast iron pan with the stock/sauce/wine mix.  I decided I wanted a little more kick to the braising liquid so I sliced a jalapeno pepper and a habanero pepper into thin strips while the liquid reduced out and sauteed them in the fat that remained in the pan once the liquid was gone.

In the meantime, i decided that a brown stock (stock that contains caramelized tomato product) would be preferable as a braising liquid, so i opened up a small can of tomato paste and caramelized it in with the hot peppers, adding a little bit of water into the mix to keep the paste from scorching (this is a fairly standard procedure known as making a pincage–it helps to remove the tinny taste of canned tomato paste and develops a fuller flavor).

Pincage having been developed around the hot peppers, I combined the stock/wine/ applesauce mixture with the pincage and realized that I had a tomato soup staring me in the face.  Thick, rich, and hearty–this soup was good!  Aurora and I finished off about half of it for dinner last night, accompanied by grilled cheese sandwiches.  I’m planning on using the other half as braising liquid when I finish off the boiling beef for dinner tonight.

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 8th, 2010 at 10:13 am and is filed under Cooking Tips, What I Ate. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.