Tagliatelle with Oxtail Ragu

Winter is upon us in the northern tablelands, and with it – the desire to slow cook some of the more interesting cuts of meat in the butchers. Whether it’s pies, stews or pasta – the weather is brutally cold and there’s nothing quite like gooey and thoroughly tasty bits of meat on our forks to cheer us up.

This winter was the first for many years at red grapevine that we haven’t had Osso Buco on our menu, instead choosing to have this classic slow cooked pasta sauce on our specials instead. It’s been a great success, so much so that we decided to post it as our recipe for this month.

There is something especially alluring about Ox, however for those who don’t know, this is the meat from the tail of the exact same domesticated & castrated Bovine creature that gives us Scotch Fillet Steak and mince beef. The term ‘Ox’ generally refers to a Bullock that has been trained to work as a draught animal, not commonly practiced in a country with thousands of tractors. If you were to purchase ‘Ox’ meat at a market stall in Mongolia then it would be almost certainly be Ox, but in an Australian supermarket chances are it’s come from the very same animal as the packet of T-Bone or topside beef it’s sitting next to. Why butchers and chefs refer to the tongue and tail as Ox is probably a result of culinary tradition more than anything else. I doubt ‘Eye Fillet of Ox’ would be particularly popular in restaurants.

Ingredients:
2kg oxtail or beeftail (You may find it described as either).
2 large brown onions
3 celery stalks
3 large carrots
500ml vegetable stock
½ cup red wine

1. Arrange a large roasting tin or ovenproof dish with some chopped carrot, onion, & celery pieces
2. In a hot frying pan with a small amount of oil, lightly brown your oxtail pieces on both sides
3. When finished, place the meat on top of the vegetables in the dish. Deglaze your pan with the red wine and pour this on top of the oxtail. Then add enough vegetable stock so that the liquid level goes up 1/3 to 1/2 of the meat. It needs to be sitting in the liquid, but not covered.
4. Cover the oxtail tightly with two pieces of aluminium foil. It is VERY IMPORTANT that it is tightly covered with no holes. The slow cooking will only work if there is little to no moisture loss at all. As the liquid comes to the boil, it will turn to steam, but then condense on the inside of the foil and go back to liquid again. It is this cycle that creates the combination of boiling, steaming & roasting which breaks the meat down, and makes it so flavoursome & tender.
5. The whole tray will need about 4 hours in an oven set to 150 degrees C.

There is a comprehensive description of this method (officially known as braising) and a video of us slow cooking lamb on one of our older posts here.

6. Take it out of the oven, and allow the meat to cool slightly.
7. Shred the meat from the bone, making sure you get all the gooey sticky yuminess from all the nooks & crannies.
8. Save the carrots and puree them thoroughly till smooth.
9. Strain all of the cooking liquid.
10. Mix through the meat & carrot with enough of the stock to make a thick sauce. If it is too runny, put it into a saucepan on a low heat and reduce it until it has reached a nice thick consistancy.
11. Mix together with whatever pasta you choose. This month at red grapevine we have used tagliatelle.

Any question, or thoughts (or if anyone knows a little more about the Ox / Beef Etymology) please use the comment section below.

This recipe is hardly original. In fact, pasta with mushrooms is one of the oldest and most common combinations in Italian cuisine, not just found across the Italian peninsula, but served and eaten all over the world.

It would be fairly accurate to refer to this as ‘Boscaiola’ sauce, however at red grapevine we shy away from using the traditional terminology, preferring instead to describe the food in English. This prevents confusion, and also allows us to put some of our own interpretations onto the traditional dishes.

Ironically though, the definition of authentic ‘Boscaiola’ is not set it stone, and unlike many Italian sauces, the regional origin is not that distinct. In the context of food ‘Boscaila’ means ‘of the forrest’ – a reference to its most common ingredient – wild mushrooms. Literally though, ‘Boscaiolo’ means ‘woodman’ or ‘lumberjack’. It is quaint, but I’ve always liked the lumberjack connection to Boscaiola. It is a hearty & rustic collection of flavours and is always immensely satisfying. I think if I spent all day cutting down trees, this is the type of meal I’d like to come home to.

You can use any pasta that you like for this, but I tend towards the rule that short, spiral or tubular pastas should be served with rich tomato sauces, while long pastas work really well with sticky creamy or olive oil based sauces.

Interestingly enough, the name Pappardelle derives from the verb “pappare,”- to gobble up. Perfect for the lumberjack.

It takes about 7 minutes from start to finish.

Ingredients

(Serves 1)

The Sauce:
1. In a hot pan, lightly saute the bacon, mushrooms & leeks for about 1 minute, or until the bacon crispens slightly, the mushrooms moisten, and the leeks go limp.
2. Add the crushed garlic and deglaze with the white wine.
3. When the wine has reduced in volume by about half (depending on the heat in your pan this should take anywhere from 20-40 seconds) add the cream, salt & pepper & bring to the boil.
4. Once the cream starts to bubble, it will slowly reduce. There is no time guideline for this, you just need to watch the sauce and turn it off when it has reached the desired consistency. For the best result, the sauce should be thick enough to stick to pasta, but runny enough to mix through it easily. If you reduce it too far, you can add a little cream.

The Pasta:
All pasta types & brands are different, so you should always follow the instructions on the packet carefully.

All pasta should be cooked in lightly salted water.

For this dish at red grapevine, we use Barilla’s Pappardelle Uovo from their specialty range. This is not available in a lot of supermarkets, but there are many great pappardelle varieties that are. If you live close to somewhere that sells fresh egg pasta than even better.

N.B. If you are fairly confident with the coordinating the cooking, you can save time by cook the pasta while you make the sauce, but it is quite easy to overcook the pasta this way (which is an irretrievable disaster). If you have an extra few minutes, cook the sauce first, put it to one side, and then cook the pasta.

Once both are ready, drain the pasta, and add the pasta to the sauce and mix. ALWAYS add the pasta to the sauce, and never the sauce to the pasta.

Good luck. Any queries or feedback please feel free to use the comments below.

Santuzza Pizza – slow cooked lamb, caramelised onion, pumpkin, feta & fresh basil.

Santuzza has been on the red grapevine menu since 2006, and in that time has become one of our best sellers.

A little more complex & time consuming than many of the others, it requires of knowledge of how to slow cook lamb, which can be found here.

Ingredients

60g shredded slow cooked lamb (click here to see the recipe & video)

20g caramelised onion (recipe below)

40g roast pumpkin

40g crumbled feta cheese

60g shredded mozzarella cheese

2-3 tablespoons pizza sauce (see below)

150g ball of pizza dough (see below)

Instructions:

….in an electric pizza oven at 300 degrees C this should take about 8 minutes. If you don’t have one of these at home (most people don’t), then you can get very good results with a pizza stone in a normal domestic oven.

On a pizza stone though, for a crispy base it’s a good idea not to cook the pizza on a tray like we have in the video, but to lay the pizza base directly onto some baking paper and carefully transfer it directly to the stone.

If you’re lucky enough to be using a wood fire oven, the same thing applies.

In this Video: Leo Pastor-Kellet from Red Grapevine making a Santuzza
Leo is a first year apprentice, and although the youngest member of the kitchen team, has already made more pizzas than most people make in a lifetime!

Caramelised Onion (makes about 5 portions)
81 large brown onion, sliced as thinly as possible
1 knob of butter
1 tbspn olive oil

1/2 cup brown sugar

1/4 cup (70mls) balsamic vinegar

1. Cook the onion in the oil & butter until limp, and then add the vinegar and sugar and cook on a low heat for about 20 mins.  It is very important not to let it come to the boil, otherwise it can toffee, and will go solid when cool.

Pizza Sauce (makes about 10 portions)
800g tin of crushed tomatoes
100ml red wine
1 tablsespoon pureed garlic

Cook on a low heat for 20-30mins and then puree in a blender

Pizza Dough
500g Flour
300ml warm water
1 tspn instant yeast
1 tspn salt
mix together until combined with a wooden spoon, then knead on a well floured surface for about 5 minutes. Leave to rest at room temperature for at least half an hour.
If you have any questions, or need any help with this recipe, please feel free to leave a comment below, and we’ll try to get back to you. Good luck.
the red grapevine kitchen team

Slow Cooked Lamb Salad with semi dried tomatoes, pinenuts, feta & kumera chips.
Ingredients

150g slow cooked lamb (to see the recipe & video click here)

a small handful of semi dried tomatoes

about 150g feta crumbled

1 tbspn toasted pinenuts.

A handful of kumera chips (recipe below).

Dressing
15mls balsamic vinegar
45mls olive oil

1.  Mix all of the ingredients except for the kumera chips, and toss thoroughly.

2.  Garnish with the kumera chips.

In this video: Levi Rudge, second year apprentice at Red Grapevine, plates a Slow Cooked Lamb Salad.

Kumera Chips
1 gold sweet potato (or kumera)

3 tbspns olive oil

Peel the sweet potato thoroughly with a sharp peeler (It is fairly essential that the peeler is relatively good quality and very sharp).  When all of the skin is discarded, continue to use the peeler – running it gently and swiftly along the surface of the sweet potato, rotating the sweet potato skightly every couple of peels.  The result should be long wafer thin chips.

Put a frying pan on the stove until very hot, and then add the oil liberally.  Fry the kumera chips, moving them around with a pair of tongs constantly until they begin to crispen.  Drain on a plate covered with paper towel.

Good luck

As usual, please feel free to post your comments and/or questions below.

slow roasted lamb salad with semi dried tomatoes, feta, rocket, pine nuts, kumera chips & balsamic dressing 

Part 1 – the slow cooked lamb

Ingredients

1 Leg or shoulder of lamb ***

2 carrots

2 celery stalks

2 onions

1 ltr veg stock

100ml white wine

*** For best results at home, if you are just feeding a family or group of friends, I would recommend a whole shoulder for this recipe, but legs taste just as good in my opinion and are better if you are feeding a larger group of  people.  Price-wise, it is practically the same, because although the per kilo price of shoulders is generally less, that is because the actual yield of meat from the leg is higher (proportionally there is more bone in the shoulder).

What you will see in the video is what we use most days in the restaurant: a large (approx 3kg) lamb leg cut into 2 inch chops. (“Chops” is butcher terminology for any cut which goes accross the bone.)  There are two reasons we use chops: it speeds the process slightly, and most days at the restaurant we have about a 4 hour maximum prep time.  The main reason though, is that our pizza oven has a very short opening, and our roasting dishes can’t be more than about 10cm in height.  In a normal domestic oven, you will be able to fit a whole leg or shoulder, and there is a  chart below the video showing you how to adjust the cooking times.

If you want to do it exactly the same as we do though, go the The Meating Place and ask for a leg of lamb the same as red grapevine.  The butchers there will know what to do, because we get one pretty much every day.

Method

The actual cooking method we are going to use is called braising (cooking at a low heat in a covered vessel with a small amount of liquid).  For some reason though, perhaps because of it’s highly common usage in chinese cuisine, the word ‘braising’ has fallen out of fashion in modern australian & continental food styles – so we call it ‘slow roasting’ or ‘slow cooking instead’.  It is much the same though, and can be done like this.

1.  Arrange a large roasting tin or ovenproof dish with some chopped carrot, onion, & celery pieces (don’t worry too much about peeling them, as they are only there to infuse some flavour to the lamb, and will be discarded later)

2.  In a hot frying pan with a small amount of oil, lightly brown your lamb on both sides (1-2 mins each side if using chops; a little longer if you are using a whole joint.

3.  When finished, place your lamb on top of the vegetables in the dish.  Deglaze your pan with the white wine and pour this on top of the lamb.  Then add enough vegetable stock so that the liquid level goes up 1/3 to 1/2 of the lamb.  It needs to be sitting in the liquid, but not covered.

4. Cover the lamb tightly with two pieces of aluminium foil.  It is VERY IMPORTANT that it is tightly covered with no holes.  The slow cooking will only work if there is little to no moisture loss at all.  As the liquid comes to the boil, it will turn to steam, but then condense on the inside of the foil and go back to liquid again.  It is this cycle  that creates the combination of boiling, steaming & roasting which breaks the meat down, and makes it so flavoursome & tender.  If steam is allowed to escape, then the meat very quickly dries up and you are left with lamb jerky.  Your dogs will love you for it, but it’ll be a dissapointing waste of time for everybody else!!

5.  Cook it in a low to moderate oven for as long as you have to spare (see the chart below the video)

In this video: Peter Ireland, sous chef at Red Grapevine Restaurant & Bar prepares slow roasted lamb.

Rough guide for cooking times (depends greatly on size of joint and type of oven)

6.  Once it’s out of the oven, let it cool for a few minutes and then take the cover off (be carefull of escaping steam).  With a pair of tongs, you should be able to pull meat of the bone very easily.  If you can’t, cover it again (fresh aluminium foil is best), and give it some more time in the oven.  If it’s ready, then let it cool for about 30 minutes, and then shred it with tongs or clean fingers, discarding the bits you don’t want as you go.  The meat be very tender & a consistently deep pinkish brown right through.

In this video: Peter Ireland

Any questions or comments on this recipe please feel free to do so by clicking here.

Part II (coming soon) will demonstrate how to make the rest of the salad, but there a many other ways you can use this lamb, the possiblities are endless. We got some of the inspiration from this great recipe byNigella Lawson, which Natalie used to cook for us at home long before we had slow cooked lamb on the restaurant menu. One of the things we loved about it was starting first thing in the morning, and cooking it all day. By dinner time, your whole house smells of lamb!!

Good Luck!

Scarpia Pizza – chorizo, pancetta, spanish onion, bbq & chilli.

Scarpia has been on the red grapevine menu since the restaurant opened in 2004, and has been consistantly one of the most popoular pizzas on the menu. 

Although this is fairly simple, we thought it would be a great way to kick off our Recipe of the Month series. Below is a brief outline, including a video showing how it’s done.

Ingredients

60g sliced chorizo sausage

40g thinly sliced pancetta

20g thinly sliced spanish onion

1/2 teaspoon fresh chilli (chopped or blended)

80g  shredded mozzarella cheese

2-3 tablespoons pizza sauce (see below)

150g ball of pizza dough (see below)

10-20ml bbq sauce

Instructions:

….in an electric pizza oven at 300 degrees C this should take about 8 minutes. If you don’t have one of these at home (most people don’t), then you can get very good results with a pizza stone in a normal domestic oven.

On a pizza stone though, for a crispy base it’s a good idea not to cook the pizza on a tray like we have in the video, but to lay the pizza base directly onto some baking paper and carefully transfer it directly to the stone.

If you’re lucky enough to be using a wood fire oven, the same thing applies.

In this Video: Levi Rudge from Red Grapevine making a Scarpia
Levi Rudge is a second year apprentice, and a key member of the Red Grapevine kitchen team.  After over a year at the restaurant & literally thousands of pizzas, he has become a bit of a Scarpia specialist.

Pizza Sauce (makes about 10 portions)
800g tin of crushed tomatoes
100ml red wine
1 tablsespoon pureed garlic

Cook on a low heat for 20-30mins and then puree in a blender

Pizza Dough
500g Flour
300ml warm water
1 tspn instant yeast
1 tspn salt
mix together until combined with a wooden spoon, then knead on a well floured surface for about 5 minutes.  Leave to rest at room temperature for at least half an hour.
If you have any questions, or need any help with this recipe, please feel free to leave a comment below, and we’ll try to get back to you.  Good luck.
the red grapevine kitchen team