2012 Cooking Club Week 46: Slow-braised beef short rib with red wine gravy

This is such a simple dish and it's a bowl full of comfort on a cold wintry day. It's also one of the easiest dinners to prepare but the tastes are delicious.

Start with your ingredients:

• Red Wine (any type)
• Beef stock
• Red Onion
• Garlic
• Beef short ribs (Or any type of braising meat - lamb shoulder works very well with this, pork shoulder too! Just try to get someone with bones/bone-in)
• Olive Oil
• Bisto Original Gravy (for thickening)

Start by preparing your meat - I just chopped mine into more manageable pieces for frying:



Season them well with salt and pepper to your taste and sear them in a very hot pan. No matter what type of meat you are using - sear it well. It will give the meat that extra depth of flavour like the below (Excuse the image quality)



Chop your red onion and line the pan like so:



Place the seared meat on top and pour a good glug of red wine into the pan. I don't really measure but it's about 1/4 of a bottle. Meanwhile have the kettle boiling for your beef stock cube and when that's done, add that liquid to the pan too. It's at this point that I usually add some garlic - this can either be paste (coz it's handy) or raw garlic cloves, either would work well.

Put the lid on, or if you have no lid, seal your braising tray/pot/dish with tin foil, and place in an oven at 150/160 degrees. Leave for about 3 hours, but check in after maybe 1 or 2 hours to ensure that your liquid hasn't evaporated. It shouldn't but I have a vague memory that this happened to me before so keep an eye.

It comes out like this:



The bones will be falling out of it, and the juices will smell out of this world. What I usually do now is take a soup ladle and get all that juice/wine/stock and put it in a little saucepan like this:



I add some Bisto (only original) gravy - the one where you have to mix the powder with water before hand, to give it some body, and then you have a delicious gravy ready to go.

I serve with mash and green beans - here's the finished result:



Enjoy!