Category: Secondi di Carne (meat dishes)

Secondi di Carne (meat dishes)23 Comments

Carne alla Pizzaiola

StefanGourmet

Alla Pizzaiola indicates something like “pizza style” and is not a clearly defined term in Italian cooking. The basic recipe for Carne alla Pizzaiola (meat pizza-style) is thin slices of meat (usually beef, but it can be prepared with other types of meat as well) cooked in a simple tomato sauce. To the tomato sauce you can add ‘pizza style’ ingredients like oregano, olives, capers, etc. It is a simple dish with a lot of flavor that in Italy is often served as piatto unico with mashed or roasted potatoes. It is easy to prepare, as you should only take care that you do not overcook the meat. An interesting point about carne alla pizzaiola is that in all the recipes that I have seen, the meat is not browned first. Continue reading “Carne alla Pizzaiola”

Secondi di Carne (meat dishes)27 Comments

Lamb and Goat Cheese Roulade

StefanGourmet

Summer has finally arrived and that means it time for grilling, or BBQ as we call it. For me grilling is strictly a charcoal thing, as a charcoal fire is hotter and imparts more flavor than a gas grill. Most grilling done in the Netherlands is very ‘low brow’, with cheap meat from the supermarket, with the lack of flavor masked by a reddish marinade. That is clearly not my kind of grilling. I like to use proper meat and pre-cook it sous-vide so it’s always cooked through, juicy and tender on the inside, and nicely browned on the outside. Since the meat is already cooked, visual inspection (i.e. using your eyes) is all that’s needed to decide when to remove the meat from the grill. Since I discovered last year that lamb and goat cheese go well together, I decided to make a roulade of lamb shoulder with goat cheese, pancetta, thyme, and balsamic vinegar. It turned out great! Continue reading “Lamb and Goat Cheese Roulade”

Secondi di Carne (meat dishes)24 Comments

Richard’s Awesome Chipotle Pork Burgers

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After receiving Richard’s wonderful chile package, I browsed through his chile recipes (i.e. most of his recipes 😉 ) to get ideas of what to do with those chiles. His recipe for Chihuahua Cheese Stuffed Porcine Chipotle Burgers struck my fancy, so I decided to give it a try. I’ve never seen Chihuahua cheese around here, and I didn’t look forward to inquiring because everyone would think I was talking about a yappy little dog rather than cheese. So I decided to use sardinian pecorino because that is what I had.

I had never heard of chipotle chiles before, so I did not know that they are in fact smoked jalapeños. The flavor of the pork burger with the pickled chipotles mixed into the patties was simply amazing! We both loved it. The smoky flavor of the chipotles worked really well. I will definitely prepare these burgers again and then I will try grilling them on a charcoal fire because I expect that will take them over the top. Thanks Richard, not only for the great gift but also for this delicious recipe! Continue reading “Richard’s Awesome Chipotle Pork Burgers”

Secondi di Carne (meat dishes)15 Comments

Braciole alla Barese Sous-Vide

StefanGourmet

A simple but great dish from the city of Bari in Southern Italy (in the region of Puglia) is Braciole alla Barese, which can be prepared using either beef or horse meat. Thin slices of beef are stuffed with garlic, parsley, and cheese, rolled up, and braised in tomato sauce. I absolutely love this dish, but I thought it could be even better when prepared sous-vide. In the traditional preparation the meat is braised and thus cooked well done; with sous-vide it is possible to ‘braise’ the meat in the tomato sauce to medium rare. There’s only one way to find out, and that is to simply try it. It turned out delicious, and without putting down the regular version, which is great, the sous-vide version to me is absolutely superior. The meat is more juicy and the whole dish has a ‘fresher’ taste. Roll up the beef bundles as in the regular recipe and brown them in hot olive oil.
Continue reading “Braciole alla Barese Sous-Vide”

Secondi di Carne (meat dishes)46 Comments

Hanger Steak Sous-Vide

StefanGourmet

Hanger Steak is a lesser known but very flavorful cut of beef. It has so much flavor because it comes from the diaphragm that is needed for breathing, and has therefore had a lot of use in the life of the steer or cow. Hanger steak is called onglet in French, and longhaas or karweivlees in Dutch. It is best when served medium rare, but it can be slightly tough when prepared like a regular steak. With sous-vide we can fix this, because we can cook it for a longer time without taking it over medium rare or we can apply the technique that I have called warm aging.

It is possible to tenderize beef by boosting the activity of calpain and cathepsin enzymes in the meat through bringing the meat to temperatures of 39.5C/103F for calpains and 49.5C/121F for cathepsins. These are the same enzymes that are at work when meat is aged at refrigerator temperatures (both for dry aging and for aging in vacuum), but much faster and (compared to dry aging) without drying the meat. If you can find dry aged hanger steak there is no need to apply warm aging, but I don’t expect this to be a cut that is available dry aged. I finished cooking the steak at 55C/131F for medium rare. You could also cook it longer at 55C/131F instead of applying warm aging, but the meat would turn out less juicy and a bit more like medium. Continue reading “Hanger Steak Sous-Vide”

Secondi di Carne (meat dishes)25 Comments

Veal Scaloppine al Marsala

StefanGourmet

Some dishes are so simple you don’t really need a recipe to make them. But that doesn’t mean they’re not delicious. Italian cuisine is full of such recipes. This one takes less than five minutes to prepare and is a classic recipe that you can find in restaurants all over Italy (and in fact, in Italian restaurants all over the world). Continue reading “Veal Scaloppine al Marsala”

Secondi di Carne (meat dishes)14 Comments

Duck Leg a l’Orange Sous-Vide

StefanGourmet

Sous-vide confit of duck leg is great, but I thought it should also be possible to do a more juicy less flaky texture. Some experimenting with times and temperatures showed me right: 24 hours at 64.5C/148F yielded tender juicy duck legs. Duck with orange is a classic combination from French cuisine, known as Canard à l’Orange. And so a very simple but very stylish and tasty dish was born. Ingredients? Duck legs, an orange, salt and pepper, and a teaspoon of honey. That’s it! The duck is cooked in its own fat. Perfect simplicity or simple perfection? Continue reading “Duck Leg a l’Orange Sous-Vide”

Secondi di Carne (meat dishes)16 Comments

Pressure-Cooked Boeuf Bourguignon

StefanGourmet

Although I purchased my pressure cooker for making stocks, I thought it would be nice to try making a pressure-cooked stew as well. Pressure cookers are known as “fast cookers” (or actually “fast cooking pan”, “snelkookpan”) in Dutch, and in this case it is true because stewing beef in a pressure cooker only takes 20 minutes instead of 3 hours. Stating it like that is cheating a bit, because after those 20 minutes you need to wait for about half an hour for the pressure to go down. But still, it still means that you only have to start cooking 75 minutes or so before you’re having boeuf bourguignon and that is kind of nice. Continue reading “Pressure-Cooked Boeuf Bourguignon”

Secondi di Carne (meat dishes)12 Comments

Leg of Lamb Steak Sous-vide

StefanGourmet

Good food can be surprisingly easy to prepare, especially if you have sous-vide equipment at your disposal. You could also make this with a regular oven though, but you’ll have to pay more attention to getting the meat cooked just right. Lamb is one of my favorite meats, with rack of lamb one of my favorite cuts. Leg of lamb can be cooked whole, but you can also cook a slice of leg of lamb as a steak. Here I am serving it with a red wine demi-glace sauce. Assuming that you already have the lamb demi-glace, there isn’t a whole lot to it. Just cook the meat sous-vide, sear it, and deglaze the pan to make the sauce. Here’s what I did. Continue reading “Leg of Lamb Steak Sous-vide”

Secondi di Carne (meat dishes)13 Comments

Chicken Breast with Tarragon Sous-Vide

StefanGourmet

Chicken and tarragon are a classic combination in French cuisine: Poulet à l’Estragon. In this recipe the chicken breast is seasoned with paprika and served with a sauce made from chicken stock, white wine, shallots, and tarragon. The tarragon sauce was nice, although I may have used a bit too much tarragon as it overpowered the chicken just a bit.

Continue reading “Chicken Breast with Tarragon Sous-Vide”

Secondi di Carne (meat dishes)11 Comments

Lamb with Lemon-Egg Sauce (Abbacchio Brodettato)

StefanGourmet

As I mentioned in my earlier posts this week, Easter is celebrated in Italy by eating egg and lamb. So it was a given that the main course for our Easter dinner would be lamb. To make it even more appropriate for Easter, the sauce of this lamb dish is made with an egg yolk. Abbacchio Brodettato is a lamb dish from Lazio, the region around Rome. Abbacchio is suckling lamb, but any young lamb will do to make this dish. This dish has a very original taste, as lamb is not often combined with prosciutto, lemon, and egg yolk. It works very well and the lamb is very tender. It is almost like eating white meat, and therefore it can be no surprise that a full-bodied oaked white wine is a better pairing for this than red wine. Continue reading “Lamb with Lemon-Egg Sauce (Abbacchio Brodettato)”

Secondi di Carne (meat dishes)14 Comments

Lamb a Scottadito

StefanGourmet

Easter is the celebration of spring, and in Italy this means eating eggs and lamb. Even though it is snowing and Easter is colder than Christmas this year and therefore there is no suckling lamb available yet, I am following that tradition by preparing Abbacchio a Scottadito. This is a piatto tipico from Lazio, the region of Rome. Abbacchio means suckling lamb, and although the dish is still called abbacchio it is more usually prepared with regular lamb. The lamb should be as young as you can find; the lamb I used was 4 months old. Continue reading “Lamb a Scottadito”

Secondi di Carne (meat dishes)23 Comments

Coq au Vin Sous-Vide

StefanGourmet

Coq au Vin was ‘invented’ to turn a tough old rooster into a feast. Nowadays it is hard to find such tough old roosters, and most Coq au Vin is made with chickens that have only lived to be about six weeks old. They do not really require to be simmered for a long time in red wine to become edible, and have a lot less flavor. Coq au Vin is still good anyway. If you are looking for a good Coq au Vin recipe for regular chicken, click here.

After I had discovered a type of free range chicken that is allowed to grow more slowly and thus develop more flavor, which reminded me of my grandmother’s chicken, I was curious how it would work when served as Coq au Vin. My parents were coming over for dinner and they had dropped some hints that they were curious about the “kip van tante Ali” I had found. And so I decided to kill two birds with one stone and prepare that type of chicken sous-vide, served as Coq au Vin. Continue reading “Coq au Vin Sous-Vide”

Secondi di Carne (meat dishes)16 Comments

Veal Rib Eye with Mushrooms

StefanGourmet

According to my butcher, you will live to be 100 if you eat veal on a regular basis. This is not a scientifically proven statement (he bases it on a few people he knows who used to eat veal on a regular basis and have lived to be 100) and since he’s selling the veal his objectivity is questionable. I do like to eat veal though, and it is great with mushrooms.

Fresh porcini mushrooms are very difficult to obtain around here, as they are in many other places around the world. A trick I’ve developed is to soak dried porcini mushrooms in hot water, sauté the reconstituted porcini mushrooms with fresh cultivated mushrooms, and then simmer all of the mushrooms in the porcini soaking liquid to boost the flavor of all the mushrooms. The mushrooms are sautéed with parsley and garlic, which is called funghi trifolati in Italy. Together with the deep fried fennel I posted about yesterday and a good glass of white wine, this makes a great meal for Easter. Continue reading “Veal Rib Eye with Mushrooms”

2. Primi (pasta, risotto), Secondi di Carne (meat dishes)26 Comments

Coda alla Vaccinara (Oxtail Stewed in Tomato Sauce)

StefanGourmet

All regions of Italy have their own traditional dishes, referred to as piatti tipici. I like to cook my way through Italy by trying piatti tipici  from different regions. Coda alla Vaccinara is a typical dish from the cucina povera (poor man’s kitchen) of Rome (Lazio). Oxtail is part of what is called the quinto quarto (the fifth quarter), the less desirable parts of an animal that remain when all the nice parts have been taken. As often with traditional Italian dishes, there are many different versions. I made an elaborate version with  raisins, pine nuts, and cocoa powder in the sauce. The sauce can be served over penne rigate or rigatoni, which is called Rigatoni al Sugo di Coda. Continue reading “Coda alla Vaccinara (Oxtail Stewed in Tomato Sauce)”

Secondi di Carne (meat dishes)20 Comments

Horse Sirloin and Sous-Vide: a (not so) Rare Combination

StefanGourmet
DSC03896
Horse sirloin: notice the marbling

Due to the increased popularity of horse meat that I already wrote about in my post on Braciole di Cavallo alla Barese, my butcher now displays his horse meat more prominently. This is why I noticed this fine piece of horse sirloin at only half the price of beef sirloin and with better marbling. I decided that it would be a nice idea to try and cook it sous-vide.

I expected that I would be on my own with this, because most of the home cooks that can afford sous-vide equipment sneer at horse meat (or live in a country where it is not very sale for human consumption such as the USA) and so I was not expecting to find much guidance online. Google confirmed that horse sirloin and sous-vide are a rare combination: I only found one post and that was for horse tenderloin and most importantly wasn’t real sous-vide but more of a poorly executed poor-man’s version of it (not even a thermometer was used). Continue reading “Horse Sirloin and Sous-Vide: a (not so) Rare Combination”

Secondi di Carne (meat dishes)19 Comments

Fabio’s Grandmother’s Meatballs (Le Polpette della Nonna di Fabio)

StefanGourmet

I had invited some Italian friends from Amsterdam for dinner. I thought it would be nice to cook something for them that their grandmother used to cook for them, something that they had fond memories of. My friend Fabio said his grandmother always made meatballs that were outstanding with a bit of lemon. This post is the result of my attempt to make Fabio’s grandmother’s meatballs, without having the actual recipe. Fabio liked them a lot and he was taking lots of pictures. When we were pestering him about taking so many pictures, he said he was going to send them to his grandmother. For the next attempt, we should probably just ask her for the recipe… Whether or not they were close to her original, they were great anyway. Here’s what I did… Continue reading “Fabio’s Grandmother’s Meatballs (Le Polpette della Nonna di Fabio)”

Secondi di Carne (meat dishes)22 Comments

Coq au Vin

StefanGourmet

Coq au Vin is a prime example of classic French cooking. It is a lot of work, but worth it. “Coq” is French for rooster, and in times when people still ate roosters they were old and thus so tough that they needed to be stewed in wine to make them edible. Nowadays most chicken only gets to live about 6 weeks, so it is not needed to cook it like that anymore. But the flavor of the classic dish is so good that people keep making it anyway. Those old roosters had a lot of flavor, so this dish will benefit from using an older chicken like the one I discovered recently.

I have looked at various recipes online, most of them in French, and noted that they are all very similar. Chicken is browned, covered in red wine and stock, and then stewed until tender. It is served with sautéed mushrooms and braised pearl onions. Since Julia Child has been very important for introducing French cuisine to America, I thought it would be nice to follow her recipe from Mastering the Art of French Cooking. She made some adaptations to ingredients available in America, for instance she cooks the chicken only for a short time (because young chickens don’t need that long) and she blanches the bacon before using it (I think this is because bacon in America was — or still is? — too salty).

I believe the key success factors for a good Coq au Vin are: the quality of the wine, the quality of the chicken, the quality of the chicken stock, and cooking the onions and mushrooms separately and only adding them at the end. This will allow the mushrooms and onions to keep their own flavor. If you’ve never made braised onions before, I bet you’ll like them so much that you will make them again. Braised onions are very tender, flavorful, and sweet, and very different from raw or sautéed onions. Continue reading “Coq au Vin”

Secondi di Carne (meat dishes)10 Comments

Venison and Bell Pepper Stew

StefanGourmet

Venison, bell pepper and paprika are a good combination that make for a very flavorful stew. If you can’t find venison, lamb is a good substitute. I served it with roasted parsnips and mashed potatoes. The recipe is very similar to the venison and bell pepper ragù I posted a few days ago. In fact, only the end of the preparation is different. Ingredients For 6 servings 900 grams (2 lbs) venison stewing meat, in cubes about 250 ml (1 cup) warm water or venison stock 3 red bell peppers 1 Tbsp hot paprika (or 2 tsp sweet paprika and 1 tsp … Continue reading Venison and Bell Pepper Stew

Secondi di Carne (meat dishes)14 Comments

My Grandmother’s Chicken Sous-Vide

StefanGourmet

Almost a year ago I wrote about my quest to recreate the braised chicken like my grandmother used to make. Most people have nostalgic memories of a favorite food made by their mother or grandmother. Just the smell of it will instantly propel you back to your childhood. In many cases the memory has been romanticized by our brains and it may therefore seem impossible to recreate it. For me, this was the braised chicken my grandmother made. Her husband, my grandfather, was the only one who had left the family farm, where his brothers and sister kept livestock including … Continue reading My Grandmother’s Chicken Sous-Vide

Secondi di Carne (meat dishes)8 Comments

Lamb Stew with Polenta

StefanGourmet

Even though I’ve been cooking out of Biba Caggiano’s “Modern Italian Cooking” for 15 years now, I still haven’t tried all of her recipes. One of them was “Lamb Stew with Small Onions and Carrots”. I thought it would be perfect for the cold winter weather we’ve been having, and I was right. The stew is very hearty and flavorful and the vegetables have more color and flavor because they are cooked separately and are only added at the end. It paired very well with polenta. I’m not usually a big fan of polenta, but I liked it when my … Continue reading Lamb Stew with Polenta

2. Primi (pasta, risotto), Secondi di Carne (meat dishes)17 Comments

Braciole alla Barese (Stuffed Beef Bundles)

StefanGourmet

Braciole (also spelled as Brasciole) are a typical dish from the province of Bari in Puglia. Braciole are bundles of beef, stuffed with a mixture of parsley, garlic, and cheese, and then cooked low and slow in a tomato sauce. As with many Italian recipes there are variations. According to the Italian wikipedia it is supposed to be made with horse meat rather than beef and with the addition of lard (probably because horse meat is very lean). You could also use red wine rather than wite, or basil rather than oregano. Even though this dish seems very similar to the version … Continue reading Braciole alla Barese (Stuffed Beef Bundles)

Secondi di Carne (meat dishes)11 Comments

Chicken Cordon Bleu

StefanGourmet

Cordon Bleu was one of my favorite dishes as a kid. I hadn’t eaten it for years, but when I was thinking about what to do with the organic chicken breast I had left from the whole chicken I had used to make brodo for tortellini, I decided it would be nice to make cordon bleu again. It can’t be a surprise that cordon bleu is really good if made from scratch with good chicken, good ham, and good cheese. It is quite different from something store-bought where the ham, cheese, and chicken are probably all of the ‘processed’ variety. Cordon … Continue reading Chicken Cordon Bleu