As far as eating goes, this was a pretty good weekend. On Friday night I went to the wonderful Mien Tay in Shoreditch for the second time this month. One of the friends I was dining with travelled with me around Vietnam in 2009 so it has become our tradition to eat Vietnamese food whenever she is in town. I have been to many of the Vietnamese restaurants along the Kingsland Road, but recently this one has become my favourite. I feasted on my usual starter of quail cooked in honey and spices (so good!), followed by a main course of tamarind prawns and steamed rice and ending with the traditional, insomnia-inducing Vietnamese coffee with condensed milk. We discovered these one hungover morning in Hanoi and have enjoyed many since.
Saturday morning rolled around and the wine and coffee had given me a peculiar kind of hangover that I knew only food could cure. I dragged myself out of bed, trekked over to Brockley Market and treated myself to a buttermilk fried chicken bap from poultry maestros Spit & Roast that definitely got me back to full speed.
Whilst wandering around the market, I spotted a couple of packets of bone-in beef shin at The Butchery‘s stall and my mind turned to slow cooking. £9 later and I had procured enough beef to make an enormous amount of stew, and so headed home. Beef shin is a cheap cut of meat that comes from the front leg of the cow. It is incredibly tough and incompatible with many cooking methods, but is subject to a wonderful transformation when slow cooked: the fat and sinew marbled through the meat breaks down to give a soft, almost gelatinous texture to the beef. When slow cooked with the bones, the all-important bone marrow also melts to give a strong, meaty flavour to the gravy.
This particular dish is a bit of a hybrid: the cooking method indicates a stew, but the ingredients are chilli all the way. The beef shin is marinated in a dry rub of herbs and spices, before being browned and cooked along with some soaked black beans, in a mixture of tomatoes and chipotle paste. The chipotle, especially, gives it a spicy, smokiness found in so many modern southern American and Mexican dishes. Chipotle is one of my favourite flavours; I use it in glazes for chicken wings, my marinade for pulled pork, and recently tried some chipotle-pumpkin bread made by Lauren Garland for Band of Bakers that completely blew my mind. In this stew, the chipotle lends itself well to the richness of the beef and gives it that all-important and much-needed kick.
If you’re going to cook this in a slow-cooker, you will need a good seven or eight hours for it to be perfect. I haven’t tried cooking the recipe on the hob, but you could probably do it in a shorter time if you are good at converting these things (I’m not), or in the oven if you’re really brave. You will notice that there are also a few vegetables in this recipe – I hadn’t initially planned to add any, however found that I had a few parsnips and half a swede in the veg drawer. I added these about two and a half-hours before the end of the cooking time to stop them breaking down too much. Any other root vegetables would work just as well.
Beef Shin, Black Bean and Chipotle Stew
- 150g dried black beans
- 1.2kg bone-in beef shin
- Salt and pepper
- 2 tsp smoked paprika
- 2 tsp ground cumin
- 2 tsp dried oregano
- 2 tsp chilli powder
- Olive oil
- 1 large onion
- 4 cloves garlic, finely choppped
- 1 red chilli, finely chopped
- 400g tinned tomatoes
- 2 tbsp tomato puree
- 2 tbsp chipotle paste
- 1 beef stock cube
- 1 tbsp red wine vinegar
- Fresh coriander, chopped
The day before you start cooking this recipe, place the black beans in a bowl and cover with cold water. Cover the bowl with clingfilm and soak the beans for 24 hours.
To make the spice rub for the beef, combine the paprika, cumin, oregano and chilli powder, along with a generous pinch of salt and pepper. Rub the spices into the meat pieces and leave, uncovered, in the fridge for an hour.
Heat the olive oil in a large frying pan and brown the pieces of beef shin for a few minutes on each side. Turn the slow cooker on to a high setting and place the meat in the bottom. Leaving the oil in the saucepan, gently fry the onion until translucent, about five minutes, then add the garlic and chilli and fry for a further couple of minutes before adding the mixture to the slow cooker.
Add the drained black beans and tinned tomatoes to the slow cooker. Fill up the empty tomato tin with water and add to the mixture. Stir in the tomato puree and the chipotle paste and crumble in the stock cube and cook on a high setting for seven hours, stirring occasionally and adding more water if the sauce looks as though it is drying out. By the end of the cooking time, the meat should be falling from the bone and the bone marrow should have melted into the stew. Remove any remnants of meat from the bones and set the bones aside. Stir in the red wine vinegar and half of the coriander. Serve in bowls, using the last of the coriander as a garnish. Add sour cream or sliced avocado if you wish.
The Boozy Rouge 