Veal osso buco with citrus zest tomatoes & cannellini beans
If you’ve spent any time perusing our blog, especially the recipe and the food pix pages, you might notice a distinct shortage of meat related content. Why is that, especially since I’m a card-carrying omnivore? A lot of it has to do with Rosaria’s predilection against consuming mammals: it’s just plain hard to purvey and prepare meat dishes for just one person, me. In fact, years ago, when I first moved in with Rosaria, I gave up eating meat altogether for several years. Ah, what a man will do for love. And over the past several years, after reading a fair amount about cattle production in this country, it leaves me with little appetite for beef.
Now, once in awhile, when I have a dinner party, I’ll have an appetizer of boned grilled lamb chops, or an entrée of boned and butterflied leg of lamb. And when my son is home I’ll make braised short ribs or grill a rib eye, but with just us 2gourmaniacs in the kitchen, meat sinks to a low priority and gets pushed to the back burner.
That being said, I decided that we needed some meat related pictures and content for our blog. Recently, while shopping at Arthur Ave in the Bronx, I stopped by Peter’s Meat Market, arguable one of the best butcher shops from which I’ve had the pleasure of purveying beef, rabbits, offal, goat, lamb and sausage. With a specific plan in mind, I purchased one (1!) veal shank, one (1!) veal chop, and 1 ½ pound of thinly sliced and pounded veal scaloppini (for dinner guests the following evening). While I waited for my order to be filled I noticed a guy behind the counter hand-cranking sausage meat into casings and I couldn’t resist buying 1 and ½ pound of their homemade sausage.
Back home, I used the veal shank and the veal chops for two different meals. In this post, I’ll tell you about the first: osso buco. Here’s what I did.
Ingredients
1 2-3” thick veal shank
4-6 large shitake mushrooms, sliced
1 medium white onion sliced
4 cloves garlic minced
1 lemon
1 orange
2 large ripe tomatoes coarsely chopped
½ cup cannellini beans (soaked and cooked)
or 1 can of cannellini beans
2 cups veal or chicken stock
½ cup dry white wine
½ cup white flour
1 T red pepper flakes
salt & pepper
2 sprig of fresh thyme
3 T canola oil
2 T unsalted butter
Preparation
Grate the lemon and orange zests into a small bowl and set aside. Add the red pepper flakes into the flour and coat the veal shank in the mixture and add salt & pepper. Heat the canola oil in a small sauté pan and cook both sides of the veal shank until golden brown.
In another pan, sauté the sliced onion in some olive oil; when translucent, add the shitakes and garlic and cook until the mushrooms released their moisture.
Remove the veal shank from the pan once it’s browned and de-glaze the pan with the white wine, reducing it to a syrup consistency. Add the veal stock (you can use chicken stock) and bring to a boil, then reduce the heat to a simmer and put in the tomatoes, citrus zests, and thyme sprigs, stirring together well. Make a sort of “nest” with the tomatoes mixture and place the veal shank in it. Adjust the heat so everything keeps simmering nicely, with a lid placed half way on the pan. (You can also use a piece of parchment paper instead and place the pan in a 375° oven). The whole thing cooks for about an hour or until the meat is just falling off the bone.
Transfer the veal shank and its sauce with tomatoes to a warming plate and hold in a warming oven. The veal stock should be reduced down to about one cup by now and the cannellini can be added to it at this point. (I used canned because I had some on hand and I was in a hurry, ordinarily I would have used dry cannellini beans, soaked them for several hours, and cooked them in a chicken stock until tender). Lastly, whisk in the butter, taste and season accordingly and serve immediately. The picture above shows how I plated my veal shank with cannellini beans and tomatoes.
RMA
