Well, it’s been a
while, since duck feet (see May 5th, 2014 post), I think, but I finally was able to
find another organ/body part to write about.
(I’m really running low on options for this category—sheep’s
head/eyeballs and “Rocky Mountain Oysters” might be among the few remaining
ones that I haven’t tried.) But, happily
my local Shop Rite came through again, in the organ section of their meat
aisle.
Oxtail is pretty
much popular everywhere—it’s eaten throughout Europe, South America, Asia, West
Africa, and clearly parts of the U.S. It used to refer to literal ox tails, or then
castrated males (steers), but now, it’s generally used to refer to the tails of
any cattle. And while some people render
it “ox tails,” the most common spelling seems to be as one word.
Alas, the oxtail
was not canned, dried, or precooked, so I had to do some real cooking for the
first time in probably a year or so.
Also, most of the recipes I saw online were for oxtail soups or stews,
and I’m not big on either of these food types.
Fortunately my parents’ old Fannie Farmer cookbook had a non-soup/stew
recipe, so I went with this. I’ll
include the basic recipe below. This cookbook
is quite historic, too—the first edition came out in 1896, and the one I used,
the 11th edition, was still 50 years old!
Braised Oxtail
Wash and drain oxtails.
Roll in
flour.
Melt
butter or other cooking fat in skillet/pan.
Put
oxtails in skillet/pan and brown them.
Add
enough water to fill most of skillet/pan.
Add
tomatoes, mushrooms, salt and pepper, and garlic.
Cover and
cook on low hear for 3-4 hours, until meat is tender.
Ms. Farmer
included soup stock, bay leaf, and onions in the slow-cooking phase, but since
I didn’t have/want these I didn’t. Also
I used grape tomatoes, as I had some left over, instead of the tomatoes. You can slow cook this in the oven, too, but
I was more comfortable using the stovetop.
Incidentally,
Fannie Farmer was a real person, an expert chef/writer, who lived from
1857-1915. Another cooking icon, Betty
Crocker, is a just a brand name, and wasn’t a real woman. Also, I understand that “Fannie” is British
slang for a private female body part, meaning that people probably snicker at
Ms. Farmer’s name in the U.K.
The oxtail’s
appearance was a little deceiving. From
the outside, it looked like it had a round bone in the center, with meat all
around it. But, as I soon discovered,
you can’t easily cut the meat off. The
tail, after all, is a vertebrae, and thus has a vertebrae’s standard shape,
complete with several projections right under the surface. The only way to remove the meat from the bone
(short of using a saw, I guess) is after cooking, and even then I had to use my
teeth at some points. In addition, the
oxtail was surprisingly expensive. I got
about a pound for around $7. I noticed
that the tripe and liver were much better values, being about $2-3 for much
bigger cuts.
The end result
was positive, though. There was a fair
amount of fat, but this seemed to add to the meat’s juiciness and flavor, like
marbled flesh. The oxtail was tender and
tasty. The mushrooms and tomatoes seemed
to complement the meat well. Really, my
only complaint was that the portion was kind of small—with the bone taking up
much of the package’s weight I probably got only a half pound of actual meat
(and some of this had to be gnawed off the bone, as I mentioned before). Others who tried it agreed with my opinion. Therefore, I would definitely recommend
oxtail’s taste and flavor, but given its high price (at least in South New Jersey ), as well as my aversion to cooking,
it’s probably not something I will eat regularly.
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