I made a pasta sauce yesterday and had some spare, so I used it to make this delicious, rustic soup.
Feel free to add more pancetta, though I felt the small amount was great for imparting flavour to the dish without being dominant. This is, after all, a tomato soup (and one you'd expect to find in a typical, idyllic country setting).
Serve, if you like, with crusty bread rolls topped with melted cheese.
Remove the stalks from the tomatoes
Deseed and dice the peppers
Place the ingredients in a pressure cooker
Bring up to pressure, then simmer for 20 minutes
Remove the vines and tomato skins (beware of heat)
Pulse the cooked ingredients in a blender several times
Blitz for 20 seconds, to obtain a chunky sauce
Set 1/4 of the sauce aside. This is the soup base.
Use the other 3/4s as a pasta sauce (egg fusilli, chicken stuffed with mozzerella and tomato, wrapped in pancetta)
Place the soup ingredients in the pressure cooker, along with the base
Bring to pressure
Simmer for 30 minutes
Microwave the pancetta for 2 minutes, and leave to crisp up.
Remove the vines from the soup
Blitz for 1-2 minutes until smooth and thick
Pour into bowls
Season
Crumble the pancetta on top
Season at each stage. That way, the lamb gets seasoned, the base gets seasoned, the sauce gets seasoned, and you can get a better control of the seasoning than if you merely check at the end.
Lamb
Heat some groundnut oil in a large pan
Cut the escalopes as small as you can get them, no larger than 1 cubic millimetre (I didn't have any mince, so I made my own. Yes, it took a while.)
Brown the lamb 'mince' in the pan. Add the white wine, boil for a minute, then simmer gently for 10 minutes.
Soffrito
A proper soffrito has celery, and garlic. But, I didn't have any celery, and I wanted to roast the garlic (or, if I'm honest, I forgot the garlic, then remembered it and decided to roast it anyway).
Top and tail the carrots, deseed the pepper and peel and halve the onion.
Place them all in a blender and blend until a very fine dice, or course paste, is achieved.
Roast garlic
Remove the roots and peels from the garlic
Place in an ovenproof dish in the oil
Place in the oven at 200C for 30 minutes, or until the garlic is softened and starting to brown.
Caramelised Onion
Peel the onion, halve it and remove the root
Slice with the grain, as finely as possible
Place in a saucepan with the butter
Cook on a very low heat until the onion has caramelised (about 2-3 hours)
Tomato Sauce
Place the tomatoes in the blender and blitz at full power to get a smooth, liquidy sauce
Place in a wide pan with the oil
Put the pan on full heat and reduce by 2/3rds.
Final Product
Place the lamb, red wine, star anise, and soffrito in a pressure cooker.
Bring to full pressure and then let cool.
When the pressure has dropped, add the tomato sauce, bring back up to pressure, then simmer very gently for an hour.
Let cool again, until the pressure has dropped, then add the basil, onion and garlic.
Add up to half a pint of water to keep the sauce moist. Bring back up to pressure, simmer for an hour.
Cook the pasta to your liking (I suggest heavily salted water with olive oil added, bring to the boil, add the pasta, bring it above the surface of the water a few times to coat the pasta with the oil, then simmer until ad dente)
Drain the pasta
Spoon the pasta on serving plates
Top with a generous ladle of sauce
Shred the basil and scatter onto the centre of the sauce.
Season to taste.
Quantities may not be accurate as I am doing this from memory
As always, this risotto needs a good stock. I make my stocks fresh for every dish, allowing me to fit the flavour of the stock to the flavour of the dish, as well as ensuring freshness. For this recipe, my stock included saffron for a wonderful golden colour, as well as chantenay carrots for a complementary sweetness.
Heat the groundnut oil on medium heat in a deep sided pan
Peel the onion, remove the outer layer and root and cut into julienne
Lightly fry the onion until softened
Add the rice and toast for a minute
Add the wine, increase heat to full and reduce by 2/3rds
Add the chicken and sear as the wine evaporates.
Season with vanilla salt
Set heat at medium
Add the stock, a ladle at a time, stirring constantly
When 3/4s of the stock has been added, add the basmati rice
Add the rest of the stock, increase heat to full and boil, stirring intermittantly until the rice has absorbed the stock
Turn off the heat
Stir in the mascarpone and grated parmesan
Whisk in the butter to emulsify
Season to taste with the smoked salt
Finish with a few drops of black truffle infused porcini oil
This is probably the longest, and easiest part of the dish (unless you want to count leaving the brine or marinade in the fridge for a day).
The ingredients are split into 2 groups. One is for the beef stock based recipe, the other for the veal stock.
Regarding stocks, you should have about 1 part chicken stock to 3 parts veal stock. Since the chicken stock is (if done right) very flavoursome anyway, and since you don't want too much chicken flavour in the final dish, a wise option would be to use as much as is needed, rather than reduce the stock.
Initially I coined this a 4-day stew. However, after sampling the left overs the day after eating, it occurred to me that an extra day makes a huge difference to the dish.
The overnight resting period will develop the stew flavours. Furthermore, since cooked meat is more easily affected than raw meat by marinading, the process will result is meat that is tender through to the centre. (Raw meat marinading does not penetrate to the centre of the meat). Finally, any juices lost during cooking as the collagen melted will be soaked back up by the meat.
Method
Strain the marinade through a chinois. Pick out all the pieces of meat and divide them between 2 roasting trays.
Reduce the marinade by a quarter, cool, then share it between the two trays.
To one tray, add the beef stock and, to the other, add the combined veal and chicken stocks.
Add some cold water if the meat is not covered.
Add the vegetables
Place in the oven and set the temperature as low as possible (ideally 60C). If you're not sure of your oven temp, set it to the slow cook setting and leave the door ajar, with a doorstop to stop it swinging open
Cook the stews for 20 hours.
If you maintained a 60C temperature, the meat should be tender, the collagen should have melted out, and the colour of the meat should be like an excellent quality ham.
Now strain the stews. Pick out the meat and pour the sauces into large pans. Discard the vegetables. Reduce each sauce rapidly over high heat (this will give the proper consistency, without sacrificing flavour to thickening agents or a slow reduction process).
When the sauces have reduced by 3/4 - 4/5, taste them. They should be exceptionally, almost unbearably rich. The final ingredient in the dish will sort that out, and serve as an interesting demonstration as to how contrasting taste pairings make a dish work.
While the sauces are reducing, pick the oxtail meat from the bones. Trim off any excess fat (we have kept it on during cooking to flavour the stew).
Allow the sauces to cool to room temperature, then divide the meat between them. Cover and refrigerate overnight.
The next day, gently reheat the stews.
Add 1/2 tsp sherry vinegar to each stew to cut through the richness.
Season to taste with sea salt and serve with appropriate garnishes and accompaniments.
For ease of reference, I shall post the marinade ingredients here. They can also be found in the initial blog entry.
Ingredients
Zest of 1 orange blanched in sugar water
3 pink grapefruit segments
Handful cherries (about 10)
1 bottle red wine
½ bottle port
5 cloves
1 star anise
1 caramelised brown onion
3 sprigs rosemary
4 sprigs thyme
1/2 tsp saffron
3 garlic cloves
1 leek (white part)
5 carrots
1 vanilla pod
All vegetables should be, where appropriate, washed, trimmed and peeled. That means no garlic skins, no carrot tops, no onion roots.
The onion needs to be caramelised exceptionally slowly to ensure that all the starch molecules are converted to fructose and a full development of the flavour compounds is achieved. 4-5 hours is the requisite amount of time. A quick caramelisation will only achieve superficial, ergo practically worthless results.
The wine should ideally be full bodied with spicy notes and a subtle hint of fruit. The port should be well bodied, with a mild aftertaste and deep fruit notes.
It is not necessary to remove the pith from the peel. The bitterness can be eliminated by blanching in boiling water for 8 minutes, though 4-5 minutes in a litre of boiling water with 3 tbsp of caster sugar will also suffice. I opted for 4 minutes in sugar water.
Method
Pour the wine and port into a large pan and bring to the boil. Ignite to burn off the alcohol, bring back to the boil, then ignite again. If more flames appear, ignite again, and again, until there are no more flames.
Add the rest of the ingredients and simmer gently for 15 minutes to allow the flavours to develop. It should have an odour reminscent of mulled wine.
Cool the marinade in a bowl set in ice water
Add the shin and oxtail to the marinade, ensuring complete submersion
Cover with clingfilm and place in the fridge for 24 hours