How To Braise Beef

Hi, there. I'm Matt from the Underground Cookery School, and today I'm going to do a video cookery lesson for you. Hi, guys.

What I'm going to do today is show you how to make or do braised beef. The first thing we're going to do is put a little bit of heat in this pan. Now, over here, I've got carrots, onions, leek, and celery which I've just sliced up.

And I've got these big onions because I think they'll work particularly nicely with braised beef. And I just want to make sure that we get a really nice bit of heat in there before putting them in, because when you through the veg in, you just want to hear that crash. Like that! We're going to come back in about five minutes, when those veg are nice and soft.

So those veg are now nice and soft, so I'm just going to put them back in the pan that I originally took them out of. What I want to do now, is we will use those veg in a second, but I want to start cooking off the beef. So I've just got some stewing steak, which you can just buy from the supermarket.

Try and go to a local butcher though. I don't really like the… not the greatest cuts, always. Anyway, we're just going to get a bit of that flour in there.

And I'm going to throw some pancetta in. In that goes! Now, the pan's smoking away, so I'm going to add a little bit of olive oil and just give that a good old mix. But that pancetta is really going to flavor it, and that raw beef I just want to get colored all over before we actually start the stewing process.

So I'm just going to keep moving that beef until it's cooked. Now, the beef is nicely cooked all over, so I'm going to return the cooked veg back to the pan. I've also made a bouquet of herbs.

So we've got rosemary, flat-leaf parsley, thyme, and a bay leaf on there. So, in that goes, and I'm just going to throw a little bit of red wine in there. So what will happen is in the next two or three minutes, we'll just cook all of the alcohol out of that red wine.

And the flour in the beef, which we used before, will just thicken that red wine to create something of a, what we call a roux. I've got some tomato puree, and I'm going to add about a teaspoon of that. And I'm just going to keep mixing.

And in fact, in the very short period of time that we've been doing that, the red wine. the alcohol has burned out of the red wine, and it's really thickened out nicely. I'm going to just try and show you this. So the stickiness of the red wine and the flour is really going to create a lovely sauce.

We're just going to finish it off with a bit of stock. Now obviously, you can use stock cube. I've got a fresh stock here, and I'm going to add this, just to cover the ingredients.

I'll try and get some of it in the pan. There we go. And really, all you want to do is just cover the beef with the stock.

Just going to put a tiny drop more in there, but that should do it. Put the lid on, just crank that up. That's going to come up to the boil, and as soon as it comes up to the boil, we're going to stick it in the oven.

And you'll probably leave it to braise for about anything between an hour and a half to two hours. So as you can see from the steam, that's now come up to the boil, and all I'm going to do is stick that. I'm actually going to turn the lid upside down so that it fits in the oven, because the shelves are quite narrow.

I'm just going to throw that in. Now, the oven's on about one-fifty, but cooking times vary. Some ovens are quicker.

Bear in mind, this is fan assisted and it's an industrial range, but about one-forty to one-fifty is probably a good temperature to braise beef, or slow cook it. And if you think about it, you know, in the olden days, you know 1900's, people would go out farming and they'd leave their oven on. It would be about a hundred and thirty, an hour ago.

The bottom oven's about one-thirty. It just depends how long you want to cook it for. The longer you cook it for, the nicer it's going to