How To Cook Beef Cheeks

Today I'm going to show you a really useful recipe, right today were going to make some slow cooked beef cheeks and to do this we have got this lovely lobs of meat here the cheek which is going to turn off some of the sinew off here and the more and in my mind this is the best meat to slow cook because it has got this lovely marble of fat that runs through it, they are going to get cooked in about six hours in a low oven, to go in there we have got a couple of sprigs of fresh thyme were going to put a little bit of garlic in there, I've got two carrots peeled and roughly cut, two sticks of celery and one onion roughly cut, right so to start off what were going to do is just stream some of this excess sinew away here so we just slide our knife underneath and just like were filleting the skin off fish, were just going to shave that off just purely because this little bits have made the sinew bits won't cook out and they will remain tough, now that is a good two portions there so what were going to do is cut that in half like that so when they cook down I'd rather have one big a piece of meat than little smaller pieces, I've just put them into the pan to seal off and to get a nice roasty color on the meat and we season off with salt and pepper, right now what were going to do is add our vegetables so its going to brown those slightly off as well, they will help color our stuff out so we go with the carrots, the celery and some onion and I'm just going to drop a couple of cloves and peeled garlic as well and were just going to brown those vegetables off slightly, right we put two sprigs of thyme, fresh thyme in there and then were going to add a glass of red wine and enough brown beef stock to cover that, you could use a commercial beef stock or but when your using those commercial ones just watch out for the salt content in them and because this sauce that we have were going to reduce it down and remember your going to be reducing that salt as well so probably we wont need much more seasoning, right this has been cooking for about five minutes now just to get a little culminarization on our vegetables here, now were going to add our glass of red wine and were going to add an amount of beef stock just to cover the meat, must be completely covered because it will go dry on the top and its going to take all of that and what were going to do now is just wrap that very tightly with foil so we've got no loss of moisture and were going to cook that in the oven for about 6 hours at about 160 degrees Celsius, right here's our beef cheeks, since we've had that for six hours in the oven now and as you can see all the liquor has evaporated and the meat should be lovely and tender and soft so you can just sort of poke a finger through there and because we have really, really slow cooked it, it has not shrunk in size that much, you don't want the loss of moisture to suddenly our meat feels sort of nice and tight and what I'm going to do is just take this beef cheeks out of the liquor and all that lovely stock of the vegetables were going to pass that off the herbs and garlic, they've done their job they have infused that liquor and I'm just going to take an amount of that stock out, it's a very hot pan and were going to just reduce it down so you have got a nice glutinous syrup, right we have a lovely syrup now from our reduced liquor there and what I'm going to do is I'm just going to put a touch of we have got some arrow root here diluted with a little bit of water and it just thickens it up very slightly, if you use it much the same way as corn flour but unlike corn flour this is translucent and it just thickens our stock slightly so we don't have to take it down anymore and what were going to do is were going to take one of this beef cheeks, pop it back in there so said just to glaze it nicely, using some of this lovely liquor over there and then we have got our roasted garlic and firstly mash, there and that is how to cook beef cheek