You’ve got to love Twitter. This week I ordered a “selection box” of cheaper cuts of meat from James Whelan Butchers to practice what I learned from Paul Flynn at the Tannery Cookery School last week and by attending the Butchery Demonstration at Avoca, Monkstown. So I had ordered a ham hock to make terrine, bavette of beef for stir fries, pork cheeks to try replicate a dish of Paul’s that I love and a Jacobs Ladder – short beef ribs.
Now I’ve only used short beef ribs once before to make the stock for my Wagyu hotpot using a recipe from Audrea of Tastefully Yours but I was curious to see if there was another way of using the cut that would get even more value from this tasty meat. So I put out a Friday afternoon appeal on Twitter and several of my friends came back with suggestions – Aoife, Imen, Helena – all with interesting recipes.
One suggestion caught my eye. It was from Tom Walsh the Head Chef at the Samphire Restaurant at the Waterside, Donobate. I haven’t met Tom and I haven’t yet visited his restaurant but I love his philosophy – classical French cuisine with a modern twist, supporting businesses in the community and sourcing all ingredients locally including meat, vegetables and fish and preparing seasonal menus, making the most of what is available at different times of the year. Samphire, a wild shoreline, vegetable growing on the doorstep of the restaurant perched on the beautiful coastline of north Dublin, provided a name that resonates with the place and the approach he adopts. It’s also one of my favourite ingredients and sums up the search for the authentic and the local which influences my own amateur approach to cooking.
Anyway Tom’s suggestion for the Jacob’s Ladder went something like this:
“Get it into a nice marinade of hoisin with chilli added and some stock. Bed of veg. Nice bit of garlic.”
“Slowly cooked at 120 – 140, covered so it’s basted for a long period until tender.”
“After cooking, can be roasted up to give a lovely robust and meaty flavour, texture. Some fondant potatoes and red cabbage #goforit.”
So go for it I did and, in the process, I came across a recipe for DongPo Pork in Exploring China a Culinary Adventure and I tweaked the braising liquid in that recipe for my Jacobs Ladder.
According to legend, Su DongPo was an important official from Hangzhou who was sent pork by his grateful people. Hangzhou is a city on the Yangtze River Delta about 180 km southwest of Shanghai. It is located in an area of great natural beauty and has been one of the most prosperous cities of China for over a 1,000 years. Being a nice guy, DongPo instructed his cooks to prepare the pork, share it with his workers and serve it with rice wine. Somewhere along the way the message got garbled and the cooks added the wine to the dish. And so this classic dish was born, of which there are almost as many variations as there are Chinese cooks. My version below uses beef instead of pork and a higher concentration of hoisin sauce. It is delicious.
Twice-cooked Short Beef Ribs (Jacob’s Ladder), DongPo Style
Continue reading Short Beef Ribs with Red Cabbage and Fondant Potatoes