OK…. here we go….
Ingredients:
- Some sort of roasting beef.
- Red wine
- Balsamic Vinegar
- Onion
- Carrots
- Brown sugar
- Raisins
- Celery (optional)
I will use anything from a beef roast to a very thick 7-bone steak cut. Just make sure the meat is at least 1″ thick. If the meat has a bone in it, try to de-bone it prior to cooking. If there are little scraps of meat attached to the bone that you can carve off with a small knife, do so and add to the pot… can’t hurt!
First, get a good size pot that will hold the meat and the added stuff. You don’t want the pot to be too big, just the right size. The less liquid you can have in the pot while still covering the meat, the better.
To really do this right, you need to do a lot of prep work. I let the meat marinate in a mixture of wine and balsamic vinegar overnight, then added the crushed tomatoes (or chopped…doesn’t matter really… what you want is the acidity that is involved in the tomatoes…)
Once the marination is done, you need to pull the meat out of the marinade for a moment and sear it in a pan at high heat. You really want a heavy-weight pan for this, not an aluminum frying pan that you would fry eggs in. You want something that has a lot of weight to it because it will tend to hold the heat longer. You want to sear both sides of the meat, then return it to the marinade in the pot. if your roast is large, don’t be afraid to cut it up into more manageable pieces for the searing… it won’t matter, and makes portion control later much simpler.
Now to the mix you need to add the onions, carrots, and raisins. Also to this mess add some brown sugar. If you keep the onions and carrots on the bottom of the pot, it should be good. You can also add chopped celery if you like. Basically anything that is considered to be an “aromatic” in the cooking world.
Throw the pot in the oven, and cook at 225F for a minimum of four hours. The nice thing about this cooking temperature is that you can cook it up to that four hour point, then let it sit in the oven for the next couple of hours without it going bad or overcooking. This is really a stew thing in the first place, so no big deal.
When it is time to serve, pull it from the oven, take out some of the chunkies and liquid like I showed you and blend away. Don’t forget to take some slurried flour (2-3 table spoons should be enough… if you are making more gravy, start with 2-3 tablespoons, then add more if you need it thicker…)
Slurried flour: This is where you take flour, add it to cold water, and mix well. This is because you are soon going to be adding the mixture to something hot, and if you simply add the flour to the hot thing, it will clump… yuck! So add water to the flour, get a nice white sauce looking consistency, then add to the hot stuff… no problems with clumping.