I brewed a big pot of oxtail soup yesterday for my daughter’s birthday later this week. I followed the recipe in the Joy of Cooking. (An edition from the 80s, if the recipe has changed.) Mostly, it’s just soup. Brown meat, saute onions, add water, salt, pepper, and simmer about 4.5 hours. Yeah, that’s all easy.
The hard part is the throwaway line, after straining , it says “the meat can be chopped and added later”.
So i spent an hour or two last night picking meat off of oxtail chunks. My husband doesn’t like fat, and i don’t like slimy bits, so i don’t just pull the soft stuff off the bones. I start by doing that, and then i pick the bundles of meat fibers out of the mass of cartilage and fat, putting the meat into a pot, and the rest in a bowl with the bones. If i handle it too quickly after removing the chunk from the hot broth, i burn my fingers. If i wait till long, everything congeals and the muscle fibers don’t just slip out. A labor of love.
(Next step is to remove the fat, then chop up fresh vegetables to cook with the soup for serving. I leave out the wine, but add the barley.)
I made a lot. The broth and meat freezes well, the vegetables not so much. Maybe i should freeze some of it and finish the rest.
Anyone want a lot of beef fat? I also made short ribs last night (a recipe with a lot of wine in the broth) so I’ll have a lot of fat from the top of that pot, too. Maybe i should put it out for the birds instead of tossing it in the trash.
My sainted grandmother, late in life and having heard all about the virtues of ox tail soup growing up, visited Ireland and in a pub ordered a bowl of the stuff. The bartender reached into the shelf and grabbed a can of Campbell’s ox tail soup. Decades later, when I lived in China, I saw a can of it in a grocery store and grabbed it and tried it. I did not feel the need to do so a second time.
Spend an hour or two picking the meat off? Nahh, just serve with the joints intact. After four or five hours of stewing, the meat should be slipping off the bones, and half the fun of oxtail soup is picking up and gnawing out the remaining shreds from the joint crevices like a caveman.
Nope. Did i mention that my husband hates fat (huge globs of fat stick to the bones, even after hours of simmering) and i really don’t like to eat cartilage, unless it’s been fully dissolved?
The non-bone does slip off the bone easily enough, so long as it’s still warm when i separate them.
Lucky for you that you enjoy eating it that way, as that preparation is easy, and oxtail soup is delicious. (I’ve never tried Campbell’s, but mine is really delicious.)
That’s not nearly as good. The tail has a unique flavor, just like picanha tastes different from ribeye tastes different from sirloin, tastes different from filet. (Picanha has the best flavor, IMHO.) And it’s also rich in gelatin, making for a thick velvety soup.
Oxtail soup is one of those dishes I haven’t made yet but want to try. Sounds like a great thing to make during this absolutely frigid winter we’re having. Maybe next weekend…
My wife makes an absolutely delicious oxtail soup. The way she does it, the meat falls right off the bone. (I guess that’s always been the right way to make it.) Too bad she makes it very rarely.