Osso Bucco

Rob and I went to Deadwood South Dakota in 2016 for our 7th anniversary. We had the best time ever. Both of us are fans of the Deadwood series that HBO produced and getting to walk the same streets (sort of) as those historic people was pretty amazing. Seeing the actual layout of the town gives the show a different perspective.

Rob treated me to a fancy dinner at a now closed restaurant that was in an old train turnaround building. He had a beautiful rib steak, his favorite, and I had elk shank osso bucco. It was an amazing dish, tender and flavorful, and I have wanted it again ever since.

While scrounging around in the freezer yesterday morning I found a package of beef shanks from one of our cows. Time to try my hand at making osso bucco!

I found a few recipes on Allrecipies and since I had everything on hand in the house to make it except a lemon for the zest, I decided to give it a try. Seems like a very straight forward dish to make.

Here’s the link to the recipe I used. Osso Bucco Style Beef Shank

I got all my ingredients gathered up and ready to go. I did double this recipe, since the package of shanks contained 4. Please excuse my orange sink. 60 years of iron rich hard water has left it that color and it does not scrub out.

I wanted to do one thing differently that was not in the recipe, and that was to add a bit of wine to deglaze the pan and add another layer of flavor. I chose a Reisling for the peach notes it would add to the mix.

I did dredge the shanks thru some flour, which was a tip I took from a different osso bucco recipe.

Onions and garlic went in first, and I used bacon fat instead of the called for olive oil.

Then I browned the shanks

Deglazing the pan

And then everything into the pot for a 2-hour braising.

I decided to pair this dish with polenta. While I was looking thru the recipes, I saw several mentions of making polenta in a rice cooker, and how great it came out. I felt that would be a bit of a time saver, since I also had to go out and do evening chores while I was in the middle of cooking.

Yeah, I won’t be doing polenta in the rice cooker again. It did what it said, it cooked the polenta, and left it a lumpy mess that no amount of stirring, mashing, or beating it into submission would take out. Seriously, I whooped the crap out of that and still had big goopy lumps. So not appealing. I did eat it, but ugh.

The flavor of the meat and the sauce was wonderful, I did give it a secret glug of wine in the last 15 mins of cooking. My biggest bitch about it, besides the polenta bitch, is that the meat did not get as tender as I anticipated. It did fall off the bone when it came out of the pan that I took as a good sign, but it just was not very tender. Plus, being a shank, there is a lot of connective tissue that comes with that cut of meat.

I think maybe with a different cut of meat this would be a wonderful dinner, that I would absolutely make again. Oh, and no more rice cooker polenta, I’ll do the real stuff in the pan on the stove.

Tally update: He is doing great, healing very well, the swelling has gone down and he has scabbed over nicely. I did let him out of the barn with the rest of the flock yesterday. He did quite well given he has never really been around most of those sheep. I decided to leave him out overnight, but Miss Putt Putt, who is in the throws of being in heat, was not being so very gentle with him and I was afraid he would tear his scabs open. Given that Tally is really a giant puppy dog, I called him and he followed me back into the barn for the night. I’ll let him out again this morning and see how it goes with him and the flock.

Blessed Be!