#oxtail

Today's pie!

...This is what happened to the Jamaican oxtail recipe I was experimenting with the other day. I had some of the original stew with pasta, and then I thought "Hmm, there's a whole lot of gravy here, what if I reduced it...", and after I'd done that and refrigerated it, it jelled almost immediately. Meaning there was a whole lot of natural gelatin in it.

Which more or less immediately provoked the concept, "This desperately wants to be a cold pie!" So to add some flavor (and a bit more heat) I simmered some parsnip slices in clarified butter with smoked paprika and cayenne, and added them to the meat. (Those who note a lack of onions and other alliums: that's me, not the recipe: alliums [except for chives], to my intense grief, infallibly set off my IBS.) And then I let that whole business and the gravy sit overnight in the fridge; and the next morning, made a butter-based "short" pie crust, broke up the cold-and-very-gelled-again meat, put it in the crust, and baked that for an hour.

Then I left the pie out in the boot room (which is cool but not cold cold) overnight, and finally had a slice of it for lunch today. As you can see. 😄

It was terrific. Oxtail works really well for this kind of treatment. (And it also paired really nicely with the kinda-burnt-sugar flavor that the Jamaican recipe provides: the slight sweetness works well with the dark rich quality of the oxtail.)

...The werewolves are gonna love this. 😀

(Just for those who might be curious: these "casual" / "using up the leftovers" recipes will appear in The Chalet Chef and the Snow Pack: I'm not going to publish them online.)