Bison Osso Buco with Polenta, Accomplished!

Oh my God, marrow is so good. Butter should be replaced by it. We should eat it on toast.

You’ll find it inside the cylindrical bone in an osso buco cut of meat. It’s a pretty small bone, and doesn’t really rationalize the slaughtering of as many bison as it would take to make a breakfast spread…but practicalities aside, this is a very good idea.

Anyway, huge step forward! Osso Buco feels like a stepping stone on a path of ‘great meals’ (French, Italian) that everyone who loves to cook should learn to make in the course of their lifetime. Thanks to everyone who commented on my Osso Buco recipe request. Here’s what happened:

I ended up using a recipe from Bonnie Stern’s HeartSmart: The Best of HeartSmart Cooking and replaced the 2 cups of white wine in the recipe with red to go better with the bison shanks I planned to use. I won’t eat the more traditional veal shanks. I debated mixing in some of the nicer aspects of Josée di Stasio’s recipe (fennel and fennel seeds instead of carrots, onions and garlic), but that recipe called for a lot of orange juice and no wine at all. Not very French or Italian, ironically. I wanted to keep it as traditional as possible and figured I should stick completely with one recipe on my first try at Osso Buco. That way if the result was bad and I’d done everything correctly, it couldn’t possibly be my fault. As a friend once said, “The recipe can’t see you…” but my taste buds and over-active imagination would find a way to lay on the guilt if the bison didn’t turn out as I’d hoped.

I also wanted to use this recipe because it called for a long, slow cooking process, like one my commenters had suggested. I felt okay about switching the white wine for red since this commenter had informed me that an Italian cookbook had a recipe that used red. Of course, the choice of which red to use is very important, but at least just by using a bottle of red I wouldn’t be damning myself to the Roman culinary underworld.

The recipe is actually very easy. It’s the ingredients and the execution that separates the (insert gender-neutral group of young people here) from the (insert relatively older gender-neutral group here. See? Very Canadian of me).

First the bison shanks get dredged in a combination of flour, salt and pepper, and browned in a few teaspoons of oil. I only had two bison shanks so everything got halved. 1/8 c. of flour, 1/8 tsp. salt, a few grinds of the pepper mill. Unlike my Coq Au Vin, I washed the shanks and PATTED THEM DRY before coating them in flour. Hurray for learning from mistakes. This is the one slip in the recipe, though. Ms. Stern says to brown the shanks in vegetable oil. We’re talking Northern Italy here…the only traditional method would be to brown in butter. Normally I would say olive oil, but no, in Lombardy in the North it would be butter. Anyway, I used olive oil because I had no butter and I was just very careful to not burn the oil at the medium-high heat the recipe called for. If I’d kept the heat lower the bison wouldn’t have browned as well, and once it started releasing juices the olive oil had a much smaller chance of burning.

Then I chopped two shallots, 4 cloves of garlic (reserving 2 cloves for the gremolata), 2 stalks of celery and 2 carrots. I’m ashamed to say I chopped the carrots and celery on a diagonal like I had for the Asian-style stir-friy noodle dish. It just said “chopped” and I wanted to practice my diagonal chopping. In the picture in di Stasio’s book she clearly keeps the small carrots whole, just peeling them. I actually prefer this because it saves a lot of the natural flavour of the carrot which will cook just fine whether it’s chopped finer or not. Next time.

Anyway, these vegetables got thrown in the pot where the shanks had browned, and the heat was turned down to medium to sweat the vegetables for 10 minutes. Again, not a stir-fry. No browning. You have to constantly remind yourself when making this that Osso Buco is about elegance, not about just doing whatever. Authenticity is key if you actually want to be so bold as to call your result by the recipe name. Thus that image of the Italian grandmother stood over my shoulder, menacingly tapping a wooden spoon again the palm of her opposite hand.

Then my favourite part, pouring 2 cups of wine over the vegetables. I used a Black Tree Hill Bin 41 South African Red, and I worried it would be a bit too full-bodied, but it worked. Not fancy, affordable and not too heavy a wine.

Then I raised the heat and let half the wine evaporate before adding a can of plum tomatoes along with their juices. I was very excited to use this can of tomatoes. What a ridiculous sentence…

I got it at a pasta store that makes their own sauce and it sat right next to a can of San Marzano tomatoes, which are supposed to the perfect tomato sauce-making tomatoes because of their low acidity. Basically you don’t need to add sugar to your tomato sauce because the tomatoes are so good by themselves. So I bought both cans, the San Marzano and these and figured these would be very good too, but I’d save the others for their originally-intended use in a pasta tomato sauce. Well, the ones I used were too acidic, so now I’m thinking I should have used the San Marzano in this. It’s a kind of tomato sauce, and the acidity of the sauce was my only complaint about the results. Fortunately when I ate it with the wine, the sweetness of the wine was the perfect balance for the acidity of the sauce. Lucky wine selection saved the day.

I added a tablespoon of fresh lemon juice, a few pinches of dried rosemary and some more freshly ground pepper. Since I didn’t have a dutch oven (a pot that can move between the stove top and the oven), I had removed the bison shanks to a plate after browning and stuck a roasting pan in the preheating 325 degree Fahrenheit oven. This way the pan would still be hot like the Dutch oven would have been when you transfer it to the oven. Now I put the bison shanks on the preheated roasting pan and poured the tomato/wine/vegetable mixture over top. I covered the pan with two carefully sealed pieces of aluminum foil and got the whole thing into the oven as quickly as I could.

2 hours of intoxicating wine-braised meat smells later…

I took it out of the oven, checked the meat with a meat thermometre (Lamb and pork were supposed to be brought to 170, so I figured that would be a good temperature for the bison too. No bison tartar today…actually it worked out really well because the braising makes it so tender that the meat would really have a hard time getting tough, evenly if you cook it longer or at a higher temperature than necessary) and I let it sit to rest on the counter for 30 minutes. I’m not sure if the sitting is necessary but whenever I roast something I like to let it sit covered for 30 minutes afterward to let the juices in the meat spread out to tenderize the entire cut. Probably overkill. In these 30 minutes I made the polenta (4 cups of water brought to a boil, add a little salt and pepper and whisk in a cup of cornmeal. I thought I had the slow-cooking kind but when it was very done 5 minutes later I figured I had the quick kind…nothing burned! It was a miracle. I had to dilute the polenta a few times with maybe another cup of water, though. Then I stuck some asparagus topped with paper-thin slices of cucumber in the oven to roast with salt and pepper. The oven was already hot so I might as well take advantage.

Then the gremolata. The reserved finely chopped garlic cloves got added to a 1/4 c. of fresh parsley and a tablespoon of lemon peel. The colour was beautiful but the flavour got overwhelmed by the strength of the dish’s sauce.

The result? Amazingly tender meat. If the wine hadn’t saved the day by cutting the acidity of the dish, I wouldn’t be calling it such a success, so if you don’t drink wine, you may not have liked it as much. It kind of masked the natural flavours of the dish. The bison itself was a very, very fatty cut, which I didn’t like, but if I had reduced the sauce like the recipe said I could (it was optional), it may have sweetened itself and made me enjoy the meat more. I will try reducing the braising liquid when I eat the leftovers. I may also add a little tiny, tiny bit of sugar or reduced balsamic vinegar to sweeten the jus.

…and the marrow. That’s what makes this dish exceptional. Otherwise it’s just a very tender hunk of fatty meat. All well and good, but not worth generations of Italian tradition and obsession. If you eat meat, please try marrow.

Oh, the smell of the meat. It’s a day later now and my apartment still smells like wine-braised bison. Basically I start to think it’s a good idea to have a drink every time I open the front door. This is very dangerous. The Italian Grandmother is now standing over my shoulder offering me endless limoncello, which actually happened once (the endless limoncello at a restaurant, not the Grandmother)…Fortunately my apartment is very cold and the minute I get inside my warm room and close the door to the rest of the apartment, I can more easily forget about the intoxicating smell of the wine.

Fortunately?