“In the winter time …………
ingredients for 4 servings (cost about 5 € pp)
- Salt
- 500 g beef shoulder
- EV sunflower oil
- 4 pancetta slices
- 4 onions
- ½ litre brown vegetable stock
- 200 ml red wine
- 200 gr chanterelles
- 1 bay leaf
- 200 g polenta flour
- 30 g parmigiano reggiano cheese
- 30 g butter
………….. when all the leaves are brown”. Do you remember this great song by Steve Miller band? I love it, maybe because I love winter. Basically I love all seasons but summer, but winter has Christmas, snow, chestnuts, soups and many other things that I adore. And it also has ¨brown dishes¨ like today´s one.
Polenta and braised beef is a classic Italian combination. We add some chanterelles and a large portion of onions to prepare this original – as always – proposal.
The day before cooking, we take a whole piece of shoulder and we pre-salt it. The day after we wash, pat dry and cut the meat in pieces. We brown the meat along with the pancetta slices, taking care not to dry it.
We chop the onions and we add them in the meat pot with a bay leaf.
When the onion starts to change colour, we add the red wine and the stock, we check the salt and we let simmer for about one hour.
Meanwhile we clean the chanterelles, we remove their bottoms and we just brown them in a wok. We add them into the pot with the meat and we let them simmer with the other ingredients.
When we see that the meat is ready we remove it from the pot and we take care of the sauce composition. If it is thin we continue to reduce it. If it is thick, we add a little stock. We add the meat and we leave it to rest.
While the meat is resting, we prepare the polenta. We boil 1,5 litre of water, mineral or filtered of course. We slightly salt it and we start adding polenta while at the same time we stir with the whisk. We bring to full boil and we immediately lower the heat. We continue cooking the polenta till the liquid will be absorbed by the flour. Just before cooking end we add the butter and the cheese. We check the saltiness.
We add polenta to plates, we cover with meat, chanterelles and sauce and we serve.
