The cheap parts of beef have no limit! Today, we prepare them with a classic Italian sauce
ingredients for 4 servings (cost about 6 € pp)
- Salt
- 800 g beef shoulder
- EV olive oil
- 100 ml white wine
- 2 garlic cloves
- 1 peperoncino
- 8 black olives
- 16 caper flowers
- 500 ml vegetable stock
- a can of tomatoes
- Fresh parsley
- 400 g potatoes
- EV sunflower oil
– Hey cook, you know you have not yet presented a dish with the famous puttanesca sauce. I wonder, why?
– You have right, I love this pasta, it is one of my best. I promise you, I am gonna make a puttanesca next days, I can´t overpass this great Neapolitan dish. But, today I will prepare a meat dish with the almost same sauce. Are you satisfied?
– Yes !!!!!!!
– So, what do we do when we have to cook a tough piece of meat as the beef shoulder is?
– We presalt it from the day before to tenderize it.
– Excellent. For today´s dish we also put the capers and the olives in (abundant) water and we keep them in fridge for all night long to remove the intensive saltiness and acidity.
The next day we wash and pat dry the meat, we cut it in 4 pieces and we then brown it in a Dutch Oven. We also peel and cut the garlic in small pieces and starting from a cold pan we gently fry it till golden.
We add in the DO the garlic, the pepperoncino and the wine and 1 minute later the stock, we reduce the temperature to minimum (I remind you that when we prepare meat dishes like this we use the smallest of all burners), and we cook the meat till very very tender (more than 3-4 hours).
When the meat starts to get tender, we add the tomato, the olives and the capers and we cook for 30 more minutes.
Meanwhile we prepare the potatoes. We peel them, we cut them in pieces and we add them in a pot with boiling salted water.
– I thought that we always start potatoes from cold water. Am I wrong?
– Not always. When we want to fry the potatoes in a later stage, we use boiling water to provoke an instant gelification of the potato starches, which will helps us to prepare less oily fried potatoes. I am gonna explain it to you. When the potatoes come in touch with the boiling water, the starches from their surface produce a membrane which limits the oil coming in the potato flesh. This way the potatoes come very very crispy and dry.
We turn the heat off and we remove the DO from the stove. We also check the salt, adding some if required. We let it rest.
During meat´s resting time we finish the potatoes. We preheat the EV sunflower oil at 190 Celsius degrees and we fry them in two batches. We salt them right after we take them out of the pan, so the salt will be melted by the vapor.
We serve meat and potatoes, adding very finely chopped parsley.
