🎄Braised Beef Cheeks for the Ultimate German Christmas Dinner 🇩🇪🥩 So Tender You’ll Need a Spoon! 🍽️✨

Servus and welcome to Flo's German Christmas Kitchen. I'm Flo, this is my kitchen, and I show you how to cook the German way. Today, we're making a lovely Christmas dinner, braised beef cheeks. Now, look at this wonderful piece of beef. It's three cheeks of the cow. I've cleaned the meat already, and this is the leftover meat. I'm going to use that also later on. What else do we need? We have some veggies. That's a couple of onions, couple of carrots, celery. That looks a bit rotten, but it's fine. I just had it in the freezer for quite some time, and that's the way it looks after it, but taste is okay. A little bit of rosemary, bay leaf, pepper, tomato paste, salt, and as always, a good guzzle of German beer. Wunderbar. A good thing about this recipe is that you don't have to cut the veggies in little pieces, just coarse pieces. I don't even peel the carrots. It just doesn't matter because this is only for the flavor of the sauce, but I'll strain it later on, and yeah, the veggies are just for the taste. Some people even don't, some people even don't peel the onions, but now, I don't want to get too far with that. So this is already all the preparations you have to do. I'll set up the stove and see you in a minute. I take some olive oil and heat up the oven to 160 degree Celsius. First thing I do is I roast the pieces of cheek. So what I want is to have some good roast flavors on the pan, but of course, I don't want to burn the meat. That's why I'm not using too much heat. This is also at 160 degrees. I'll set these aside. They get in the pot later again. Next one, please. That's it for now. I'll set these guys aside. We'll see them later on. Now I add all the veggies plus the remains of the beef, and I'll raise the heat because I want these guys to get really, really brown also too. You have to leave some of these wonderful roast flavors on the pan that will get the sauce nice and dark later. I can smell the meat. I can smell the celery. And speaking of the celery, it doesn't matter if you use celery or celery root. I've had some leftover celery. Otherwise, I'd probably take celery root, but the taste is pretty much the same. So don't worry about that. See, this is what you want because that adds the roast flavors to the sauce later on. Interesting thing about that piece of the cow is that eating the cheek used to be pretty much of a poor man's meal, a poor man's piece. But nowadays it has become pretty fashionable and also had an effect on the price of the cheeks. They used to be pretty cheap. Prices went up, but it's worth it really. So I add the tomato paste. This is also supposed to roast a little bit to add extra flavor. And you can see it's pretty dark on the bottom of the pan, but nevermind. This will all loosen later on when I deglaze it, which is going to be now. You can use red wine. This is a Franconian wine. I put the meat back. And now I fill it up with water. Usually I would take beef stock for that, but as I'm using the remains of the meat, of cleaning the meat, I think this is gonna release enough flavor so that I can take water. What you do is that you just fill it up so that the meat is almost covered with water. I add the rosemary, bay leaf, pepper. This is around a teaspoon of pepper. As always, that's a bit too much, but I just love pepper. And half a tablespoon of salt. So that's already it. I cover that thing and put it in that weird oven of mine. This stays in the oven for around two and a half to three hours. Now, while the Rindsbacker, the beef cheeks are still in the oven, I'm gonna do the side dish, and this is going to be mashed potatoes. I've already cooked the potatoes. I didn't peel them. I don't have to peel them, which is a pretty, pretty lucky thing. For the mashed potatoes, I'm using my Spätzle press. Of course, if you want to know how to originally use the Spätzle press to make your own Spätzle, check out this video. And if you need a Spätzle press, check out my affiliate links in the video description. Get yourself a Spätzle press and I'll get a little commission. So I said I don't have to peel the potatoes. That's a good thing. I'll just squeeze them through the Spätzle press. And making mashed potato is a good way to get rid of small potatoes that nobody likes to peel or to work with anyway. As always, when working with potatoes, make sure you use quite a lot of salt because potatoes can absorb an absurd amount of salt. Also, some nutmeg and milk. Use hot milk because otherwise it's gonna cool down the potatoes, which is something you definitely don't want. Just mix it well. And if you feel it's too tough, just add a little more milk to get it nice and thick. And fluffy. Great, that's it. So let's see what we have. Ah, it smells delicious. So let's finish this. First thing I do is to take out that insanely tender beef. Now the next thing is to strain the sauce. You can see this is pretty, pretty thin, pretty watery still. But no worries, this is gonna change soon. As soon as I've strained it, of course we're gonna reduce it to about half the amount and then maybe thicken it a little. Let's see how it works out. After I've taken out the pieces, it's easier to just pour the rest. But if you do it immediately, then you will really just splash a lot, which you don't want. Now I'm gonna squeeze it, but only a little. Of course, I want to get just everything out of it. The sauce is the essence of what I've been doing for the last three hours here. And of course, I wanna get the most out of it. But I don't wanna squeeze it too hard because I'm gonna destroy my strainer. And yeah, don't wanna do that. So as you can see, this is a real lot of sauce. But of course, more important than quantity is quality. That's why I'm gonna reduce that to 50% or even less. And while this is cooking, I'll show you something how I'll thicken it later on. Because you can either do that with making a mixture of water and starch. But today I'm gonna show you something different, something that works with butter and wheat flour. So what you need for that is a scoop of butter and wheat flour. Now what you do is you knead the flour into the butter so that you get a dough of butter and wheat flour. And this is what's gonna refine and thicken your sauce later on. Just shape it in little balls, put it in the freezer and keep it. So if you have to refine or thicken a sauce, you just take one of these balls out of the freezer, add it to the sauce and there you go. I put this back to the refrigerator because this needs to reduce a lot more. This is going to take a couple of more minutes. So I might as well just have a good guzzle of beer. Now this really is a test for my patience because yeah, it looks good. It already tastes very well, but I still want to reduce it a little more. This has been boiling for about 15 to 20 minutes already, but the flavor is really, really delicious. So I might as well just start thickening it. So I get the first of these butter balls, just add it to the sauce and see what it's gonna look like. So I've put back the meat to the sauce and had it reheat and now look at the sauce with the butter and the flour mixture. The test become pretty glossy, pretty shiny and it tastes so delicious. Now let's get everything on a plate. What I do to arrange this on a plate is that I start with a bit of my wonderful, fluffy mashed potatoes, add a piece of the meat, put it on top and circle it with this wonderful sauce. So here we got it. Geschmorte Rinsbacke, braised beef cheeks, tender, juicy, lovely. And you might wonder why I'm having it with a spoon. Well, because I can. As you see, it's so soft that you can actually eat it with a spoon. Wow, the meat is so tender, the sauce is delicious, tasty, flavorful. Fluffy mashed potatoes, it's just great. And so great that I don't wanna stop eating. So I'll wrap this up. If you liked this video, hit the subscribe button, give me a thumbs up and tell your friends about my channel. I love this Rinsbacke. Cheers on Rinsbacke. Ah, wunderbar.