Tender Oso Bucco Recipe from Jacques Pépin | KQED

Today we're going to do a great meal for you. Great food for special friends. A bit more expensive than usual maybe. We're doing a beautiful veal dish. Very moist, very savoury, very lean actually. Italian type of dish, an osso buco. I love Italian food. My wife and I are crazy about pasta and stuff and we do that at the house almost 2, 3, 4 times a week. We're going to start that menu with the first course which is a red onion and orange salad with tomato. And what I have here, I have those tiny... And often throughout the year I tend to choose those plum tomatoes because they are relatively good in supermarkets. Cut them in half like this, expose the seed. I'm going to press the seed out of it. And that of course you keep for stock. Remember at home I take a quart of milk, one of those quarts of milk when it's empty, and I wash it out and put it in the freezer, keep it. And when I have a lot of leftover things like the skin or juice of an orange, the stem of parsley, pieces of garlic, any of that stuff I put it in there. Next time I do a stock, just grab the frozen carton of milk there, cut right through with the knife and drop it in the stock pot. That's good economical cooking. So what we have here is about 12 ounces, close to a pound of tomato. I'm putting this in there and with that we are putting that beautiful red, usually they're a bit smaller than that, torpedo onion so-called. You can see torpedo, why the shape of it. And we want to cut some of that, about five, six ounces of onion in there. And as I say, I would conventionally leave it all if the onion is a bit smaller than that. So here we have that onion that we put with it. Classic accompaniment, red onion and tomato. I can't feel them, but it's okay. And parsley. Now the parsley that I'm putting in, flat leaf parsley as you can see here, is not only for decoration, it is also for taste. Now this is very high in vitamin C also. Usually vegetables which are very dark green or deep yellow are high in vitamin A, you know, and that's very good here. So you see basically that's what you do. You could use a curly parsley, but this one I think is more flavorful this way. So with this, we're going to do a dressing here. And the dressing is very simple. I'm using a bit of, remember I haven't put any salt here, freshly ground pepper, a lot of pepper actually. A bit of white wine vinegar, and I have about two tablespoons, you know, at the most of white wine vinegar. And about three, four tablespoons, maybe at the most of olive oil in there. And I put a little bit of Lea and Perrins sauce here, which is the Worcestershire sauce, about half a teaspoon of salt. That gives me quite an intensity of taste. And basically that's what we want to do, to season our salad here. I will have more acidity in that salad, but the first thing I want to toss this in, season it because it can get slightly wilted, especially for the onion, you know, it will have a better taste. Here we are, look how beautiful it is. And with this, we are putting orange, preferably seedless orange. And what you want to do here is to cut the cap of the orange using a sharp, thin knife, and cut that, as you see, in one stroke, removing not only the top part of the skin, but the white, cottony part underneath that we call the pith, you know, P-I-T-H. Okay, here what we have here, you want to cut that into slice. You could also toss that into your salad, but frankly, it's a bit better to put it around because it tends to break down. And we put this all around, for the color absolutely gorgeous, as you can see, very fresh looking, fresh taste, you know. And this would be, for me, a great start for the type of meal that we are going to do, just for the taste, more than the color. But the taste is very important. So what we do with this, I'm going to serve that. You can serve it, of course, bring it, serve it by itself, or then serve a little portion. You know, what you would want to do is to serve a slice of the orange, probably underneath, or maybe even two slices of the orange, and serve your salad right on top of it with a nice, crunchy, country type of bread, you know. And with that first course now, let's move to the second course, that is the main course, which is the osso buco. And the osso buco, as the name implies, osso means bone in Italian, and buco means hole or mouth sometimes. So this is the shank of the veal, and as you can see, you cut with your knife here, all around that central bone, and after that, you have to use a saw. But frankly, you know, you ask the butcher, the butcher do it with the electric saw, and cut it into those pieces. There is no fat around, this is very gelatinous, and very good for stewing, the best in my opinion. You have the bone still in the center, a piece of meat like that, is approximately 10 ounces, but remember that you will have at least half of it meat, half of it bone, you know, and that's perfectly fine. So what we have now, you want to put them flat, I have put those here and there, and brown them a good 10-12 minutes on each side. Look how beautiful those are browning now, they have been browning for a while. You can notice, for example, that this one has much more bone to a certain extent than meat, but on the other hand, this one, probably more meat than bone, so you have to divide it, it's going to be a bit different. Give this one to the one who doesn't have a good appetite, give the big one to me, I will eat the whole thing, you know. So we have this in there now, and what we want to do is to put the different vegetables here with that. As you can see, I have leek here, those are tiny, small leek, but it's fine, I have one medium leek or two small ones like this, and notice that I'm using basically all of the green from the leek. You know, there is nothing wasted, I don't like to cut all the green off from the leek, most of it is edible, and it gives you the proper color. With that I have an onion here, which again is going to be cut coarsely, you don't have to worry too much, quarter of an inch, those things are going to cook a long time, so the type of stew, you know, very, very kind of flavory. You remember that the raw meat here, as I say, would give you about three ounces of cooked meat. So the amount of cholesterol and fat that you have in that dish is relatively minimal. So I have all of those vegetables here, I have carrot, carrot will give me some sweetness, some crunchiness, and also a beautiful color, so again, the carrot is going to be cut into little dice, just like the onion and the rest of it. Here we are, I have plenty of vegetables in there. I have in addition to that celery here, and herbes de Provence, I mean, if you can look at that very close, you will notice that there is small purple flowers, and those are lavender flowers that we have in the herbes de Provence sometimes. Now here I have garlic, and I'm slicing the garlic very finely, you can chop the garlic also, it's going to be a bit less pungent if you do it this way, and the celery. So all of those vegetables are going to go with the meat here, to give you a beautiful color. After the meat has been browned nicely on both sides, as you know, I just turned the other one so it should really brown a little more on the bottom, but that tells you how to do it, you know, the herbes de Provence here, and finally we want to put our liquid, and what I have here is a little bit of water, you will put there about half a cup, maybe two thirds of a cup of water at the most, and approximately the same amount of wine, you know, a dry white wine that we have, a dry fruity type of wine, it can go from a Cabernet to a Sauvignon Blanc, any of those will be perfectly fine. And that basically all, I put a dash of salt on top of this here of course, I put some at the beginning, and this is basically what you want to do to start. Then you cover it, that has to cook for an hour and a half. And as you can see, this one has been cooking for an hour and a half, so the second seasoning I can see is pretty tender now. The second set of vegetables that I'm putting in there, we are putting some orange and lemon rind that I have here, as well as tomato, you know. So what I'm going to do, you can use one of those, you can use one of those, which is a zester if you want to do those long strips here of zest that you can put in it, it's perfectly fine. Or you can use one of those grater to actually grate it directly on top of it. Watch for your knuckle because it can hurt you, make you bleed. So you want to be careful, grate it this way, same thing with the lemon. And those citrus fruit, orange and lemon are going to add a very vibrant, very fresh flavor to it, you know, at the end. So you go all around, a little more maybe than what I have here, bang it this way. For the one that you have between the teeth here, just bang it this way. You can use a little brush also, it will get rid of that. This will go directly, again, in our osso buco. I can actually put it directly with the tomato because the tomato are going to go in there now. So you would want to put that more at the end, as I'm putting here. And this now has to come back to a boil and cook for another five minutes or so while to develop a little bit of flavor. So I can again cover this which would be the proper way. This one actually, you've seen it, we don't need it, it's here. So now, while this is coming back to a boil, I want to show you how to do the rice, the classic rice, which we are going to do with it. It's done very simply with usually, Italians are going to do it with an Arborio rice, which is a round rice from Piedmont, the north part of Italy, which is the classic rice to make a risotto, you know, and it's very good actually. So in there, we'll use something similar, a dash of butter, a little bit of oil, and what I have here, actually, is a small rice also, about the same size, that's a brown American rice, short grain, very round, you see slightly greenish thing, this is a bit more, it has a lot of roughage in this, a lot of crunch because it is a brown rice. What I have in there is the onion, so I'll start to sauté a little bit of chopped onion, and with this, the brown rice, I have some thyme leaves that I'm going to put in it too, I can actually put them directly on top of my rice, and a bit of saffron. Now the saffron, as you can see here, I have one ounce of saffron here, one ounce is a lot, and an ounce of saffron can go from wholesale approximately $30 one of those, to up to $60 one of those. So you have to know the price of those things, but what we use here is like a teaspoon, maybe a teaspoon and a half too, and those are actually the stigma of the pistil of flowers, of crocuses, and you need 40,000 crocuses to do a pound of saffron, and this is one of the reasons it's expensive. So I have here all my stuff, which I want to mix in there, I have the rice, the onion rather, so now I put my rice, saffron, thyme and so forth, I'm going to put a little bit of salt in there, and chicken stock. Now the chicken stock is twice, two, two and a half times sometimes the amount of your rice, it depends on the type of rice, the brown rice will tend to take a little more liquid than the white rice, you know. So now what you do, you stir it occasionally, and until it comes to a boil, then you cover it. While this is coming back to a boil, what we are going to do is to finish our osso buco, and I have the osso buco here, which now is boiling nicely as you can see, and what I want to do is to thicken it just lightly, and actually I have a little bit of potato starch here, and the potato starch that I have here, I can put like a teaspoon, some people may not even want to thicken it, what I do actually is to put a little bit of water, or white wine, actually we have white wine in here, why not put a dash of white wine in there too, and you thicken it, stir it, the starch has to be diluted with liquid, otherwise the protein will coagulate as you put it in something hot, and you'll end up having, you'll end up having nice little dumplings all over the place which you don't want. So you can see that theoretically you take that off the heat, I'm going to shut my heat a little bit, because as this touches the liquid it will thicken on contact, so you pour a little bit, you thicken, and you look whether you like it or not, put a dash more, stir it, and do so forth. So this is the way of thickening, and I think that I have enough thickening like that, you bring it back to a boil, and that's basically it, you always want to taste for seasoning, I think it's delicious, so what we are going to do, now this is close to coming back to a boil, I have one here that I want to show to you which has been already cooked, it has that beautiful yellow color that the saffron is going to give to this, and into this I want to mix a little bit of parmesan cheese, at the end about three, I have two, three tablespoons here, which we want to stir, directly into this, and we are basically ready to serve our ossobuco now. So what I have here, I have that beautiful platter, you want to put your rice, and when you serve a rice as a garnish, oops, I messed up the kitchen, my wife doesn't let me in the kitchen anymore, so what you want to do is to pour all of it in the middle, don't worry, because the center is going to be covered, and from the center you start extending it on the outside, this way to create a kind of column if you want, a kind of rim all around, and with this now, I'm going to move it a little bit this way, I can serve directly my ossobuco here, which as you can see is totally beautiful, maybe I'll show that side, the bone is smaller here, and another piece, here I have four pieces of ossobuco, I may put only three on top of it, because it may be a bit, my tray may be a bit too small for that, the next one you can serve it directly on your plate, serve the sauce all around, the extra sauce, serve it on the side, the rice is going to absorb it, and if you want to be a bit fancier, put a little bit of basil on top, just break it and put it directly on top of it, and this is our beautiful ossobuco for today. What better finish for our great meal for special friends than a trifle, that British concoction of pancake and clotted cream and berries, however we're going to do it with a twist here, instead of the clotted cream, we're going to use yogurt, because it doesn't really have the same taste, but the way we're going to do it, we're going to do a yogurt cheese. I have a 16 ounce pound of yogurt here, and what you want to do is to put it into that fine strainer, if the strainer is very double mesh, fine like that, you can put it directly in there, but I would probably advise to put a paper towel, or a coffee filter, and you leave it overnight in your refrigerator, and you should get half of it whey, half of it cottage cheese, you know, fairly thick. Remember that a cup of non-fat yogurt is about 120 calories, a cup of sour cream is 490 calories, a cup of heavy cream is 830, and a cup of mayonnaise or butter, about 1600 calories, so big difference. So here, as you can see, I have a cup of whey, actually that whey you can also eat it if you want, or drink it, I like it myself, and what I do here is just to empty this in there, you can press the filter, I put this one into a filter, you can see that the thickness of it approximates about the clotted cream or cream cheese, you know, if you want, not quite cream cheese, but maybe between cream cheese and sour cream. So what we are going to do here, very simply, is laying down different trifle. Now we put some pound cake, but the pound cake that we are going to do, cut a thin slice here of pound cake, like quarter of an inch thin, and with a cookie cutter, we can do a little shape like this, we'll use everything, the trimming as well as the, we use actually one ounce of pound cake per person, so it's not much. In that particular one, what you do here, put a piece of plastic wrap in there, put your piece of pound cake in the bottom, I have an espresso coffee here, very rich that I'm going to put a little bit on top, just to mark that type of thing, then you put a little bit of your sour cream in there, or your yogurt, then the berry, you know, eight-ton berry, then that is when you use your trimming, put the trimming on top of it, you can embed them, push them a little bit in there, a little more coffee, again, to really soak the thing with it, and what else do we have? Yes, a bit more yogurt, more berry, and you finally finish up, you know, with a piece of pound cake, one of the round ones like this, and again, finish also with your coffee right on top, which works perfectly fine here. You bring that back on top of it here, I could put it in the refrigerator to keep it cold, if you want to keep it warm, you can do the same thing, you know, in a thing like that, I don't have to do the whole thing for you, but you realize what you're doing there by putting a little bit of this, a bit of your yogurt, this is layering it in a beautiful glass like that, it's very nice, and you keep doing it, a bit more pound cake, a bit more thing to layer it to do a nice finish there. What we want to do with that is a sauce, and the sauce is very simple, I have apricot preserve here, the apricot preserve, I put some orange juice in it, you know, to dilute it a little bit, and some diced nectarine, you know, to give it a bit of color, and if you want, a bit of richness, a little dash of cognac in there. Cognac is always good, I love cognac, if you don't want to put any alcohol in it, which is perfectly fine, it'd be fine, or another alcohol of your choice. In any case, our sauce is finished now, you can serve your sauce, of course in a beautiful bowl like this, as I have here, directly at the table, or serve it on your dessert. What I have here, I have a couple of ones which are done, which have been in the refrigerator for a while, which I wanted to show you, so what you have here, you can actually unmold this one, see you can even unmold the one that I just did, because you can lift it up, it's in case there is no problem, so you can turn this upside down this way, lift it up gently, you can see the apricot, you can see the coffee here on top, we want probably put a little bit of the sauce all around, which looks absolutely beautiful, this one has been done in the same glass that I have here, and again, you may want to serve that at the table, or put a little bit of the sauce on top, and if you feel even a bit richer, serve it with a few more berries on the side here and there, for color, as well as here, and this is a beautiful trifle our dessert today. Now when you cook for a special friend, you want to take your time, you don't cook like that every day, but occasionally, taking your time in the kitchen to cook for a friend, it is great. This is what I have done today, cooking a very Mediterranean type of meal, with a chewy type of rice, we have still a lot of colorful dishes in our menu, a lot of taste for sure, starting with that beautiful salad of orange, and red onion, torpedo, and so forth, and then going to our osso buco, with the chewy rice around, and finally, you know, you finish with, you can have a salad in between, usually we always have a salad, and bread of course, we cannot eat without bread, and Italians eat as much bread practically as the French do, and finally our dessert, which is more British, but in that sense, very elegant, and I think very satisfying. With this of course, don't skip on the wine, you want to have a very good wine, and today I have a Barolo, and the Barolo from Piedmont, the north part of Italy, done some of the greatest wines of Italy, and from the Nebolo, the Nebolo grape, this is a very pungent, very high in berry, very fulfilling wine, and I'm sure your friends are really going to love them, to love it, maybe you tell them to bring the wine, and you do the food. I hope you enjoy my cooking today, I enjoy making it for you, happy cooking!