Brasato al Barolo (Piemontese beef stew) with proper polenta

The great thing about a good stew recipe is that, even though it requires time, it’s not all hands on time. In this dish from Piemonte, the cooking is in three parts over two days but they’re all dead easy:

Firstly and most wonderfully, there’s no lengthy prep: the beef* is in a single piece, the veg are very roughly chunked (not chopped) and herbs and spices go in whole. The whole lot gets covered in Barolo red wine** (local to the Piemonte area) and marinated in the fridge overnight.

The second step is to cook the stew itself: browning the piece of meat all over, then adding the reserved veg, marinade and some beef stock and simmering slowly for two to four hours (depending on the size of the meat). At this point the stew can go back in the fridge until you want to eat it.

Lastly, just before eating, the meat gets sliced separately and the sauce bubbles away to reduce it down while you prepare any accompaniments (polenta or mashed potatoes are traditional).

All very doable, especially as the second stew-simmering stage can be supervised by a total culinary noob, or while you’re busy doing the housework.

I really like keeping the meat separate from the sauce at the end – you can judge the consistency of the sauce (dense or pourable, sieved or pureed etc) without worrying about what the meat is doing, people can serve themselves as much or as little as they want, it’s more elegant on the plate and best of all you’ll have lovely sauce leftovers to eat (see suggestions below). It is very rich – I now have conclusive proof that it’s possible to have a stew hangover. But it was so worth it for the sublime results: sorry, but I didn’t take a photo of the finished stew, basically because I am not enough of a dedicated food stylist to make brown food look nice. I also have zero staying power in front of food that smells this good. I didn’t want to photograph it, I wanted to snort it. The meat was forkably tender without being fatty, the sauce rich and I instantly regretted not having a pan big enough to double the recipe.

I normally have an instinctive horror of all-brown food – to Mr. R&R’s eternal disappointment, I’ll sprinkle chopped parsley over anything remotely muddy looking just for a bit of green. But this time I restrained myself (I’m not sure I would have been forgiven for greenifying this dish from his home town). So the only thing we ate alongside was proper polenta. It was a revelation, worlds away from the insipid blobby mass that instant polenta produces. Very recommended, even if you’re not a starch lover. No recipe needed here – all it needs is adding to water and stirring, but here are some tips for avoiding – orrore! – lumps:

• I used fine polenta, 220g for 1l water, which gave a medium density result – but check the proportions on the label.
• Salt the water as you would pasta – i.e. a fistful of coarse salt
• Bring the water nearly up to the boil (but not quite), and pour the polenta in a thin stream while stirring. Be patient otherwise you’ll get lumps
• Always stir in the same direction
• Cook over a gentle heat for at least 90 minutes – you can’t overcook polenta, and the more you cook it the more digestible it is. In fact, cooking instant polenta for a good half-an-hour will improve it no end.
• You need to stir often, and the more often the better – but not absolutely all the time. Cover with a lid when you need to get on with other bits of your life. If it catches on the bottom of the pan, it’ll be tasty.

* In Italy, the cut of meat to use is cappello di prete, which is a very specific area of the shoulder. Now, I have studied meat cut charts and tried to translate, but I’m just not enough of a butcher to work out the exact UK equivalent (if, indeed, it exists – the cuts in Italy differ from region to region, let alone from those commonly used in Britain). I used a 1.2kg piece of feather blade from the East London Steak Co. (properly aged beef, efficient online shopping and see their cute packaging below), which is a cut from the shoulder with a lovely vein of fat running through it.

** I know that all the modern meat books say that you shouldn’t marinate meat for long in wine, that it denatures it, or hardens it, or whatever. Well, I reckon generations of Piemontesi can’t be wrong – have you tasted their food? Seriously, it’s insanely good, and we’re not about fucking up a good tasting thing here at Rum & Reason. I sloshed in the Barolo for a good 18 hours or so, with the roughly chopped veg and herbs. So there.

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