Oxtail Stew

But how does it taste? Offal! Ha, but seriously, do eat some cow tail.

Oxtail here, looking gross.

Oxtail is a lovely, cheap, sinewy cut. Granted there's not much meat on it, but it makes the best winter warmer you can get. I thought you, dear readers, might think it was getting too close to Spring for a proper winter warmer, but then it went and cocking snowed again today, so that shows what you know. Anyway, I got a whole tail from the butcher the other day, so that's what I've cooked up.

Even though the meat you get off of it is relatively small, the collagen from the sinews and the marrow from the bones make the whole stew meaty and unctious. Unctious is a funny word. Unctious. Unctiousunctiousunctious. Weird.

As with any stew, feel free to change it and add whatever root veg you've got to hand. I purposefully made this one extra simple for two reasons. 1) As I was making a big batch I thought that I could add different flavourings to different portions after it was cooked to change it up a bit, and 2) there wasn't enough space in my pan for anything else.

Serves 8 - 10 (it's probably best to freeze half if you make this much)

You will need:

1 whole oxtail, chopped
500ml cheap red wine (actually, the better the wine the better your stew will be, but I just can't face cooking with wine I want to drink. It doesn't feel right)
750ml beef stock
150g pearl barley
Seasoned flour
1 tsp thyme
4 large onions

Coat the oxtail pieces in seasoned flour, and brown, in batches, in your pan.

Remove any bits from the bottom of the pan with a little wine, then add the rest of the ingredients and bring up to simmer.

Put the lid on, and keep on a very low simmer for 3 - 4 hours. I'm lucky enough to have a pressure cooker (which I would highly recommend to anyone who makes a lot of stews and soups), and in that it only took 1 1/2 hours. Leave to cool in the pan, and ideally serve it the next day. All stews taste better the next day, but this is particularly good.

It looks like the stereotype of grey English food, but this shit is the bomb, I swear.

This is great with mashed potato, and if you have some potato left over you could make a little oxtail shepherds pie which would look beautiful and you'd be able to show it off on your blog if you had remembered to take a picture of it.

That's it. I told you this was a basic version. If you want to, I would recommend adding carrots at the start of cooking, or frying up some smoked bacon and mushrooms separately and stirring that in at the end. Try some before the weather gets any warmer.