For someone who did not grow up eating oxtail—I think I had it once before I left India and very rarely in my first decade in the US—I do love it now in curries. It’s a perfect cut of beef for slow-cooked curries in particular. The meat becomes wonderfully tender as the bones and gelatin give depth of texture and flavour as they meld with the spices in the curry. If you can’t find oxtail near you—we get ours directly from a south Minnesota farm, but it’s also available in Middle Eastern and Korean groceries in the Twin Cities—you can use short rib or even brisket or cut up chuck. If using a boneless cut suitable for slow-cooking, you should reduce the meat to 2 lbs and add 1 lb of soup bones (ideally with marrow) for that extra oomph. The other essential ingredient here is kalpasi/dagad phool, a lichen that is essential in Chettinad cooking, and which thankfully is now available easily in desi stores in the US, and also online. Speaking of Chettinad cooking, I’m not following any specific Chettinad recipe here, which is why I call this a Chettinad’ish curry. Give it a go anyway! Continue reading →

Growing up, keema was always minced mutton or goat meat. It was cooked in our house both as loose keema and as kofta (meatball) curry and it’s hard to say which I preferred. When I first came to the US goat keema was not easy to find. Indeed, it’s not easy even now without going to the few desi stores that sell meat or to stores catering to other goat eating cultures. But beef keema/ground beef is pretty good too in these preps. If you can find grass-fed beef keema then all the better—that gamy tang takes it pretty close to goat/mutton. And while I don’t have much use for turkey meat in Indian preps, I find ground turkey works well for keema—as long as it isn’t all white meat. And it works particularly well In a robustly spiced dish like this one where broccoli additionally adds an earthy quality. Still, in the absence of goat/mutton keema, beef would be my top choice. The point is that you can use whatever you have at hand. What you will end up with will be comfort food of the highest order and the broccoli will help you feel virtuous. Continue reading →

Keep calm: all I’m offering you is two ways of preparing beef or ox tongue, one as a lightly-dressed warm salad and the other masala-coated and crisply fried. The second is an extension of the first and given the size of the average ox tongue you’d be a fool to not make both. Now, you might say to yourself, “tongue—how Indian is that?” Well, tongue is indeed eaten in many parts of India; indeed, one of our kids’ absolute favourite dishes on our trip to India in 2020 was fried tongue, which we ate at a couple of restaurants in Goa. And the fried version I present here is my attempt to recreate those preps from taste memory. The first preparation—as a dressed warm salad—may not strike you as obviously Indian; and it is true, I’m not aware of any traditional preparation in this general vein (which is not to say that one might not exist). But as far as I’m concerned it’s an Indian dish through and through. The tongue is prepared by simmering it with whole garam masala and then sliced thinly and dressed with a vinaigrette in which roasted cumin has been steeped. Both versions go very well with dal and rice. Continue reading →

Another week, another beef curry. I made this slow-cooked curry the week before I left for Delhi (where I will be for another week) and the family instructed me in no uncertain terms to immediately write down exactly how I made it so that I can make it again. I think I may have mentioned before that when not cooking expressly for the blog I rarely make the same thing twice in the same way—mostly because, like most home cooks, I eyeball ingredients and don’t really care very much if one time there’s less cumin or more coriander seed in the masala than on another occasion. In fact, this kind of improvization has led to some of the dishes we like the most, as is the case with this curry. I made it with short ribs from the excellent Goette Farms in southern Minnesota. It was a large pack of ribs—4 lbs total—and I expected that we’d eat half of the curry and freeze the rest for later. But the boys loved it so much that it was all gone within 48 hours. I can’t guarantee that you’ll like it as much as they did but I’d be shocked if you didn’t like it at all. Give it a go. Continue reading →

I improvised this beef curry back in December. I’d thawed a pack of what had been labeled soup bones by the meat locker through which we’d bought a quarter of a cow a while ago. The plan had been to make pho. But when I opened the packet they turned out instead to be highly meaty shanks. I pivoted to making a slow-cooked curry and decided to take this opportunity to also finally use up an open bottle of red wine that had been sitting in the fridge for god knows how long. Meat, spices, a long braise on low heat: what could go wrong. Absolutely nothing, you’re thinking, and you’re absolutely right. Nothing did go wrong. In fact, things went very, very right. And here is the recipe to prove it. Please keep in mind that even though the recipe makes it look like a fixed thing this was—as with almost all my cooking—made on the fly. Feel free to play with the proportions of spice and ratios of tomato, red wine and water. There happened to be roughly two cups of wine left in the bottle but I would have added whatever had been in there. Who’s to say it wouldn’t have been ever better if braised entirely in wine? If you do tinker let me know how it goes. Continue reading →

Oxtails are at a premium in our home. Korean-style oxtail soup as made by the missus is one of the boys’ absolute favourite foods and so any oxtail we purchase almost always goes into making that. Alas, good oxtail is not always easy to find. In December, however, I connected with a small farm in the far south of Minnesota that sells their beef and lamb both directly from their website and from a trailer they bring up north once a month and park in a lot, usually in Burnsville. As it happens their route takes them right past the exit on Highway 35 to our town and so I made a date to meet them in the parking lot of the Flying J gas station (aka The Big Steer). The tryst was originally going to be for the purpose of purchasing lamb shanks. I asked if they had oxtails as well and they said they did. I took their entire inventory (less dramatic than it sounds: they had five left). With that many in the freezer at once, and the promise of a re-supply when done, I was able to claim two for my own uses. Continue reading →

The word “keema” refers to both the ingredient—ground or minced meat—and to the stew-like dishes—not a million miles from chili—that are often made with it. In India the most common kind of keema by far is that of mutton or goat. In the US where goat/mutton is not as easily found I mostly use ground beef—though ground turkey does well in these preps too. In fact, I would say that it is in this kind of preparation that beef comes closest to substituting for goat in Indian cooking. That’s just my opinion, of course, and it shouldn’t be taken as implying that beef doesn’t have a place of its own in Indian foodways. No matter what the Hindu fundamentalist dispensation that is well into the process of destroying what remains of India’s secular fabric will tell you, beef is an Indian ingredient too. Continue reading →

Here’s a quick recipe for very tasty grilled flank steak. It’s an adaptation of this recipe on Epicurious (originally from a 1995 issue of Bon Appetit). I’ve kept all the wet ingredients and only swapped out the dried herbs and added some spices to give it a subtle Indian flavour. It’s very easy to pull the marinade together, and the marinade is so delicious I’m going to use it in the future for pork and chicken as well. You could probably use it for other cuts of beef too, but it works really well with flank because it cooks so fast on the grill. Otherwise, given the amount of sugar in the marinade it’s likely to burn completely (even with the quick sear it chars quite easily). I made it today for a small gathering focused on the carving of Halloween pumpkins for kids and it was a big hit.  Continue reading →