Saturday Night: Listening to McGee

For dinner I did braised beef, bratkartoffeln, steamed broccoli, and a green salad. The theme for the first two entries on this list was: "take standard recipes and follow McGee's suggestions to refine them."

So for the braised beef I used a crossrib roast from our cow and a recipe from How to Cook Meat, but I used McGee's suggestion of putting the browned meat + veggies + cold stock in a cold oven and heating it at 200 for two hours to do an initial heating, then raising the temp to 250 until fork tender,then letting the meat cool a bit in the sauce. I think this works better when the meat is completely immersed in liquid, which wasn't achievable with any of my pots without using an insane amount of liquid (I need to remember that I can do this type of braise in one of the ceramic bowls... those are narrow and deep enough to work). Ah well, it still turned out great and the color of the meat certainly was a lot better. I also did my usual "homogenize the sauce with the stick blender" trick, because I really like that. The combination of the sauce + the beef + the dill-horseradish-sour cream sauce is excellent.

For the potatoes, I followed McGee's suggestion of starting the potatoes in cold unsalted water and very slowly bringing it to a boil. With Yukon gold potatoes, this gives an amazing texture that stands up really well in the browning phase of making bratkartoffeln.

That McGee is a real smarty-pants. :-)