Ox Tails...

Day 1 of 3 days of practical exams... and I get to braise ox tails. Prior to this morning I have cooked ox tails all of... oh wait... I've NEVER cooked them before!

With a grade in the balance of how this dish turns out I decided to keep it super simple flavor wise. I cut a very basic mirepoix of celery, carrot and onion, for a little extra I added some pearl onions and some fresh sprigs of oregano. From there I followed the 9 steps of braising!

1. mise en place (get it all together... thought up what I was doing!)
2. prep main ingredient (trimmed some of the fat from the very fatty ox tails)
3. Sear meat (nice hot braising dish with some oil in it too. Seared the ox tails in batches and got them all pretty and carmelized on the outside)
4. Sear aeromatics (where I took all the meat out of the pan and added in the mirepoix I'd cut up earlier and got a hint of color on them.)
5. Deglaze (I added a healthy amount of red wine to the mirepoix and scraped all the yummy good bits off the bottom of the pan.)
6. Return the meat (I added the ox tails back to the pan and filled it with veal stock til the ox tails were almost submerged, but not quite)
7. Seal (exactly what it sounds like... I got a nice tight seal on the pan with heavy duty tin foil)
8. Oven (again... into the oven it went until it was "fork tender." Because ox tails are so tough it took a good long while to braise and I checked it every 30 minutes or so to be sure that there was still enough liquid in the pot.)
9. Create Sauce (once the meat is done you take it out of the pan and strain what is in the pot so that you have just the liquid to work with. I took the liquid and cranked the heat up and let it reduce to a thick syrupy goo that was divine!)

Turns out that the first time was the charm with ox tails... Chef said that the dish was fantastic and the sauce was perfect!