Miles Collins

My campaign to bring back the joys of slow cooking and oxtails

Slow cooking is great, you brown something nicely, add some suitable herbs (not in tea bags please) a glug of red wine, top it all with stock and leave it to do its thing all afternoon. Glorious.

The slow cooking of meat and vegetables make for the perfect sauce, it does all of the work for you, saving time and effort in the long run. I slow cook all sorts of meats; ham hocks, duck legs in their own fat, lamb shoulders, venison haunches, pork knuckles, beef shin and, possibly best of all, oxtails.

Oxtails are underated, to many the meat to bone ratio is not worth bothering with but I disagree. Obviously the tail tapers from thick to thin, the thick pieces make for a hearty meal but the thin pieces should be left in for flavour and chewing on at the end when nobody is looking.

The thing to remeber with oxtails is what they bring to the sauce party; natural unadulturated gelatine. Pieces of slow cooked tails help to make a sauce which, once reduced makes a wonderfully sweet, sticky, moorish gravy.

Oxtails go with anything; red curry, Spanish wine and chorizo sausage, English vegetables and pearl barley, simmered in a broth for a hearty soup, the list goes on. One of my favourite ever meals was a plate of oxtails with braised red cabbage and a fine glass of riocha with my dearest friends, Andrew and April. Perfectly cooked, stress free and delicious.

My current ‘thing’ is to pair meat and fish, a sort of surf and turf if you will. Instead of steak and tiger prawns I am serving monkfish and oxtails. We cook the oxtails all day in lots of red wine, vegetables, garlic and herbs until meltingly soft. The meat is stripped from the bone and the stock reduced by half. The monkfish is dusted with porcini powder then roasted on the bone medium rare. We serve the oxtails on a potato puree, the monkfish placed on top and served with a sauce of the reduced oxtail juices infused with clams, chopped garlic, parsley and orange zest.

Simple but really effective. Go on, get the slow cooker out, you know it makes sense!