Braised Short Rib Ragu

Although Spring is here, the weather has still been on the cooler side and I figured that I could probably get at least one more good braise in before it gets too warm to have the oven on for hours at a time. I am a huge fan of a good long braise that slowly tenderizes the meat until it literally falls off the bone and melts in your mouth and there was one more recipe that I wanted to try while it was still cool. I came across this recipe for a short rib ragu on The Parsley Thief a while ago and it immediately caught my attention. All you need to do is look at the list of ingredients to see that it is just packed with umami and flavour that could only get better the longer that it simmers.

Short ribs are a fattier cut of beef which means that we start this recipe off right away with more flavour and then we then continue to build build it by browning the short ribs on all sides. The sauce starts out with a pretty standard array of vegetables and garlic but then it jumps right into the deep end with a flavour powerhouse, anchovy paste. To make sure that we get all of the goodness from those brown bits on the bottom of the pan we deglaze it with some red wine and then we start building the complexities of the sauce with tomato paste, dried porcini mushrooms, mustard, Worcestershire sauce, and an array of herbs and spices.

One of the things that I like about braising is that generally once you get it into the oven it is pretty hands off until it is done so you get a really great meal with minimal effort. Since this recipe uses short ribs there is one final step and that is to pull the bones out of the pot and shred the beef. I wanted this dish to focus on the meat so I decided to puree the sauce while I waited for the meat to cool enough to shred, though you could easily skip this step. As promised, this ragu was just packed with flavour and it was easily one of the tastiest sauces that I have had in a while. You could serve this ragu on pretty much anything that you want and since it had been a while since I last used a creamy polenta, I decided to go with that.

Read the recipe »