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Beef cuts for soup/stock/jus


paulraphael

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I'm looking for a good choice of beef for pressure-cooked rich stock and for sous-vide jus/coulis. In both cases the meat will be ground before cooking and donated to the cat afterwards, so texture is unimportant.

 

Ideally one of the cheap/tough cuts, but one with as much flavor and as little fat as possible. Any fat will just render off and will have to be disposed of.

 

My inclination would be to use one of the round roasts, but the last time I used one in a braise the flavor was lackluster. Not sure if that was the cut in general or just the piece I got. Thoughts?

Notes from the underbelly

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Beef shins?  Fairly cheap.  Or beef shanks.

 

Much more expensive and if you don't mind bones - oxtails give very flavorful stock.  Prized in E/SE Asian beef stocks. (Besides old-fashioned Western-style oxtail soup)

 

Lots of gelatin from both.

 

Just curious, would you make beef stock from marrow bones?  Is it just your taste/usage preference that "no fat" be involved, or are other considerations involved?

 

ETA: After posting I see rlibkind has made the same recs. :-)

Edited by huiray (log)
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""""   donated to the cat afterwards  """

 

Im interested in this part.  if you have indeed extracted all the flavor, you cat might not be very interested.

 

Ive had Cats and Dogs all my life.  Cats, well, are serious Gourmets, Gourmands, etc

 

Dogs, they will Woof down anything  ( almost ) that you give them if they think you might eat it and see you 'Cook'n''

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I used to use a combination of oxtails and short ribs, until short ribs got expensive. Now it's oxtails and shanks, or some form of chuck if shanks aren't available.

 

But you say you'll be grinding it first, and that makes oxtails kind of a pain-in-the-ass cut to use. So I'd say shanks, shins, and chuck, alone or in combination.

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I use knuckle bones or oxtail as a foundation; but for enriching stocks I use meat, and for making a jus/coulis (as a substitute for demi glace) I extract additional meat directly into stock. In the past I've used stewing cuts from the chuck. I'm just wondering if there's a good bet that's cheap and that has less than the 15% or 20% fat I typically see in chuck. 

 

I'm looking for lower fat just because the fat won't be used. I want that 20% fat in a burger. In a stock it's waste. Makes more sense to use something leaner even if it's a bit more expensive, all else being equal.

 

Re: donations to the cat ... it's not as welcome as raw meat or juicy steak pilfered from the table, but it's accepted. There's still flavor in the meat. As much as what's in the stock (law of entropy, etc.) The worst thing about the used meat is dryness.

 

Shanks / shins (same thing, yes?) sound interesting. Do you ever see these off the bone? How's the flavor compared with chuck?

Edited by paulraphael (log)

Notes from the underbelly

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Shanks / shins (same thing, yes?) sound interesting. Do you ever see these off the bone? How's the flavor compared with chuck?

 

Basically from the same region, in my understanding.  I tend to think of "shanks" when thinking about bone-in cuts and "shins" when thinking about off-the-bone.  

 

Yes, I definitely see shins (entire shins) off the bone.  I get them most frequently at the local Chinese grocery store/supermarket I usually go to, typically around a foot or so long (or shorter) and oh, maybe up to 3 inches or thereabouts in diameter on average. Usually around US$3/lb.  No, I doubt they come from organic, grass-fed, specially bred and selected cows. :-)   I cut them up into different-sized rounds (usually) as desired when the time comes to cook them.

 

I haven't done side-by-side comparisons between shin/chuck for beef stock flavor, sorry.

 

Here's a pic of one of those whole shins I get from my Chinese grocery, but which I had cut up into rounds when the pic was taken: http://forums.egullet.org/uploads/monthly_08_2013/post-71503-0-11144700-1377519179.jpg

 

p.s. For myself, just personally speaking, I would find a stock or soup without fat to be...not as desirable as one with some fat.  But that's just me.

Edited by huiray (log)
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Neck from old beeves makes truly awesome stock!

But almost any cheap cut with a lot of connective tissue will make good stock.

~Martin :)

I just don't want to look back and think "I could have eaten that."

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I pressure-cooked some beef cheeks yesterday (delicious…) and noted they were the cheapest product at the butcher.  As KennethT says, very beefy and in my experience also quite lean.  FWIW, in our crazy metric part of the world the beef cheeks were $12 per kilo, and their cheapest gravy / stewing beef was $16.

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I pressure-cooked some beef cheeks yesterday (delicious…) and noted they were the cheapest product at the butcher.  As KennethT says, very beefy and in my experience also quite lean.  FWIW, in our crazy metric part of the world the beef cheeks were $12 per kilo, and their cheapest gravy / stewing beef was $16.

 

Beef cheeks might be the cheapest on display but every butcher I've been to, when I ask them if they have any scraps out back, has been willing to sell me bones for chump change.

PS: I am a guy.

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  • 1 month later...

I just made my first batch using new methods (pressure cooked stock, sous-vide jus). I'm sold on the method and am now back to tweaking the flavors.

 

I made the stock with a combination of roasted oxtail and ground shin meat, and then the jus/coulis more ground shin meat, and some browned chuck (a piece of 7-bone steak I had in the fridge)

 

The result is good, but the flavor is a roasted beefiness that emphasizes the deeper, darker beef flavors. I'm interested in balancing things a bit. Maybe I can do a bit with aromatics (I didn't put any celery in this batch ... a bit might help). But I'm also interested in other beef cuts for the jus.

 

Any thoughts on what cuts might emphasize brighter, grassier, iron-y kinds of flavors? Helpful if they're also relatively lean, cheap, and available. I'm open to other ways of balancing the flavors as well.

 

Edited to add: I didn't get a chance to experiment with cheeks. How would you describe the flavor?

Edited by paulraphael (log)

Notes from the underbelly

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Rotus, I've thought about that. I suspect it would work well, but hasn't been my first choice, since it's usually sold at boutique butchers and farmer's markets and is priced higher than what I usually put in stock. But it may be worth considering for ecological reasons. I'd still have to pick a cut.

Notes from the underbelly

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  • 2 months later...

A test I have done about using bones to make wonderful stock.

 

I used a lot of bones I had collected. I scraped off as much meat, fat and tendon from the bones as possible and pressure cooked them.

 

A couple of hours later, taste tested the stock. It was just a little more flavorful than plain water.

 

dcarch

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This might derail a little but let me ask this. What is the point of making any stock with bones when the stuff around/inside the bones (meat, fat, cartilage, tendon) provides all the flavor? It seems that other than getting a pile of bones for free, it'd be better to just use scraps instead?

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This might derail a little but let me ask this. What is the point of making any stock with bones when the stuff around/inside the bones (meat, fat, cartilage, tendon) provides all the flavor? It seems that other than getting a pile of bones for free, it'd be better to just use scraps instead?

 

At least traditionally, bones were a perfect source of cheap scraps. They're always sold with plenty of meat and connective tissue still on them, and some also include marrow. These days they're not always a great value ... I see places charging boutique prices for them, presumably because in some markets they've become special order items for wealthy gourmands. But if you have access to a butcher shop that still sells them cheap, they're a good value.

 

I make stock with a mix of bones and meat, FWIW.

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  • 1 year later...

I make lots of stock and lots of soups, but rarely do they involve beef. So I'm cooking from my new xmas gift, the Lucky Peach 101 etc and the Beef Noodle soup looks awfully good. Yesterday I made the broth. The recipe calls for boneless beef shank. The only shank meat I could get was cut in 1 1/2 inch thick slices through the bone, but I figured, how could adding the bone with marrow not be a good thing? I cut the meat into a few pieces, as the recipe suggested and proceeded to make the soup base as directed. The broth is fantastic! Really rich, flavorful, perfect. 

 

However, the shank meat after 2 hours at a low simmer is nothing to write home about. Parts of it aren't bad, but parts of it are very tough and gristly. Not exactly fall off the bone tender and not what I would hope for since the recipe calls for the beef added to the soup along with noodles and greens. Notes with the recipe sing the praises of the meat for sandwiches, beef pancake, etc. so either David Chang gets some super special shanks when he goes to the butcher or I should try another source for shank meat. Berkeley Bowl is pretty good for most meats, so it isn't like I was buying some cheap off-cut.

 

What cut of beef do you like for making broth and using in the soup? Perhaps short ribs would have been a good idea? Or a combination, using some bone-in shank for extra flavor, but counting on the short ribs for soup meat? What do you think, you habitual beef lovers? 

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 My feeling is that two hours is just not long enough for beef shanks. I shall be interested to see what others have to offer.

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Perhaps all you need is to up the temp of your simmering broth a few degrees. Two hours with bone-in shanks for me is sufficient to get tender, decently gelatinous meat, with a "simmer" where the bubbling is fairly pronounced but is NOT at a boil. One can also get boneless shanks a.k.a. "shins" from Chinese grocers (this is commonly found in my local Chinese/Vietnamese places, for instance). Sliced up, these cook up nicely in two hours also; in fact, going much more beyond that just makes them fall apart into bits and pieces.Usually I'd cut them up into 3/4 to 1 inch thick rounds. I've shown assorted braises with these boneless shins here and there on the dinner (and previously in the lunch) topics, stovetop-braised with stuff like daikon, or bamboo shoots, with or without miso or fermented bean curd and/or Chinese mushrooms, or carrots/potatoes/onions, & etc. (Here's a relevant search answer set with posts from others too)

 

I wonder also if perhaps one might be expecting completely soft shank meat - some slight resistance is desirable, IMO (and what I would go for) rather than completely soft if not to the point of mushiness. Or slice the meat thinner, against the grain of course...

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