My Best Restorative Oxtail Soup

And stock. And a poll, some upcoming demos...a bit of a NY catch all.

Yes, I’m afraid no veganuary in this house. Is it too late to be wishing you all a Happy New Year? I hope not - and let me qualify it a little - I hope that 2025 turns out to be much better than most of expect it to be.

I have been quiet since just before Christmas, I know - after getting those long Christmas posts out I decided I had to take the rest of the year off. I needed it. I’ve spent the last couple of weeks doing jigsaws Adam bought me for Christmas (proper cosy scenes), with half an eye on generally crap TV, mainly from my bed. I am still (apart from when walking or supervising in the kitchen) spending most of my time in or on the bed. So comfortable and I have a bed tray, my laptop, notebooks and reading books and a seemingly endless supply of Lindt Gold (there is likely to be a rude awakening soon). Inconceivable as it may seem, no one yet seems bored of bringing me drinks. I am tempted to turn this into the new normal. I am joking. Kind of.

So Christmas was uneventful but I was quietly ecstatic about how many of you got in touch to tell me how useful you found all the timings and recipes. Some of you were cooking the red cabbage within minutes of receiving the email! I am also really happy to welcome all of you who were bought pressure cookers/multicookers and/or one of my books for Christmas. There seem to be quite a few of you! I hope you have got as far as removing your cookers from the box. If you are nervous, please refer to this post followed by this one. They will help! As for the rest of you, I hope the pressure cooking made all of your lives easier over the holiday season. It did mine - my lot are getting ever more confident in their day to day cooking. (As I was writing last night, Adam and Lilly were “discussing” who was going to cook the rice they’re serving with the defrosted keema peas. Adam badly wanted to and is getting obsessional about the rinsing).

exercises in cooperation

A Couple of Demo Dates

I have demos coming up in February and more to come so watch this space. And just to remind you that if you have a kitchen shop or bookshop near you - or a community group, eg., the WI or a food focussed gardening club - who you think might be interested in hosting, please get in touch, because these are very cost effective ways of getting a demo!

The Chorleywood Bookshop on 11th February

The Kitchen Table in Shaftesbury on 26th February

A Poll

I should perhaps have put this in a separate post, but I don’t want to spam you so it is here instead. I try to go roughly 50/50 in terms of meat/vegetarian but realised that I have absolutely no idea what everyone’s preferences are so I thought it would be useful to get a general idea. I’m very broad strokes with this poll but it will help me so thank you for taking the time. Oh - and you can always make requests for specific types of meals - a lot of you do!

And finally, before I get onto today’s recipe I just want to point everyone - especially those of you who weren’t here this time last year - to one of my posts from last January. There will be more cheese later in the week, but for everyone who has bits of cheese leftover from Christmas (I imagine most of you), this is for you. There is cheese broth and recipes. And I stand by everything I said in it. The early part of the year is NOT FOR DIETING, it is for carbs and cheese and comfort and warmth. It is cold and often gloomy and spring seems a very long way away. It is not the time for deprivation!

The temperatures are starting to dip this January too - a fortnight of minus degrees coming up so this recipe - which is really a bit of a 3 for 1-er, not including the various things you can do with the leftovers - is as perfect a bowl you can get if you want optimum warmth. I made a vat of it for the freezer before going into hospital and thanking my past self for spending the time when I could have made more of the much faster and simpler dishes. I have described oxtail soup as being a labour of love (love of myself as much as anyone else, although it is Adam’s favourite too) because even with a pressure cooker it is time consuming - especially the stripping of the meat. But the good news is you end up with A LOT.

Oxtail soup has always been one of my favourite things and I have always considered it a recuperative food - I used to crave it when I was ill as a child. I don’t remember my mum making it, although I’m sure she did, as we did keep calves on our smallholding and we were very nose to tail. I wonder if I would like the Heinz version now? The only time I have had a ready meal soup in forever is the Covt Garden Soup that Shariq brought me in hospital. Not even Heinz tomato - why would I, when my own home made takes about a minute of prep time and is much better for you? I always have portions of it in the freezer.

But I admit, making oxtail soup is a very different endeavour. It isn’t the most economical, either. Oxtail has gone from being ridiculously cheap to quite expensive, especially considering the bone/meat ratio. However, it is one of those things that is often reduced on various meat counters so worth keeping your eye out for. I find that my local often bags up 2-3 pieces at a time so I just stick them in the freezer until I have enough. The other thing I do is use those pieces to enrich other soups and stews - amazing how much flavour and texture 2 mid sized pieces of oxtail will add to a vegetable/grain/pulse based stew. But back to the soup - it is totally worth the expense and the time spent - the texture and flavour of the meat and broth is unlike any other cut. But I always think about cost and extracting as much value from everything I cook and I think this method helps with that.

This is a recipe I will frequently double because making twice as much does not take twice as long and it freezes brilliantly. And to eke it out I do use it in other dishes too - see more on this soon. There is a version of it in Modern Pressure Cooking, where I suggest that you can use short ribs or ox cheeks in smaller quantities in place of oxtail. You can. You can also use beef shin. I would not use anything leaner - part of the point of a soup like this is its slightly sticky, oleaginous nature - you want the connective tissues to dissolve to give you as much collagen as possible. This is just one of the reasons it is such a good recovery food.

One final point - I pretty much always go for Caribbean flavours when I make this soup - in particular allspice, thyme, bay and scotch bonnet so there is both warmth and chilli heat. You don’t have to do this. Sticking with a bouquet garni (thyme, bay, parsley, rosemary if you are so inclined), mustard, garlic and red wine will give you an excellent flavour. And going smoky with a bit of paprika wouldn’t hurt either.

no one has cleaned the hob since I have been out of commission!

My Best Oxtail Soup

1.5kg oxtail

1 tsp plain flour

1 tsp mustard powder

1 tsp garlic powder

1 tsp ground black pepper

2 tbsp olive oil or beef dripping

15g butter

1 tsp light soft brown sugar

2 onions, roughly chopped

3 sticks celery, roughly chopped

2 large carrots, roughly chopped

250ml red wine

Cloves from 1 head of garlic, peeled

A bouquet garni of:

1 large sprig thyme

1 large sprig parsley

3 bay leaves

1 tsp allspice berries, lightly crushed

1 scotch bonnet, pierced with a knife tip

200g chopped tomatoes

Stock or water to cover

Season the meat with salt. Mix the flour with the mustard powder, garlic powder and black pepper and put into a bag with the oxtail. Shake well until the oxtail is coated with a fine layer of the seasoned flour. Pat off any excess.

Heat your pressure cooker and add half the olive oil or dripping. Add as much of the oxtail as you can without crowding the base and sear well on both sides. Remove from the pressure cooker, add more oil or dripping if necessary and sear the remaining oxtail. Remove this as well. NOTE, if you are using an electric pressure cooker which has an over sensitive burn warning, you might want to do this in a frying pan. If so, make sure you deglaze it with a little liquid and add the contents to your pressure cooker when you add the stock.

Add the butter to the pressure cooker and stir in the sugar until it has dissolved. Add the vegetables and saute gently just to start getting a little bit of colour and to kick start the deglazing process. The butter and sugar is a popular Caribbean thing I learned years ago from a Trinidadian chef - it gives an extra bit of caramelisation.

Pour in the wine and finish off the deglazing process - make sure the base is completely clean. Return the oxtail to the cooker and add the garlic, the bouquet garni, the tomatoes and enough stock or water to cover. Season with salt again.

Close the lid and bring up to high pressure. Adjust the heat so it is just high enough to maintain the pressure and cook for 45 mins. Remove from the heat and leave to drop pressure naturally.

[ASIDE: At this stage, you can eat the oxtail as a casserole - my husband would quite happily go at it this point. However, I think it is best after chilling overnight and skimming. This in part for flavour, but also to reduce the fat content - I love the fat, but prefer to use it as dripping or for frying/roasting. I cool, chill, leave over night then skim. Then reheat with a carb element - add some cooked beans (butter beans or broad beans very popular additions in the Caribbean), or make dumplings and drop them on top - a simple one is 150g SR flour, 1 tsp baking powder for extra oomph, 1 tsp dried herbs, 1 tsp mustard powder, 50g suet. Mix together and season. Gradually add enough water to bind - the dough should be slightly sticky, not too wet. Divide into 8-12 pieces. They will cook under pressure suspended above the casserole for 5 minutes, natural release. Or serve with potatoes.]

But we are making soup so to continue:

Remove the bouquet garni and strain the contents of your cooker. Leave the liquid to separate and skim off the fat. You can skim straight away, but I prefer to cool, chill, and remove the fat when it has solidified - so much easier. It is also really satisfying seeing the cooking liquor jellify - you know it is going to be collagen rich and really good for you. Separate out the meat from the vegetables and puree the latter - this can be done electrically or by pushing through a coarse sieve or mouli - the celery fibres should be soft enough to break down. It is up to you whether you include the scotch bonnet from the bouquet garni - I would taste the cooking liquor first and decide whether you are happy increasing the heat - you can always just add a little bit to taste. The vegetable matter will help thicken the soup.

jellied cooking liquor - the stock will do the same

When it is cool enough to handle, remove as much of the meat as you can. Chop it if the strands are particularly long - makes it easier to eat. Add to the skimmed cooking liquor and vegetables. This will give you a good amount of a fairly thick soup. You can reserve some of the meat for other purposes if you like, you don’t need to use it all. When you are ready to serve, reheat everything together until piping hot, adding a little port/madeira/rum to it if you like. The fastest way to do this is to put everything back in the pressure cooker, let the jellified liquor start to melt and as soon as you have a bit of steam, put the lid on, bring up to high pressure and do a gradual fast release. You can natural release too, it won’t come to any harm.

FINALLY - don’t throw the bones away just yet. There is enough goodness in them to make a really good stock. You can add a bit of this to your soup to thin it out a bit, or you can keep for other uses - it will make a good base for a pot of spiced beans, for example.

[Another aside. The first time I reused the discarded bones was because I had made a huge error with the soup. I removed all the meat and then pureed everything else before I had skimmed off the fat. Of course it emulsified and was was really quite unpleasant in terms of both flavour - a bit tallow - and mouth feel. So I threw most of it out, made a broth with the discarded solids, more vegetables and red wine, then added back the meat and it was still really good. Phew. Every day is a learning day in the kitchen.]

As you can see from this (not particularly appetising) photo, this looks as though there is plenty of goodness still to be had from it, and it is true - the stock will set just as well as the soup liquor.

Return all the bones to your pressure cooker. Add more aromatics (any herbs you like, vegetable trimmings etc), cover with water and cook at high pressure for an hour. This will really help extract as much of the collagen as possible. Leave to drop pressure naturally and strain. You may need to skim of fat once more but there will be significantly less.

This one with a bit more broth, beans and greens added to it

This is it for now. There will be hopefully be more winter warmers later in the week, apologies to anyone tropical or in the southern hemisphere! Please take the time to take part in the poll and click on the heart - it takes a moment and really helps with visibility. Thank you all!