My Mom's Pepper Beef With Roman Gnocchi Recipe - Glen And Friends Cooking

Welcome Friends welcome back to the kitchen today I'm going to do a recipe that I've I've never made before um but I've eaten it so many times this is something that oh out of milk but I've almost got enough I need two cups of milk and I've got a cup and 7 8 and I don't have another bag of milk I've got a little bit of whipping cream there we go enough liquid enough liquid that's how I roll so um this is something that my mom made all the time when I was a little kid but we would only eat it at the end of summer and only at the cottage and let me explain that we were a family that um in the fall usually around the time that school started in the fall we would buy a side of beef and put it in the freezer and then eat that beef over the course of the year much less much more reasonable way to buy it if you buy half the cow you get a discount that's the way it works so we would do that and by the middle of August we'd be down to the last little bit of beef in the freezer we'd be at the cottage it would be the tough cuts it would be the cuts that were you know more than a little freezer burnt and my mom made this because you could put any tough cut of beef in the pot and you'd get something really flavorful and beautiful out the other side um and this is a tough one for me because about a month ago I decided I was going to make it and I'd do it on the show and I started doing research to try to figure out where this recipe came from where did my mother get this recipe and I realized that elements of this are Italian but elements of it are French or very French and I can only assume that my mother picked it up from a family that lived really close to us at the cottage they were Italian so we're going to be doing like a Roman um Roman Durham semolina gnocchi which is what's going on in this pot I've got milk and I took an onion and I sort of severed the onion at the bottom or at the top actually and I've put it into the milk I'm going to bring the milk up to a simmer and I'm going to let the milk simmer a little bit and pull the flavor out of the onion um but the beef portion of it it may have started out as an Italian Dish um which is made with red wine beef and pepper but of course my mother did it her own way and it became beef white wine or beer and Pepper with tomato onion and hot pepper so I'm gonna do it my mother's way which is much more French than Italian but it sort of brings you to this this point where you realize that a lot of Cuisines are very very similar they just have very small Regional differences based on differences in taste or differences in what ingredients were available in that smaller geographic region okay so lid on this pot and we'll let that onion and milk come together this Dutch oven I'm going to hit it generous amount of oil and use whatever oil you like now I know people are probably already typing in the comments section that you can't cook beef with white wine who's cooking beef with white wine um the French very very simply put the French a lot of French recipes especially from the 16 and 1700s cooked beef braised beef in white wine and so this is this here is a French cookbook from the 1700s and if you look through the beef section pretty much to a tea every beef recipe that uses wine as a liquid it's white wine and if it isn't white wine they're using something called verju which is this stuff and as you can see it is white or clear even though this is made with Pinot Noir which is a red grape um Virgil is is made from grapes that haven't ripened yet so they haven't they haven't ripened they haven't got sweet yet the sugar hasn't developed in the grape they're crushed the juice is extracted um and so the juice doesn't have a very high sugar content but it has a high acid content so this is pretty sour pretty acidic Works fantastic for cooking this type of dish and if I thought that this was readily available to a lot of people I would be using it today but I know that verju is sometimes very difficult to get a hold of you have to know which wineries are making and bottling it and you pretty much have to go to that Winery to get it it's not something at least here where I live it's not something that is readily available so I'm going to use white wine and like I said my mom often used beer um never red wine it was either white wine or beer and the beer she would use would be about 50. so not an expensive beer not a very great tasting beer at all but that's what she used so in goes all the beef [Music] and I'm not worried about crowding the pot at all um did a recipe a while back for beef bourguignon and it was a recipe that I got out of a book written by Paul Bocuse Paul Bocuse is an amazing or was an amazing Chef probably the previous generation's greatest chef and for him when you put beef in a pot you put in enough oil you got the pot hot enough you put in all the beef and you just let her rip no worries about overcrowding now I'm not touching that beef I'm just letting it go I really want it to build up some brown on the bottom before I start turning it and messing with the pot okay let's give that its first toss okay so that's been frying on the stove top here for about 15 minutes at this point and it is got some incredible gorgeous Browning going on there and I had that on the highest heat I was very attentive I watched it very closely don't walk away from an operation like this you want to make sure that you you keep an eye on it there's a difference between Browning and burnt there's a difference between caramelized and burnt so I've got some tomato paste um not strictly something that you would find in the French cookbooks at all but my mother put tomato in everything so this is just the way I remember eating it so I'm going to stir that in and let it fry a little bit again just to caramelize the Tomato caramelizing it just brings out a little bit more flavor I've got shallots we grew onions that were very close to shellacs growing up at the cottage at the Garden of the cottage so I'm going to use the same type of onion and I've just got a handful of those I've just peeled them I haven't chopped anything I haven't chopped them up at all I've just peeled those go in and I've got a bit of a hot pepper that was left over from pizza night a few nights ago that's going to go in my mom always put something like that in just to give it a little bit of spiciness not spicy just a little bit of spiciness I've got some salt that goes in I can really smell that tomato now oh I can smell that tomato okay I'm gonna move quickly so I've got some cracked black pepper and this is a very coarse grind it's not really ground it is cracked and I'm gonna put in about a tablespoon at this point and then the wine and at the same time I'm pour it in the wine just scraped up the fond on the bottom of the pot okay so about three quarters of that bottle of wine and just glug it in there I'm gonna hold back a little bit so I'm just going to stir that in I'm gonna lower the temperature I don't want it to boil too much right now this is going to go into the oven so if you are someone who is one of those people that ask me all the time what can you use instead of wine in your cooking verju is the answer really Virgil is one of the answers because verju is not fermented so there's no alcohol [Music] um so it brings everything that you want from wine and cooking without the alcohol which I think is for a lot of people important now just because I've got this going here smells great so I've infused the milk with that onion waste not want not that onion now goes into this pot the lid goes on this pot and this pot goes in the oven the oven is preheated to 275 anywhere between 275 and 325 I'm going to put that in for about an hour hour and a half at that point I'm going to look inside take a look see if it needs any liquid I know for my oven and this pot I've got a really good tight fitting lid I'm not going to lose too much moisture but you want to check it every once in a while to make sure that you haven't lost too much moisture that it hasn't gone dry if it does start to go dry add the remaining wine if you've added all of the wine and it's still going dry add a little bit of water or a little bit of chicken stock or beef stock it'll be fine just don't let it go dry thank you okay now we're going to come back and we're going to work on the Durham semolina gnocchi this is a Roman dish which is why I think my mom got this this whole idea from an Italian family down the way because it certainly didn't come from her mother or any other place that I can think of so I've got the milk in here it's hot the milk is hot I'm gonna add a little bit of salt I've got durum semolina which is a rough ground flour from Derm wheat same stuff I made pasta with if you go back on the channel I made a dried pasta with this smells like flour and the idea is that you just stir it into the hot milk a little bit at a time and you try to keep it from clumping now I've got about a cup of milk in here I've got about two cups of germ semolina and I'm just going to pour it in until I reach a consistency that I like and that changes every time you make it so you don't don't think of this as a an exact quantity recipe in this regard it really is sort of a method where you look at it and you go that's enough and the heat is still on for the milk we're on fairly low I might turn it up just a touch just to keep the heat coming now that I'm stirring and watching a whisk at this early stage works but you're going to get to a point where a whisk just isn't gonna work okay I'm gonna say that's good now the heat is still on I'm going to turn that right back to the lowest setting I've got an egg but I only want the yolk so we'll separate this egg and in goes the yoke and we just vigorously stir that in continuing with the heat at this point keep it cooking you wanna you wanna you wanna cook the semolina most of the way at this point like 95 of the way at this point and you're not really going to know when it's done enough you're just going to kind of look at it and go I'm done stirring it I think we're ready to go so I've reached that point I've I'm done stirring it I'm ready to go I've got a glass baking dish here but it could be anything it could be a quarter sheet pan it could just be a cookie sheet okay I'm just going to smooth this out into the dish doesn't have to be crazy smooth you can put some water on your spatula and get really fancy and make sure that it's perfectly smooth okay so I'm just going to stick this in the fridge and let it set up I'm going to keep my eye on the on the braising that's going on in the oven but pretty much good to go until it's almost time to serve supper okay so I've got the semolina out and I've cut it into little squares next thing I want to do is fry it on both sides add a little bit of color to it and finish the cooking so I've got a heavy cast iron frying pan here I'm going to hit it with some oil and this is also the point where um you know 20 minutes before service my mom would be prepping some veg to go either beside or in what's happening in the oven and it would often be broccoli cauliflower beans whatever was coming off of our garden when she was cooking and so she put that into the Dutch oven in the last 10 minutes just to sort of get a little bit of um just to soften them a little bit cook them a little bit but they would still be crunchy when you ate them or you could just steam them up and put them on the side it's really it's up to you putting them in now makes it into more of a stew having them on the side mix it into something that's a little bit different okay into the oil and we give that a little bit of a fry and we'll just flip those over get nice and brown oh it's wonderful and yes I'm using a fish slice um for a lot of things I think the fish slice is the perfect spatula now the first round of gnocchi is pretty much fried up nicely we'll get the stewed beef out of the oven and get the lid off and take a look at that there we go look at that give that a bit of a stir now if you want the sauce thicker we could thicken that with bermanie now we've gone over berminion in the past it's equal parts flour and butter mashed together Burr maniere mashed together and then you mix it in and you put it on a little bit of heat on the stove top when you mix it in the flour Cooks in seconds there is no raw flour taste um it's in these cookbooks this is a French cookbook from the 1700s and pretty much every stew recipe in this book uses bermanie it's perfect for this type of use so the gnocchi is done it's got some nice color so we'll plate that up put three on here okay we'll get some of this braised beef on top hey Glenn hey friends maybe a fork maybe a spoon okay please just in case and that onion that I put in that was in the pot of milk completely disintegrated like completely disintegrated ah see if we brought back the gnocchi yeah yep finally I think I finally got it I think I finally got it that's great yes so look at that that looks great uh I'm gonna go with fork I think me too I don't know what to try first like because the Stew's really good but I'm fascinated by the gnocchi I want to just try it on its own the meat fall apart gender hmm meat and Yaki oh it's really good that childhood memory is perfect yes peppery beefy oniony a little bit of heat from the hot pepper the gnocchi which is really kind of weird because you know we were a mashed potato family but somehow at the cottage this is what we this is what we ate so what's fascinating though is the gnocchi like mashed potatoes it's it's kind of a fairly hmm you know it's a fairly Bland flavored thing that takes on whatever you're eating with it it's there for everything else it was definitely there for everything else no this is a stew at the very beginning you could have put in all kinds of root vegetables right you could have put in carrots and parsnips in turnip and potatoes and everything else and come up with an amazing stew that would stand on its own that didn't need this treatment and that's how all of these foods are really kind of interrelated and you can't really don't think too hard about it and then Yankee could be a base for almost any type of stew-like thing that you might eat yes a chili yeah uh you know just a red sauce you put any sort of red meat sauce on that and it would be really good um another piece so I think what I what I'm what this dish was for us was that end of the season use up the things that we had use of the things that really couldn't be cooked any other way because the freezer beef was getting a little freezer burnt by August because it had been there since September and use up the last of the garden vegetables because you know you're starting to get into fall and the garden vegetables aren't and I think that that that ethos stands today use what you've got use what you can afford and you can make a really good meal and you don't need to use the white wine you could use a red wine you could use a verju you could just use beef stock a little bit of vinegar what do you got beef stock and a little bit of vinegar and you could achieve pretty much exactly the same thing thanks for stopping by see you again soon

Channel: Glen And Friends Cooking

Views: 72,270

Keywords: Glen And Friends Cooking, historical cooking, peposo ricetta toscana, peposo toscano, peposo beef, roman gnocchi, roman style gnocchi, semolina fried gnocchi, semolina gnocchi, pepper beef stew, pepper beef and wine, white wine beef stew, tuscan beef stew, peposo - tuscan black pepper beef, cooking with glen, glen cook, glen cooks, gnocchi alla romana, gnocchi alla romana recipe, italian beef stew, glen & friends cooking, gnocchi, simple beef stew

Id: OCDDduDMaIY

Length: 19min 45sec (1185 seconds)

Published: Sat Oct 22 2022