Feeding Friendship: Balsamic Vinegar

This week's ingredient was chosen by Veronica to help her mom, Nancy, with a balsamic vinegar quandary.  Nancy had been given a gift basket with several flavors of balsamic vinegar and had no idea what to cook with them. Ellie called dibs on the strawberry flavor, so the next most intriguing possibility to me was the dark sweet cherry. Full disclosure here: I have never cooked with balsamic before, but I have seen it used constantly by Top Chef contestants on TV, usually accompanied by the word "reduction." But I did stay at a Holiday Inn Express last night....ok, no I didn't.

So, being a Top Chef fan I decided to go an unexpected route and suggest pairing this type of balsamic with something savory instead of sweet: beef! Scouring my available recipe resources, I settled on one from AllRecipes.com (my go-to online recipe site where you can save recipes in an online "recipe box") called Cherry Balsamic Short Ribs. Now, due to grocery store constraints and other life factors (apparently one should not shop at the end of Labor Day weekend since the store is kind of tapped out), my recipe turned into what I will call Cherry Balsamic Braised Beef. Here I substituted what my store calls "stew beef" for short ribs, because they were completely out and I figured that cooking the meat for over 3 hours would offset any toughness that comes from using a cheaper cut of beef.

I started out by slicing and dicing everything I would need to get my mise en place, well, in place. Look, Mom, colored vegetables!

I sliced up most of a large Vidalia onion, two carrots and two celery ribs. I would also have added a fennel bulb here, but they came in packs of 3 at the store and I didn't want to deal with trying to use up 2 more alien-looking bulbs. Next, I turned the oven to 350 while I took my next steps. I took the beef and seasoned it with sea salt and fresh cracked pepper, then browned it in my Dutch oven in two batches, draining the grease in between. Now I had a plate of mostly browned bite-sized pieces of beef, which I set aside for the moment. 

In lieu of adding more olive oil, I left the beef drippings in the pot for flavor and cooked the onion, celery, and carrot in that instead for several minutes until the onion got translucent. Next, I added some shamefully cheap Burgundy wine (I looked for better and could find no other Burgundys) and let it reduce by half. I'm certain that any full-bodied red wine would do fine, but the recipe said Burgundy, so I obliged. Per the directions I added some fresh rosemary from my garden (yay!), dried thyme (I was out of fresh), and the demi-glaze.

Oh, the demi-glaze. This is a gelatinous sauce base that took me about 4 grocery stores to find, and even then Balducci's (local fancy-pants gourmet market) didn't carry beef for some reason, so I chose lamb over chicken or seafood. I thought about making my own, but that entails hours of reducing stock and making an entire French sauce, so that went out the window.

After a good stir, chicken stock and cherry cola (!) went into the pot with the 1/3 cup of balsamic.

Now, I used regular aged balsamic, but I think that the cherry flavored kind would be a nice addition to the recipe. Next, I added the beef back in and tossed in 10 oz package of thawed frozen cherries and a few fresh cherries too.

In retrospect, I realize that I added too much cherry Coke to the sauce- a can instead of just a cup. I was rushing because I wanted to get this all in the oven before leaving for an appointment so it would cook while I was gone, and we all know that haste makes waste. So, oblivious to the dangers ahead, I placed the pot in the oven, set the timer for 3.5 hours, and went on my merry way.

When I re-entered the house, I knew immediately that something wasn't right. I checked the pot, but could see nothing obviously burning to explain the smell. When the time was up, this is what I pulled from the oven:

Boooo. My theory is that the extra soda made the overall liquid level too high, as well as adding too much fizz to the pot. Therefore, the top part burned while the bottom portions under the liquid were spared. Still hoping to save the dish, I strained out the liquid from the sauce through my (spanking new) mesh sieve. At this point I tried some beef to make sure it wasn't all a lost cause, and it tasted alright. I put the solids in one container and the liquid in another and called it a night. [I'll also put in a plug for Le Creuset pots here, because this nightmare cleaned up super easily due to the coating they put on their cast-iron pots. Amazing, and worth the cost and the heft for cooking.]

The next day, I followed the directions from the recipe to make the sauce, but it was really salty and basically tasted burnt. Alas. I made some brown minute rice and ate the beef and vegetable mixture alone over it. 

Though the beef survived and was relatively tasty, I'll need to make some gravy or something to put on the leftovers to make up for the sauce. The burning incident stripped the dish of its nice sweet cherry flavor that other cooks raved about online, which is disappointing, but I still think it would pair well with the cherry balsamic. So, if you try this dish, make sure your pot is big enough, check your liquid measurements twice, and check in on the braising process a little more often than I did, and you should be fine. 

In other beef and cherry news, I think that the balsamic marinade from this month's Real Simple magazine could be used with the cherry balsamic vinegar to a similar, tasty effect on grilled steak. Here is the link if you want to try out a recipe I haven't screwed up.