The most tender part of an animal does not necessarily have the most flavour. Thus, while fillet (or undercut in the subcontinent) is the most prized portion of beef, it is not the tastiest. Until I came to realise this, I spent a lot of money on fillet steak instead of going for less expensive cuts like rib-eye.

In Pakistan, understandably, butchers sell cuts of meat that are used for our cuisine, i.e., mince and diced meat. At best, you can get chops and undercut. But cuts like hangar, T-bone and rib-eye steaks are not so easy to buy. Nor, I suspect, is oxtail, although I have never asked for it in Pakistan.

However, a couple of weeks ago, the lady wife picked up a kilo and a half of oxtail from Rose’s, our local fancy (read expensive) butcher as this is not a cut available in the supermarkets. She placed the two-inch long pieces in a large casserole, browned them in oil over medium heat, and then threw in a cocktail of herbs and spices that included cinnamon, salt, pepper, cumin powder, some crushed red chillies, rosemary and bay leaves. Lots of chopped tomatoes, quartered onions, chopped garlic and ginger followed.

Finally, some cooking wine completed the preparations. As we have noted before, the alcohol evaporates during cooking, so the dish is entirely kosher when served. You can substitute good beef stock for the wine, but the flavour will change.

The best steak need not necessarily be fillet, it can be made of other cuts as well

The covered casserole was placed in the bottom oven of our Aga, a heavy cast iron cooking range peculiar to England that is always on, heating the kitchen. We use the lower oven to warm plates as it heats very gently. The dish cooked overnight and when I came down to the kitchen the next morning, the room was redolent with the fragrance of the stew.

The downside of the dish is that it gives off a lot of fat while it cooks, so the first thing you will need to do is to skim it off. Like most stews and curries, it improves over a day or so, as cooking it ahead of time allows the spices and herbs to meld together. Served in deep soup plates, accompanied with good, crusty sourdough bread, the oxtail made a delicious meal. The meat literally fell off the bone at the touch of a fork.

Returning to the subject of beef, good butchers hang carcasses in large, refrigerated rooms for a few days. The best ones age their steaks for up to 35 days. In this time, the meat loses some of its moisture, and thus its weight is reduced, pushing up the price. Natural chemical processes break down the fibre, tenderising the meat. All this makes good steaks expensive.

The other day in London, I walked into a famous butcher’s shop situated close to the friends we were staying with. I wanted to give them a treat, so asked for four rib-eye steaks, noting that fillet was selling for 53 pounds a kilo. This is close to Rs8,000, or Rs2,000 for each steak. Luckily, the rib-eye was cheaper.

At home, I lathered the steaks with olive oil and soy sauce, and left them to marinate for a couple of hours. Just before the other three sat down to their first course, I put a heavy frying pan on the burner, and set it at maximum until the surface was very hot. The steaks went on, sizzling away for just over two minutes before being flipped and cooked for another couple of minutes.

Next, while they were cooling and the juices were being redistributed away from the centre where they had been concentrated while cooking, I prepared a sauce. Pouring in some cooking wine to deglaze the slightly burned bits in the frying pan, followed by a little salt and pepper, I tossed in a generous pat of butter and sprinkled a teaspoon of flour over the bubbling liquid. (Again, good beef stock is a perfectly acceptable substitute for wine). As soon as it had thickened, the sauce went into a small jug to accompany the steak. Our hostess had baked some potatoes and prepared a fresh green salad.

The steak was meltingly tender, full of flavour and cooked medium rare. You just can’t go wrong with a good cut of meat.

PS: Incidentally, my foodie friend Mohammad Shehzad informs me that oxtail translates as dumgaza in Urdu.

Published in Dawn, Sunday Magazine, May 3rd, 2015

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