Short rib ragu and pappardelle

A hearty ragu requires long, slow cooking of cheaper cuts of meat, braised until the meat falls off the bone and the fat renders down so you can skim some off but leave in just enough to make the sauce unctuous without being greasy. Short ribs are my favourite cut for making a ragu and they are still relatively cheap despite the popularity of so-called ‘cheap cuts’ increasing substantially of late so that they are no longer quite so cheap.

While a number of supermarkets stock short ribs, they are often vacuum packed so it’s difficult to tell if they’ve been evenly cut. A good butcher however, is your friend here. You’re looking for individual short ribs still on the bone that are uniformly thick with a good marbling of fat. Like most slow braises, they benefit from resting for 24 hours after you cook them for the flavours to develop. They freeze well too. In short (fully intended, you’ve read my stuff before) you can make this in advance and heat it up while you cook some pasta for a delicious quick meal. Yes, it takes a while to make the ragu but this is batch-cooking-fine-home-dining at it’s best. You don’t have to make your own pasta but try it once and you’ll be hooked.

Ingredients

Ragu

(This is for four portions but you can scale it up or down as required)

1kg of beef short ribs. Ideally four ribs each weighing about 250g

2 medium carrots cut into small dice

1 large onion cut into small dice

2 ribs of celery cut into small dice

4 large cloves of garlic finely sliced

70g of tomato puree (really can’t recommend Cirio double concentrated highly enough)

A bunch of parsley and thyme plus a bay leaf tied with chef’s string into a bouquet garni

A tin of chopped tomatoes or a 500g carton of passata

Half a bottle of Chianti

200ml of beef stock

Pappardelle

(This is for four portions but you can scale it up or down as required)

4 eggs plus 4 egg yolks

Double zero (Tipo ‘00’) pasta flour

Or dried pasta of your choice

Making the ragu

Step 1 - Browning the meat and sweating off the vegetables

Bring a pan large enough to hold all of the short ribs to a medium-high heat and add a tablespoon of vegetable oil. You won’t need more than that because the fat in the ribs will render out as you brown them. Working in batches of no more than two ribs at a time, liberally sprinkle salt on all surfaces of the meat and brown them in the pan. To get a rich flavour, you need to really caramelisethe meat on all sides. This means leaving them undisturbed for 4-5 minutes per side until they look like this.

You don’t need to brown the bone side at the top but once you’ve done all three sides you’ll have something that looks like this

Brown all of the short ribs and put them on a plate to rest. The pan will have far more fat in it than when you started. Pour most of it off into a bowl keeping just enough to sweat the vegetables. Try not to lose any of the sediment on the bottom of the pan when you do this. Put all of the vegetables in the pan on a medium heat and sweat them until soft.

Once soft, add the tomato puree and cook for a couple of minutes then add the bouquet garni, Chianti and beef stock. Boil for 3-4 minutes to reduce slightly.

While it’s boiling you’ll see the impurities rise to the top of the pan. Skim off whatever you can. Remove from the heat and put the short ribs back in, bone side up. Take a square of parchment paper, scrunch it up, run it under a cold tap and then cover the ribs, vegetables and liquid. Add a single layer of foil on top of the pan and then finally add a lid. This will help keep the moisture in the pan while it cooks. Put the pan in an oven set to 100c (yes 100c it’s not a typo) for 10-12 hours (that’s not a typo either). At this point if you’ve been cooking along without reading this through, now would be a good time to curse my name and order a pizza. You probably won’t be eating this tonight unless you started cooking at the crack of dawn.

Step 2 - Meat off the bone and finishing the sauce

Once the meat has cooked for 10-12 hours it will be soft enough to cleanly pull out the bone. Remove the short ribs and put them in a container or bowl. Pour the sauce into a different large container or bowl. Place both in the fridge for a couple of hours and the excess fat will rise to the top of the sauce and become visible on the outside of the short ribs. Skim the fat off.

30 minutes before you are ready to eat, remove both from the fridge and pull the bone out of each short rib. Using your hands or a fork, press the meat until it falls apart into bite size chunks.

Pour the sauce into a clean frying pan. If it looks too thin, turn up the heat and reduce it a little. Then add the meat, stir and if you have made more than you need, put the extras into freezer bags. Freezing 1-2 portions at a time and lying the bags flat so that they freeze in a thin layer rather than a heavy blob will make them quicker to defrost.

Step 3 - Finishing the sauce

Do this in the 3-4 minutes before your pasta is ready. If you are using dried pasta, time so that the sauce comes up to temperature as your pasta hits al dente. Just before adding the pasta to the sauce (never the other way round), add a couple of knobs of cold butter to bring the sauce together and stir it in quickly. It also gives the sauce a glossy sheen. Pasta into the sauce, fold together, out onto a plate and top with finely chopped parsley, freshly grated parmesan and a few twists of freshly milled pepper. Eat straight away.

Fresh pappardelle

Fresh pasta is relatively quick and easy once you get the hang of it. It’s also silkier than any shop bought dried pasta you’ll ever buy. There are many pasta dough recipes. This is my trusted recipe after lots of testing.

Step 1 - Making the dough

The basic principle is that you need 1 egg per person and then flour in a 3:2 flour:egg ratio. I like to use Burford Brown eggs because their orange yolks give the pasta a pleasing yellow colour. For extra rich pasta, I use 1 whole egg and 1 yolk per person. Weigh your eggs and extra yolks if using. In a second bowl, weigh out 1.5 times the weight of the eggs. Make a well in the flour (either in the bowl or on your counter) and pour in the eggs. Using a fork, gradually incorporate the flour and then knead until you have a uniformly yellow ball of dough with no flecks of flour remaining. The gluten will tighten up and it’s hard work but do persevere. Wrap in cling film (see here for a video demonstrating my cling film expertise) and leave to rest in the fridge for 30 minutes.

Step 2 - Rolling out the dough

Pasta dough dries out quickly so work in batches keeping the rest covered in cling film. I tend to cut it into as many portions as I have used whole eggs but you can be wild and do it in larger batches if you wish. Use a rolling pin to flatten the piece of dough into an approximate square, run the dough through the thickest setting on your pasta roller. Fold into dough in half, flatten a little with a rolling pin if necessary and then run it through the pasta machine at the highest setting again but this time at 90 degrees to the original pass. Do that four times, turning 90 degrees as you go each time. Then feed the pasta through the machine twice at each setting until you get to the thinnest. Each time you run the pasta through, give it a light dusting of flour to stop it sticking.

When you have run it through the thinnest setting, flour the surface again and then fold it over so that the ends meet but don’t press down on the pasta. Flour the new exposed surface and repeat until you have a thick wad of pasta. Using a sharp knife, cut it into thick strips.

Yes, yes, as I read it back this could probably do with a video. I will try to film one next time I make it. Pour a little semolina flour onto your work surface and then toss each ribbon of pappardelle into the semolina to stop it from sticking to itself.

Repeat with the remaining pasta dough and cook in a large pan of heavily salted boiling water. It will cook in about a minute.