Winter Essential Recipes - Caribbean Oxtail Stew

Dear friends, I hereby drop you a delicious winter recipe that I have personally made for the last seven years, to warm myself and my guests when temperatures in our Northern Hemisphere hit zero.

I can tell you straight up that it is one of the most heart-warming meals I have ever made and offers key nutrients to beat the big freeze.

Ingredients such as allspice, garlic, onion, and hot peppers, assist our immune system and cardiovascular health. The wonderful compounds found in these natural foods infuse the liquids they are stewed in over many hours and provide us with much-needed energy.

Here's how to make a meal for two people:

Ingredients:

2 tablespoons of organic, cold-pressed Olive Oil.

Please politely note, do your own research on the use of all processed vegetable oils such as canola (palm), sunflower, or rapeseed oil. They cause mitochondrial damage to our cells, cause obesity, and should only be used for lubricating machinery, as they were 100 years ago. Check all supermarket ingredients for these processed oils and avoid them at all costs. Sadly, they lurk in most goods found in those mainstream outlets now.

4 x organic Oxtail pieces.

If you are vegetarian, pescatarian or vegan, you can add whatever you like further down the line of cooking time with seafood or fish, plantain, green beans, red, green or yellow peppers, sweet potatoes, etc)

1 x white organic Onion - chopped into small pieces

3 x organic Carrots

2 x organic Celery

2 x teaspoons of chopped organic Garlic

1 x tablespoon of freshly prepared Thyme

½ teaspoon of smoked Paprika

1 x tablespoon of organic ketchup / Tomato puree paste

1 x whole Scotch Bonnet Pepper (or add other hot chili peppers if not locally available)

2 x chopped organic Spring Onions

8 x whole Pimento seeds (aka Allspice)

2 x tablespoons of Worcestershire Sauce

1 x teaspoon of Curry Powder

1 x can of drained Butter Beans (Cannelloni beans, or any other beans you may have lurking in your cupboard)

Sprinkle some Celtic Salt to taste and some fresh organic Parsley to serve. Find out why Celtic Salt has key beneficial minerals here.

Optional: Beef stock, or veal stock for deep flavour tings that we used here with organic Veal Stock.

How to make it:

1. Firstly, season your Oxtail chunks with Celtic salt and organic milled Black Peppercorns.

2. Drizzle some Olive Oil to your chosen cooking pot, (the larger the better), and apply medium heat until your pan is hot. Then add the Oxtail pieces and sauté them, stirring them every few minutes to help brown off, and seal the outside.

3. Add your white onion, spring onions, garlic, thyme, allspice, Worcestershire sauce, and smoked paprika to the pan, and stir all these ingredients in for about a minute or so, making sure that you do not burn anything. Watch your heat.

4. Luz in your chopped pieces of scotch bonnet pepper, add the tomato paste, and curry powder, then keep stirring until it all blends together.

5. Then pour in 4-5 cups of water to begin with, bring it to a boil, then switch it back to a simmer.

For this recipe, I also added 500ml of organic veal stock at this point to give this dish an even deeper flavour. You don’t need to add this, or additional organic beef stock, as the Oxtail will give you amazingly deep flavours. On this occasion, I feel I have found a very special flavour that complements the overall recipe and it was incredible to taste the difference.

6. Let your new liquid-infused pot simmer until the Oxtail becomes tender and falls off the bone, occasionally stirring your pan every 30 minutes. This can take between 4-6 hours in a heat of around 95’C. You will tell it's ready when the liquid turns dark and the meat falls off the bone.

If you have a slow-cooker then you know the score. It’s a long, wonderful process, and the longer you leave this blend cooking, the deeper the flavour layers will become.

7. Thirty minutes before serving, add the Butter Beans and decide whether you should reduce the water content in the stock, or not. If you would like your stock to become thicker, you can add a tsp of corn flour to a small glass of water, and then pour it into the pot to make your liquid thicker. As you can see in the photo above, we could not wait for that, as it smelled so good after 8 hours! But tomorrow night, this addition will be in play for round two and the flavours will no doubt become richer.

8. Serve with some hot buttered sourdough toast and/or whatever drink floats your boat. A spiced shot of Jamaican rum, or even a 'full-bodied' glass of red wine such as an Argentinian Malbec, or a Spanish Rioja (Reserva) will give these flavours a run for their money on your palate if you are an alcohol consumer.

Fresh organic mango or pineapple juice would be my personal choice if I’m not in the mood for drinking the previously mentioned beverages.

This wonderful Caribbean-inspired winter stew recipe ideally needs to be made in vats for freezing purposes. Storing foods like this for days when it's just too cold to think makes for great forward-planning. You can just just pull a batch out of the freezer, defrost it, and slowly warm it up in a pan.

Enjoy!

Zac