No Knife Needed

The last couple of hours in a stew or a roast or whatever it is always seems to follow a trend. The meat is chewy, sinewy, gets stuck in your teeth, so you put the lid back on and figure you'll come back and check again later. This is the longest, most drawn out time in the stewing process, because the meat's cooked, it's edible, and goddammitI'mhungry. It doesn't matter how many times you check that beef, each trial taste is an advertisement for floss and a masochistic exercise in patience. Until suddenly! It's like that hunk of cow decided to jump off a cliff and beat itself silly on the way down so it could melt in your mouth one day. Every little cow's dream.

For this particular stew, which is technically a pot roast plus beef shank, the meat was marinated in a red wine sauce (preferably overnight, but for lack of proper planning, it was just from morning till the time I got off my butt to cook this shoulder). The shank is what makes the sauce really comes together - the collagen melts off the meat and bone and makes the sauce thick and rich. And to top it all off, there's this little stub of bone with what Anthony Bourdain has appropriately termed, God's Butter. Oh yeah. That's marrow in there. Well, not in this picture, because I sucked that out well before the stew was done. Shank isn't the best source of bone marrow; if that's what you're looking for, better go for marrow bone (duh) and roast it, but what you can dig out of that little stub in a shank is a nice little cherry on top.