Oxtail Braised in Red Wine

Beefy, flavourful, and off-the-bone tender oxtail braised in red wine, with crunchy carrots and pearl onions. We show you a step-by-step guide on slow-braising meat.

This was one of the very first dishes I cooked following a recipe. When I first started trying to cook, I always felt really badass adding red wine to my cooking, probably because I was way too young to be allowed a glass. That was as close as it got to drinking wine.

I still remember tasting the first attempt. The oxtail had a very strange acidity to it. It turned out I never gave the alcohol enough time to evaporate before adding more cooking liquid. Because of how alcohol evaporates (there are many wonderful articles/papers on this topic), once you add the cooking liquid, you will not be able to meaningfully evaporate more. It was a lesson I would never forget.

I also thought it would be interesting to introduce an alternative way to stove-top braising – cooking the whole cast iron pot in the oven. This is a method I first tried when I was obsessed with cooking bolognese. The oven gives the surface of the pot a lot more browning, which introduces much deeper flavours.

There are two downsides to this method though. 1) You have to attend to it quite regularly to even out the browning by mixing. 2) Your kitchen will smell like oxtail. The latter is only a problem if you have an open-plan kitchen like mine. Smelling your wonderful cooking for three long hours will remove quite a bit of your appetite.

You can achieve a very good result cooking the whole thing on the stove with the lid on. That way, you can forget about it and come back in three hours.

0:00 – Intro
0:29 – Searing the Oxtail
1:15 – Preparing the Aromatic Vegetables
2:08 – Finishing Browning the Oxtail
2:47 – Sweating the Aromatic Vegetables
3:19 – Tomato Puree
3:32 – Reducing the Red Wine
4:24 – Chicken Stock & Bay Leaves
5:25 – 2 Cooking Options
5:45 – Finishing the Oxtail Stew
8:15 – Garnish

*Ingredients*
Oxtail – about 1 kg
Carrots – 3 unpeeled and cut into chunks, 3 peeled and cut into bite-size
Celery – about 2 sticks, cut into chunks
Onion – 1 large, cut into chunks
Garlic – 3 cloves
Pearl onions (optional) – peeled
Tomato puree – about 200 ml
Bay leaves – about 3
(Cheap) dry red wine – 750 ml
Chicken stock (homemade or store-bought) – about 750 ml
Salt
Black pepper
Vegetable oil
Parsley – thinly sliced

*Directions*
1. Preheat the oven to 150°C (302°F) fan.
2. Heat the cast iron pot on medium-high heat (induction 7.5) and add vegetable oil. Season the oxtail with salt and black pepper. Once the oil starts to shimmer, add the oxtail pieces. Make sure they form one layer. Do not crowd the pan. Brown them in batches if necessary.
3. Once the oxtail pieces are browned on all sides, remove them from the pot and add the unpeeled carrots, celery, onion, and garlic. Cook until the vegetables are slightly browned.
4. Add tomato puree and stir to mix. Cook for about another minute.
5. Add red wine and cook to evaporate the alcohol. You should aim to reduce the wine by about half. This should take at least 5 minutes.
6. Add oxtail back to the pot and add just enough chicken stock to cover most of the ingredients. Bring the pot back to a simmer.
7. Add bay leaves and whatever herb you desire.
8. Add the pot to the preheated oven and cook for about 3 hours. Stir to even out the browning every half an hour.
9. After three hours, remove all the aromatic vegetables and the herbs. Skim off most of the fat. The dish can be served at this stage if desired.
10. Add carrots and pearl onion to the pot and cover with a lid. Cook for another 30 minutes on the stove at medium-low heat (induction 4.5).
11. Serve and garnish with thinly sliced parsley.

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[sizzling sound] I mean, yeah, force… Oh my God. Off the bone, just like that. Today, we’re gonna make some braised oxtail with red wine. This was probably the first recipes I cooked as a kid and I remember I would always add way too much red wine,

And never gave it enough time to reduce. So they never turned out well. But we’re not gonna do that today. So, shall we? First, we’re gonna brown the oxtails. Hot pan, high smoke point oil. In this case, vegetable oil. Oxtails are rarely in even shapes

So I would always add a bit more oil in the beginning to make sure they brown properly and we can always skim off the fat at the end. So oxtail in. You want to form one even layer. You don’t want to crowd the pan too much. And we’ll do them in two batches.

What we’re doing now is we’re browning the meat causing the Maillard reaction which makes protein taste more meaty. This is the first stage of the braising process where we build flavour. So, we season as we see here and when we flip, we’ll season the other side, of course.

Now, while that’s browning, we’ll prep our vegetables. So, very simple. Carrots, celery, onion, and a bit of garlic. We want to brown them a bit to build flavours. So I’m gonna keep them chunky and I’m not even gonna peel them. We’ll sieve them out before the end of cooking

And add some peeled carrots to eat. Same with the celery. I like to just keep them chunky like this. About 20. Check on the oxtail. If it’s sticking to the bottom, you leave it for a bit longer and it’s gonna release itself. So I wouldn’t worry too much at this stage.

Now, the onion, again, quite chunky. And the garlic. Normally, I put the garlic separately, but today, because of the long braising, we’re gonna just put them in whole. Vegetables ready. That’s beautiful browning. [sizzling sound] Now, remember to season the other side. Beautiful browning. Now we brown the sides.

At the end of the long braising, they’re going to be spoon tender anyway. So you don’t have to worry about overcooking them at this stage. You just want to get as much flavour as possible from the browning. Alright. Beautifully browned, vegetables in. This is stage two of the braising.

We’re evaporating the colour content of the vegetables to concentrate the flavours so they bring a bit of sweetness, a bit of complexity to the dish. We salt to help them release their juices. Pepper. Oxtails are so meaty and so full of flavour and rich

That they can take on a lot of deeper flavours. If I were braising beef cheeks or something more delicate, I would probably just sweat them down instead of trying to brown them. Alright, now that the vegetables are kind of browned, we add the tomato puree. This is full of umami.

And again, we cook it down a bit just to evaporate a bit of the acidity. And now, the red wine. Cheap and dry red wine. The whole bottle. Don’t use anything expensive. They will evaporate. They will taste the same. And now, to not repeat my childhood mistake, we bring the heat high

And we reduce this down by half. With wine evaporation, once you add other liquids, there is no do-over. The alcohol will not evaporate once you’ve introduced other liquids. So, please take your time. If you’re not sure, do it on the side. Reduce it in a separate saucepan

So you have way more control on the final product And then you can add it back to the stockpot. Now, it’s been seven minutes. This is the amount of reduction you want. We lower the heat a tiny bit. Check on the consistency. Perfect. Smell of the alcohol, of course has completely evaporated.

Add our oxtails back to the pot. Just pray they would fit. [chuckles] Meat juice back in, of course. Now, we top this up with store-bought chicken broth. This looks like an iced latte for some reason, But I promise you, this is chicken broth. Yes, it’s chicken broth. Basically all covered.

And they will shrink down a bit, of course. Then we add the bay leaves. Whatever herbs you have in your fridge, on your countertop, you can add them but for dishes like this I’m quite reluctant to tell people to do a bouquet garni or add some thyme or rosemary because after long cooking

You could barely detect them and you end up with three packets of herbs that you’re not going to use. So, bay leaves, because they actually work magic with long cooking, and B, even when they’re dried, they keep so well. So, at the minimum, bay leaves and whatever else you have.

Now, you can put the lid on, cook it for three hours, and you have a wonderful dinner. Today, because it’s oxtail, I want to bring even more depth to the flavours. So we’re going to cook it without the lid in the oven for the first two and a half hours at 150 fan.

I’ll see you then. All right, it’s been two and a half hours. We check on our oxtail This is what I meant by extra browning. And during the two and a half hours I moved them around every 30 minutes so they could take turns getting a bit more brown.

This introduced so much more flavour and if you really have the time to mother it every half an hour, I would suggest that you do it. Another drawback is the smell. If you have an open plan kitchen like mine, your living room will smell like braised oxtail for the foreseeable future

Whether it’s a good thing or a bad thing, that’s up to you. [chuckles] Now, we take out the oxtail. You have to be a bit careful now with them. Just because they are quite tender. You have to be extremely careful. Let me rephrase. Now,

Leave it to rest on the side for a little bit while we pass the liquid through a sieve. The vegetables, they have served their purposes and they are mushy, they’re not tasty. So we’ll sieve them out and add some fresh vegetables that we would like to eat.

Now, this is also a very good time to skim off the fat. The reason why I didn’t do it in the beginning is, the oxtail themselves release so much fat that you might as well wait and do it towards the end. And as you can see, this is all fat.

Alright, so that took a while. But just think about it. If you skip that step, this whole bowl of fat will end up in your stomachs. Now, we put our oxtails back in. Carefully, of course. Now, optional, I’m going to add a bit of pearl onions

Just because I happen to have them peeled already. If you have to peel them from scratch it takes me half an hour. [chuckles] So don’t bother. And carrots. This time peeled. Beautiful. Now, skimmed liquid back in. Don’t worry too much about covering everything

Because we’re going to put the lid on so the steam would do the job anyway. So, all we have to do, bring it back to a simmer, and we put the lid on for 20 to 30 minutes. And this is perfect because it’ll be good to go in 20 minutes

But if you need more time you can just keep lowering the heat and it can go straight to the middle of the dining table when your guests are ready, and it’ll be hot. I’ll see you then. Alright, after about 25 minutes… we have this beauty. The carrots are cooked but still crunchy.

We have the pearl onions. The oxtails are cooked beautifully. They’re fork tender. The smell is incredible. I was going to make a sauce on the side but this is way too beautiful. I think we just have to serve this in the pot. To that, we’re going to add some thinly sliced parsley

For some brightness and colour. And there you have it. Oxtail braised in red wine. I really hope you enjoy. [bell rings] I mean, yeah, force… Oh my God. Off the bone, just like that. Well browned. Oh my God. Perfectly seasoned.