The article is about how to cook beef jelly . The recipe and some tricks of this dish will be useful to every housewife. Jellied beef legs are healthy and nutritious. It does not hurt sometimes to include it in the diet of your family.
Dish history
Do you know how jellied meat or aspic appeared? His ancestor was a rich meat broth. Cooling down, he turned into a dense mass. In the cartilage and bones are substances that replace gelatin. Previously, this was considered a product defect, and the broth was constantly heated to get rid of viscosity.
It was the French who were able to make this drawback a virtue. They cooked together poultry, pork, game, veal and rabbit. After that, minced meat was prepared from boiled meat, mixed with eggs and spices, poured with a small amount of broth and put away in the cold, sometimes put under pressure. This dish was called "galantine", translated from French - "jelly". That's exactly galantine was the ancestor of our aspic. The recipe was brought to us by French chefs. Using the example of galantine, they decided to improve the Russian jelly: they lightened the broth, tinted with turmeric, lemon, saffron. So it became an ordinary jelly delicious jellied.
Nowadays, aspic is a very popular dish. In different countries, it is filled with new additives and recipes. There are many recipes for jelly from various kinds of meat, seafood, vegetables. There are even fruit jellies!
The beef leg jelly recipe allows you to cook the most delicious dish.
How to choose the right legs
- It is necessary to carefully examine the meat, it must be fresh. Not quite fresh legs can spoil the smell and taste of the dish.
- If you buy frozen feet, pay attention to their color. It should be pink, smooth, without spots that remain from repeated defrosting.
- Be sure to smell the meat. It should smell nice and light, a bit sweet.
- Before use, frozen legs must be thawed, scraped with a knife and rinsed.
Ingredients needed to cook beef jellied meat:
- 0.5 kg of beef legs;
- 1 carrot;
- 1 onion;
- 3 cloves of garlic;
- 1 PC. bay leaf;
- peppercorns (to taste);
- salt (to taste);
- fresh greens.
You can’t do without vegetables and spices
- Vegetables need to be peeled, washed and put at the beginning of cooking. They should be removed one hour and a half after the start of cooking.
- If you want your beef jellied meat to have a beautiful beige-golden hue, put a whole unpeeled onion in it, after washing it and removing one top layer of the husk.
- Vegetables should not be digested and turn into porridge.
- Spices in jellied beef legs are absolutely suitable for your taste. Most often, allspice, black and white, bay leaf, cloves, dill are used. Spices are best added at the same time as meat.
How to Cook Jellied Beef Legs
So, for starters, take beef legs, scald with boiling water, scorch them over the fire and clean them of dirt and soot as best as possible. Cut off the rough skin with a knife and remove the hooves. Cut or chop your legs into pieces.
After soaking them in cold water for a couple of hours. Then it is necessary to drain this water and pour the meat fresh so that on top of the water is about 10 cm. Uncut carrots and onions must be put in a pot with meat and water. Cooking fire should be at the very minimum level. Boil jellied meat on such a fire for about eight hours, with the lid half open. If foam appears, remove it with a slotted spoon. As water evaporates, it must be added. About half an hour before cooking, remove the carrots and onions with a slotted spoon, salt the broth, put peas and bay leaf.
After you turn off the fire, remove the legs from the broth. Leave them to cool. Then it is necessary to separate the meat from the bone. It is better, of course, to disassemble it with your hands, since in this case you can be sure that not a single, even the smallest, bone fragment will get into the dish. You can also cut the meat or scroll in a meat grinder, but not everyone likes this method.
Grind the garlic in the garlic. Then put the meat on plates where the jellied meat will harden, pour it with broth and sprinkle with squeezed garlic. After your masterpiece is ready, it must be put in the refrigerator for solidification. Before serving, decorate, sprinkle with herbs.
How to cook aspic transparent
In order for the aspic to be transparent, the following conditions must be observed.
- After the broth has boiled, make the fire minimal.
- During cooking, the aspic should not simmer, but slowly languish over a small fire.
- After the first boiling, it is necessary to drain the water, rinse the pan, pour food again with water and put everything to boil. After the jelly has begun to boil, it is absolutely necessary to strain it through cheesecloth and bring it to a boil again. Then it can be filtered again through cheesecloth, so that it is clearly transparent.
How to cook beef jellied meat
How long it takes to cook the broth for the jelly, it is obvious - until the meat itself leaves the bone, the cartilages become quite soft, about half of the water in the pan will remain. Like it or not, the broth should be very saturated.
On average, the cooking time for the broth is approximately 6 to 12 hours. The more broth for the jelly will be cooked, the richer will be its aroma and taste, and the consistency will be stronger. After everything is cooked, it is necessary to get bones, spices and vegetables from the pan. Vegetables and spices can be thrown away, and bones can be separated from meat and cartilage.
How to decorate
You can cut, for example, carrots from various figures. First, put meat at the bottom of the dish, fill it with broth, put figurines of vegetables on top . You can serve aspic in another way. Put the decorations in the original form dish first, then the meat, pour the broth. Before serving, take your dish, turn upside down and put the frozen jellied meat on a dish. It will turn out original.
And finally, another beautiful decoration, truly spring. First, boil a couple of eggs. Separate the yolk from the protein. Crush the yolk , and cut the protein into long strips. Put chopped meat on the bottom of the dish, pour it with broth. Then make a circle from the crushed yolk, and lay out the protein strips around the circle. So you get a beautiful egg daisy. You can add greens, parsley leaves will look best. After that, pour everything carefully in the broth and refrigerate. Now you know how to cook jellied beef legs and decorate it.
Enjoy your meal!