Bone broth, ooey-gooey beef tendons, and beef with broccoli
Here’s how I cook bone broth and beef tendons:
Wash 1.5 kilos of beef bones and 1.5 kilos of beef tendons, then lay the bones, then the tendons, in a stockpot that is large enough to contain them, plus about five liters of water. Salt well (I used about 4 tablespoons of rock salt).
Set the stockpot with the salted bones, tendons and water on the stove and bring to the boil. As soon as the contents of the pot hit a rolling boil, reduce the heat to the lowest possible setting. Add your spices (I put in a couple of tablespoons of my spice mix, and two tablespoons of cracked black pepper) and stir those in well. If you want to add a bouquet garni, just tie a handful of fresh herbs (parsely, carrot peels and tops, rosemary, thyme, sage), and toss it into the pot once it boils.
Cover the pot and simmer for four hours, stirring and checking the level of liquid every 20 minutes or so. You want to keep the volume of the liquid high enough to cover all the pot contents, so top the water up as needed.
Once you’re done simmering the tendons and bones for four hours, let the pot and its contents cool enough so you can handle the bones and tendons without scalding yourself — say, about an hour.
Chop up the tendons into bite-sized chunks. Remove the meat and tendons from the bones, as well, and any marrow you may find if your bag of buto-buto included shank bones (just slide a thin knife into the marrow chamber and use that to loosen the marrow, then tap the marrow out). Set these ooey-gooey goodies aside in freezer-safe containers or zip-lock bags. Your total yield of meat and tendons will be about two kilos.
Skim the oil off the top of your bone broth, then pass the broth through a sieve into the containers/bags where you put the tendons and meat, filling each just enough to cover the container contents. The excess broth can be strained and decanted into other freezer-safe containers or zip-lock bags.
Let the beef broth, tendons, and meat cool fully, then freeze them. I like to store these goodies in portions per family meal serving, so it is easy to just take what I need from the freezer and cook with it.
Result
The bone broth will be intensly beefy and cloudy, and you can dilute it up to 1.5 times its original volume without losing flavor — though you may want to add a bit more salt if you dilute it. So you can add 1.5 liters of water to 500ml of bone broth for, say, beef nilaga, or a hearty vegetable soup.
The tendons and meat you store with the bone broth will be gelatinous once defrosted. So will the bone broth. This is normal. That’s the collagen from the bones and tendons that makes it so, and this is called aspic.
If you’re wondering if this can be done in a slow-cooker, yes, it can. But most slow cookers cannot contain three kilos of bones and tendons and five liters of water, so you will need to make smaller batches for the same cooking time.
Your broth and the meat and tendons should last about a month if kept frozen. Not that they ever last more than a week in my house unless I hide them in the very back of my freezer.
A bit of trivia: Bone broth and ooey-gooey tendons are rich and hearty fare that you can add to many dishes (mainly stews) to boost flavor without using boullions or packaged broth mixes, and they give you that fatty, tender mouth-feel that makes everything better at a lower fat content than pure beef fat and lard.
I like adding these tendons and bone broth to my lentil stew, or beef and beans, or my version of my mother’s beef stew.
The collagens in both the broth and the tendons are also good for your skin and bone health. That said, consume these in moderation, so you can live long enough to continue enjoying them.
Beef with Broccoli, my way
So, on to the Beef with Broccoli: Why spend upwards of PHP350 per 200g “two-person” serving of this dish in a restaurant, which will likely be just a few strips of (overcooked) beef and some florets of broccoli (and mostly broccoli stems, if we’re being honest)? I can cook a big batch of this at home, and elevate it to magic, ensuring that I will have enough to feed eight big-appetite people over several meals.
Plus, I can do this for much less cost, per serving, than the per-person serving costs at a restaurant.
What I did was to take 500 grams of good sirloin (costing about PHP260), and cut it into strips, then marinate that in 1 teaspoon of rock salt, 1/4 cup of kalamansi juice (the juice and zest of one lemon will also work well), three tablespoons of oyster sauce and 1/4 cup of brewed soy sauce for 30 minutes.
Then I took a 200g head of broccoli and chopped up the florets, and peeled and chopped the broccoli stems to prep the lovely, tender, nutritious pith. I also chopped two medium red onions (shallots), 200 grams of white shimeji mushrooms, and about half a head of garlic (peeled and mashed) and used two tablespoons of that garlic confit I keep in my ref.
After that, I drained and quickly browned the sirloin strips in a well-oiled wok over medium heat, reserving the marinade, to which I added about two cups of water, then set the sirloin aside.
I brought out and thawed about one kilo of the tendons I’d boiled earlier in the week, drained those once they were thawed, and decanted the broth into the marinade and water mix.
I also prepared 1/4 cup of flour and two tablespoons of butter and one tablespoon of garlic-infused oil from my garlic confit for making a roux that would thicken the sauce. If you don’t have garlic oil, don’t worry, just add to the butter.
While the tendons were thawing (I had no patience to wait today, so I set those in a saucepan with about two cups of water and defrosted those on the stovetop. The total liquid volume from this was about three cups), I used the same wok where I cooked the beef to make the sauce by melting the butter and adding a bit more oil over low heat, then stirring in the flour with a whisk.
I poured in the marinade/water/beef broth combination and whisked some more. By this time, the tendons had defrosted, so I strained off the broth and added it to the sauce in the wok, and set aside the tendons. I simmered the sauce, adjusting the flavors as needed.
Today, I needed a bit more oyster sauce, some soy sauce, and cracked black pepper. When the gravy was silky smooth and glossy, and thick enough to coat the back of the cooking spoon (about 10 minutes of simmering while constantly stirring will do this), I moved the sauce into a bowl and wiped the wok down with a paper towel, re-oiled it, and began cooking the veggies.
Over medium heat, I poured in a couple of tablespoons of cooking oil and a couple of tablespoons of butter. Then I sauteed the onions, then the garlic, then the broccoli stems and mushrooms, stirring well, for five minutes. Then I added the florets and continued cooking the veggies for another five minutes.
Next, I popped in the beef tendons and poured in the sauce, and, when everything was simmering, I added the sirloin strips, mixed everything, and simmered the beef and broccoli for another five minutes before making final flavor adjustments (it needed more pepper), and serving it up with hot rice.
The total yield of this particular recipe is about two kilos, give or take, so I divided this up into four equal parts, refrigerated three containers’ worth of the dish, and served the remaining fourth for dinner. The total cost? Less than PHP1,000.
There is my beef with broccoli. I also used about a tablespoon of my spice mix for the sirloin marinade, and you can use any spice mix you’d like with that, too, as long as there is no salt in that spice mix.
I may not be able to cook for you right now, but I sure as hell want to share my recipe and how-tos, in case you’d like to try this for yourselves. Bon appetit, everybunny!
Of course I can cook Chinese food. I am the descendant of a man named Tan Bu Co from Fujian who arrived in this country with nothing but the clothes on his back, and made his first fortune from selling dimsum in the streets of Ormoc, then became one of the biggest land-owners there because he fell in love with a redheaded peninsulares lass whose mother wanted a rich, landed husband for her daughter. This is in my blood, people.
