Exactly what you need on a freezing winter day spent outside shoveling snow – the hearty, yet fragrant aroma of savory braised beef, flooding your senses the moment you walk in the door. It’s chow time!
This is a meal that I reserve for those cold snowy days when you need something pungent and restorative. There is nothing better than a hearty stew (of sorts) to satisfy the need for the deep nourishment that 100% grassfed meat will give you. The fat soluble vitamins in the tallow is totally nutritious – full of vitamins A, D, E and K2.
Saturated Fat is Not the Problem in Heart Disease
The other day, I was listening to “Doctor’s Radio” on my satellite radio. It’s a show transmitted from New York City’s NYU Langone Medical Center. There are interviews and specialty doctors answering listeners’ questions all day on various topics. It’s interesting, but being an alternative practitioner, I am appalled by the straight allopathic medical approach without any thought or knowledge (seemingly) of current research or anything outside the box.
It happened that I was listening to a cardiologist answering questions about fats. She was still spewing all the old rhetoric about saturated fats being bad for you – listing butter, cheese and beef as the worst. She even had to make a special point about saying that coconut oil is bad because it is saturated and that you should eat vegetable oils.
I felt like calling in but I knew that it would be difficult for me to control myself (and I was driving). After all, current research is now showing (apparently this doc does not read her own medical journals – so much for science based medicine) that heart disease is not all about cholesterol and saturated fats.
This is what the Weston Price Foundation has been saying for years.
What the Research REALLY Shows
A meta analysis (a study of all the studies) in 2014 of 80 studies that involved more than half a million people, conducted by Dr. Rajiv Chowdhury, a cardiovascular epidemiologist at Cambridge University concluded that,
current evidence does not clearly support cardiovascular guidelines that encourage high consumption of polyunsaturated fatty acids and low consumption of total saturated fats.
Furthermore, a study was published in the British Medical Journal in 1996. Dr. Walter Willett, head of the department of nutrition at Harvard University School of Public Health had been following 40,000 middle aged men for diet and heart health. He found that those people who replaced foods high in saturated fat with foods high in carbohydrates, experienced no reduction in heart disease. But this was exactly what the health officials and the government was telling the public to do – replace foods high in saturated fat with foods high in carbohydrates (and rancid vegetable oils like soy and canola oils which are also genetically modified).
Eat Those Fatty Grassfed Ribs!
Short ribs happen to be a very fatty cut of meat – so much so that it’s best to make this the day before so that you can scrape the fat off.
Now here is the recipe!
Ingredients
- 3 - 4 pounds of grassfed beef short ribs (where I get mine)
- 4 carrots peeled and chopped
- 1/2 medium celery root, skin removed and chopped
- 1 medium onion
- 1/2 cup red wine
- 2 cups beef stock (how to make)
- Sea salt and pepper to taste
- 4 bay leaves
- Handful chopped parsley (fresh if possible)
- 4 clove garlic squashed and chopped
Instructions
- On top of the stove, heat the dutch oven to medium, melt some tallow, bacon fat or lard and gently brown all side of the short ribs
- You may have to do this in sections until all the meat is browned
- Hold the meat aside in a large bowl
- There should be plenty of fat in the pan -- add all the vegetables except the garlic and saute until somewhat soft
- At the end, for a minute or two, add the garlic and let it warm up
- Remove the vegetables and add the wine and scrape the bottom of the pan - let the wine reduce a bit
- Add the meat and vegetables back in
- Add the beef stock, and the bay leaves and salt and pepper
- Make sure the meat is covered with liquid - if not, add some more stock or water or wine
- Cover the dutch oven and put inside the stove at 350 degrees F for 3 -- 4 hours
- Remove from oven and let cool
- Remove the meat into a separate bowl and pour the gravy into another bowl
- Le the meat cool a little, but this is the best time to use two forks to pull the shreds of meat apart
- If you wait until the meat is cold it is much harder
- After you pull the meat apart keep it in the bowl
- Refrigerate until the next day when you will remove all the fat that comes to the top (there may be some on the meat but it is mostly on the gravy)
- Instructions for a thicker gravy
- Remove all the meat from the dutch oven
- Put a strainer over a large pot
- Pour the gravy into the pot through the strainer
- Take about half the vegetables and put back in the pot
- Using an immersion blender, blend the vegetables with the liquid gravy
- This will thicken the gravy without using any starches or flours and it tastes great
- Put the vegetables that you saved, back into the gravy
- You now have a thick and savory gravy with vegetable pieces (you may want to add salt to the gravy or at the table)
- When refrigerated, this gravy will gel due to all the collagen and gelatin in the bones and the meat
- If you do not want to go through this step, simply follow the directions for the meat as above
Equipment
- 5 – 6 gallon dutch oven (where to buy a dutch oven)
- knives (where to buy high quality knives)
You can serve this with sweet potatoes, winter squash or julienned green squash, Zoodle sauce or just plain!
