The inspiration behind our Slow Cooked Beef with Green Beans and Cherry Tomatoes
Heavily braised meats teamed with heavy sides are too heavy for the warmer months so we needed to come up with a seasonal dish that was light yet still full of the flavour you get from traditional slow cooking. It also needed to be remarkable and nutritious!
The Ingredients
Beef
Beef chuck is our choice of cut for this meal and works perfectly. This cut of meat does a fair amount of work as it up near the neck of the animal and is naturally quite lean. However, we still trim to remove any unwanted fat.
We then team our meat with our braising vegetables and home-made stock, which is then slow cooked. The result is a melt in your mouth, tender meat with plenty of flavour.
Beans
It is a great time of year for this green vegetable. Cooked right they give a great textural element and freshness to any dish and in this case balance the meat beautifully.
Anchovies
Many of you wouldn't even know they are there but these amazing little creatures provide a great depth of flavour. Anchovy fans will appreciate the subtlety. If you're not an anchovy fan ignore that you've just read this as the flavours blend beautifully and you wont even recognise them!
Almonds
Almonds add a textural component to the dish whilst also providing a rich and buttery background flavour.
Tomatoes
We have a couple of different variations of tomatoes in this dish. Paste, tinned and also fresh which gives us an opportunity to build flavours through each of the cooking processes when building the meal.
Why does the end dish work?
Our Chef Dave says "textures play a huge part in the end product and mouth enjoyment of this meal. You obviously need the flavour to be there, which is present due to the care and time taken to cook the beef and the way we handle each of the accompaniments but the almonds, anchovies and beans tie it together extremely well. It's fresh and crisp which many would find hard to achieve with frozen meals. We've definitely nailed it with this meal!"
For those with food intolerances, this meal is low FODMAP and gluten, lactose, onion and garlic free. Delivery is free for all our home-delivered ready-made meals.
