Beef Cheeks x 3 Ways

I placed an online meat order a few weeks back, which can be fraught with issues. The minimum order for frozen beef cheeks was 7kg, which I was happy to buy, but I expected them to be in small packages. But no, the 7kg was one huge frozen block which I struggled to squeeze into my overloaded freezer. I could thaw the lot, cook and freeze it, but my tastes are too fickle to commit to 7kg of something I’ve cooked over a weekend.

Fortunately some friends offered to take 4kg off me, leaving me with 3kg. I made three dishes.

First, the cheeks were seared then slow cooked for 8 hours with mushrooms, carrot, celery, onion and red wine. The veggies and sauce were puréed and reduced, then spooned over the cheeks which sat on a bed of mashed potato with broccoli on the side.

They were melt in the mouth tender and the gravy was very flavoursome.

For the second recipe, I bagged a seared cheek with garlic and rosemary, nothing else, and cooked it in the sous vide at 57.5C for 48 hours. I had a small hiccup when my power went out 6 times on the second day, making me nervous about leaving it overnight, but the power remained on.

In sous vide cooking, temperature equals done-ness while time equals texture. The cheek came out juicy medium rare and very very tender.

Finally another sous vide recipe was very similar to the slow cooker version. Similar ingredients, but I reduced the red wine and sherry with herbs, then froze it so the whole lot could be easily sealed in a vacuum bag. Into the sous vide at 82C for 12 hours.

The flavor of the entire dish was similar to the slow cooker version, and the beef was similarly tender.

While it was delicious, it wasn’t better than the slow cooker version and of course it lacked the added bonus of filling my house with the fragrance of cooking.