New Year New Cuts: Beef Shin

The rule of thumb in meat is that the more work a muscle is doing the tougher it’s going to be. So it doesn’t take an old hand on the farm to extrapolate the cow’s lifestyle of walking around fields and chewing grass to realise that the cheeks and legs are do the most heavy lifting. Where internal muscles like the fillet can be cut like butter cuts like cheek and shin need hours of cooking in order to yield into something approaching tender. The time and effort is, however, richly rewarded.

Although cheek was always renowned for it’s great taste and low prices it hasn’t gone unnoticed by consumers and due to the fairly small amount of cheek on any given cow (maybe three kilos per animal) the price has risen. Not to call shin the new cheek but maybe it is.

One of the thriftiest cuts on a cow it cooks down very similarly to cheek, keeping a sense of structural integrity until about 4 hours of cooking. The tendons in shin also cook down in a similar way to in cheek giving a rich unctuousness to the dish in which it is being used.

Perfect in stews but also very effective in curries, chilli or pulled beef recipes. We thoroughly recommend employing a pressure cooker to cut cooking times. Around half an hour to forty minutes in the pressure cooker will yield similar results to three hours of simmering in a regular pot.

Shin is also quite a lean cut, making it healthy as well as hearty. This can also make slightly tricky to cook as you will need to keep an eye on the levels of moisture, leaner cuts are more likely to dry out. Shin stews benefit greatly from the addition of some lardo or chunks of bacon at the beginning of the cooking process to make sure it stays well lubricated.

One of our very favourite shin recipes is this fantastic and simple pie from Sean Maher our Beckenham manager and true gourmand.