Home · Technique ladder · Collagen and Slow Braise
Collagen and Slow Braise
Deliberate collagen breakdown, slow braising
18 rungs across 17 volumes
Dishes
Weeknight
Bunny chow
Moules-Frites
Durban masala, and the mutton curry it exists for
Lorne Sausage and Tattie Scone
Pap, three ways
Bredie
Kulajda
Liphalishi lemabele, with umbidvo wetintsanga
Weekend
Dushbara
Maraq fah-fah
Stovies
Calulu de peixe
Beuschel
Dublin Coddle
Gefilte fishProject
Diots au vin blanc de Savoie, with polenta
Papet vaudois
Bobotie
Tafelspitz
Curry Goat
Irish Stew
Naryn
Harisa
Hilib ari
Irn Bru Glazed Gammon
Beshbarmak
Haggis, Neeps and Tatties
Potjiekos
Rabo de Toro
Seswaa
Umngqusho
Svíčková na smetaně
Tripes à la mode de Caen
Cholent
Khash
Untimed
MuqmadAfrica
Somalia & Djibouti
Manage collagen deliberately, and refuse dry high heat on goat and camel
The research is unusually emphatic, and it comes from a study comparing four cooking methods on camel meat.
Kenya, Tanzania & the Swahili Coast
Radiant, patient live fire
Kenyan nyama choma is not a sear. Whole bone-in cuts of goat sit high above a modest bed of charcoal, well away from flame, and cook for an hour or more...
Angola, Namibia & Botswana
The seswaa pound, and the marrow that makes it work
Seswaa looks like the simplest dish in Africa.
South Africa, Lesotho & Eswatini
Layer, add almost no liquid, cook by trapped steam, and never stir
This is the spine of the volume, and it is the same technique in two communities kept apart by law for four decades.
Asia
Armenia and Azerbaijan
Don't rush the soak, and let the gelatine do the work slowly
Cow or sheep feet are soaked in cold water in the refrigerator for 10 to 48 hours, the water changed roughly every two hours for the first 10, leaching blood...
Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan & Turkmenistan
Long, slow simmering for gelatin, not just tenderness
Beshbarmak's broth is built the same way any serious stock is: hours of gentle simmering, two and a half to four depending on the cut, break down collagen into...
Europe
Normandy, Brittany and the Atlantic Coast
The sealed, low, long braise, tripes à la mode de Caen's method
The sealed, low, long braise, tripes à la mode de Caen's method.
Burgundy, Lyon and the Rhône
The rolling-boil paradox in a long braise
The rolling-boil paradox in a long braise.
The Alps and French-speaking Switzerland
Match the poach to the sausage, not the other way round
Diots and longeole are frequently treated in British kitchens as interchangeable Continental sausages, and their traditional methods actively refuse that...
Austria and the Habsburg Table
Hold a gentle simmer, never a rolling boil, for a gelatine-rich working cut
Tafelspitz is a working muscle, the pointed rump, genuinely tough raw and reliant on long, gentle heat to convert its connective tissue to gelatine without...
The Czech Republic and Slovakia
Sear before you braise, because the vegetables in a straight braise never get direct heat
Svíčková's root-vegetable cream sauce is built on a sequencing choice that is easy to skip and ruinous when skipped: the beef and vegetables are seared hard...
Poland
Read cholent as engineering, not folklore
Cholent's twelve-plus hour, unattended, low-heat overnight cook looks, to a modern kitchen, like an eccentric piece of folk cookery.
The Low Countries
Braise low, in malt, and keep the bitterness out of the pot
A malt-forward Trappist dubbel or a Belgian brown ale survives three hours of reduction because its sugars caramelise into deeper, rounder flavour rather than...
Andalusia
Braise long, in wine, until the tail falls from the bone
Rabo de toro depends on nothing more sophisticated than time: oxtail, a genuinely tough, connective tissue heavy cut, braised low and slow in red wine...
Scotland, the Lowlands and the Central Belt
Offal preservation by stuffing and long, gentle simmering
Haggis's core logic, dicing fast spoiling offal, binding it with oatmeal, packing it into a natural casing and simmering it for hours, is functionally an...
Scotland, the Lowlands and the Central Belt
Sweet, acidic braising and reduction
A carbonated, sugared soft drink reduced down around a joint of meat, exactly the same principle as beer or cider elsewhere in this atlas's Europe, applied...
Ireland
Collagen needs real time, not high heat
Mutton and hogget, animals kept alive for years rather than months, carry far more connective tissue than young lamb, and that tissue only becomes tender...
The New British Table
Rest bone-in curries properly, and don't rush the braise
Curry goat and the slower end of Caribbean and curry house cooking alike depend on a long, low simmer on bone-in cuts, the bone itself doing real work building...