How to make Osso Bucco: a slow-cooked stew from Lombardy

I must have written thousands of words about my love of stews, braises, and slow-cooked dishes, but osso bucco must be one of my longtime, unchanging favourites. Osso bucco comes from the Northern Italian region of Lombardy, and is made from braised veal shanks. It’s a cut that not only benefits from, but really needs, a low slow cook, bathing in stock and booze, until the meat is tender enough to be broken apart with the edge of a fork.

The dish name literally translates as ‘hole in the bone’, which quietly points to the magic of the dish (or, you could argue, misses it entirely). Inside that hole is, of course, bone marrow: a big, thick, coin of bone marrow that, as the shanks braise in among the wine and the stock and the aromatics, melts into the sauce, making it luscious, glossy and rich, and completely distinctive.

It’s a dish that we might previously have avoided, or replaced the veal with the equivalent cut of beef, mindful of the troubling welfare issues that went hand-in-hand with eating veal.