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. Now, the rise of rosé veal means that there are higher welfare ways of consuming the meat, that afford the animals a decent life. If you can get hold of rosé veal (your butcher should be able to get it for you, but even some supermarkets now stock it), then I highly recommend sticking to the veal version. Veal has a different flavour to beef: it’s a paler meat, more delicate, less robust than beef.

Some will tell you to tie up the veal shanks, so that they retain their shape while you cook them, but I never bother: it’s a faff, but also the membrane around the shanks should do the job for you. If it doesn’t, nothing terribly happens: it is, after all, a stew, and hardly the end of the world if some of the meat sinks into the sauce.