Beef Cheek Chilli
Beef cheek chilli is a gorgeous dish. Tender, robust and sublimely yielding, once you do the initial work, it basically cooks itself. The best bit? It is a relatively cheap cut of meat, and has a wonderful deep flavour and texture. Winner. You will find yourself buying this instead of steak for dishes like this, I promise you.
When I first started making chilli, I would make it using minced beef, and yes this is fine, but once I started to experiment with other meat cuts like shin and cheek, I could see that a chilli has much more potential than the one that I was making.
Then there are chillies to think about. I used to make beef chilli with whatever chilli I had, then I progressed to smoky punchy chipotle, and then, with an appetite for more and a geeky drive beneath it, I decided to explore different chilli combinations. Then I could see what all the fuss with chilli was about. Layers of chilli playing with the beef, enhancing it, some bringing searing heat, others smoke and others a low rumble. You can make your beef chilli as hot or as mild as you want, and you can make it really interesting. Chilli can be good, and chilli can be superb. Lets talk about a superb one.
Beef cheeks are a terrific cut of meat. Easier to source now than before, as we all become more aware of cheaper flavourful cuts and the importance of nose to tail eating. Ask your butcher to get some in for you if you can’t find them anywhere, that is what I do. They need long slow cooking, and start firm and obstinate, but under that low gentle heat, they yield gently and let the chillies mix in.
I use three chillies for this dish: chipotle, pasilla and ancho. The chipotle brings smoke and a low throaty rumble, the pasilla is hotter but just medium hot and quite fruity and the ancho is medium hot too, with more of a sweet dried fruit flavour. I use a combination of three, with more chipotle. It results in a nice hot chilli, not in a face melting way but it will definitely warm your cockles on a chilly night.
NOTES ON THE RECIPE: for me this is just the right heat. Hot but not searing. For some it might be too hot, and others might like this hotter. Taste as you go and adjust where necessary. I like to serve this with some rice. This chilli tastes even better the next day, if you have time to make it in advance.
Enjoy!
RECIPE: Beef Cheek Chilli
Serves 2 with some leftovers – and you want the leftovers, trust me
Ingredients
2 beef cheeks
1 x 400g tin good tomatoes
3 cloves garlic, peeled and finely chopped
1 tsp honey
1 tsp cider vinegar
1 tsp fresh ground cumin (or preferably 1 tbsp fresh cumin seeds, toasted in a dry pan for a couple of minutes over a medium heat and ground to a fine powder – it tastes so much better)
1 tbsp chopped dried chipotle chilli
1 tsp chopped dried pasilla chilli
1 tsp chopped dried ancho chilli
1 tbsp good dried oregano
fresh parsley or coriander to garnish
flavourless oil for frying – groundnut oil or coconut oil are my preference as you can heta both to high temperatures without changing the flavour (and coconut oil has a texture similar to butter and you don’t taste the coconut)
Method
In a sauté pan with a lid that will comfortably accommodate the beef cheeks, sauté the beef cheeks until brown on each side over a medium heat in a tablespoon of oil. Remove from the pan.
In the same pan sauté the garlic over a medium heat in a tablespoon of oil, add the cumin and chillies for a further minute, then add the tomatoes, vinegar and honey, then fill the tin with water and add that too. Bring to a boil. Add the beef cheeks, baste with the sauce, and reduce the heat to low. Cover with a lid, and cook gently for a couple of hours, basting occasionally. Add the oregano.
Take the lid off, and continue cooking, evaporating off some of the water and thickening the sauce. When the beef cheeks visibly yield, pull them apart with a fork and season with sea salt to taste. You want the sauce to just coat the beef and not to be too wet (as in the picture).
Garnish with torn fresh parsley, eat with rice, on toast, however you like it. Enjoy!
Sounds interesting. I’ve used buffalo mince before. It needs time to develop the flavour but is lower in cholesterol than beef.
Buffalo meat is good but it isn’t a substitute for beef cheek. Cholesterol isn’t the enemy once you have a balanced diet, too. I eat less meat and better meat, so far so good. :)
Hi Niamh – I hear what you are saying but have slightly differing views, beef cheeks I have slow cooked and turned into a meat Ragu served with pasta shells. My husband loves the strong meaty flavour. I thought of the alternative for chilli because I once owned a street food business and my main dish was chilli! Love learning about the different kinds you talk about here. Will have to try them. :-)
Different points of view are all good, and we all have different tastes too. I prefer a stronger flavour than buffalo for chilli, but that is not to say that buffalo chilli isn’t good too. And buffalo have cheeks too! Might be worth trying to source? I think I will try! :)
Ohh… never thought of Buffalo Cheeks! I wonder if Laverstock Farm – where I sourced my meat from, does them…
That is who I was thinking of too! The by have buffalo, and buffalo have cheeks! Worth asking :)
My butcher insists that he is “not allowed” to sell beef cheeks, so I have to resort to shin or pigs cheeks. Any one else have that problem?
Really?! Where to do you live? I have never heard that before. Maybe he just doesn’t want to? Try a different butcher, I would say.
I would, but I think he might cry. On the upside he has got me jacobs ladder and squirrel, so I don’t think he’s just being arsey!
Now I know what to do with the 2 beef cheeks I have in my freezer!
Enjoy!
I made this and it was utterly delicious.
I made it once with some stewing steak from the back of my freezer, just to try it out, and after tasting it made a special trip out to buy beef cheeks to try the real thing. I bought the dried chillis off eBay and for those who aren’t keen on spicy, this is the perfect chilli. You get the warmth and depth of flavour from the chillies but very little actual chilli heat.
I was slightly unsure for how long to cook it. One of the cheeks pulled after 2 and a bit hours, but the other one was stubbornly in one piece. Being past my bed time already, I wound up putting the oven on at 75c and leaving the pot in there overnight. Come the morning it was more than ready!
I have 4 more cheeks in the fridge, so I’m going to double the recipe up and make a load for the freezer. This is definitely a dish that gets even better with a bit of resting too. Reheated today. For my New Years lunchtime meal it was bowl scrapingly good!
Great to hear, Chris! It is done when tender and falling apart. Great idea to slow cook overnight – might work out a recipe that way! Enjoy :)
I finally got a new slow cooker, and the first thing I did was make this recipe. I doubled the measurements as I got a 4.5l oval cooker. I browned everything as before, and deglazed the pan with the tinned tomatoes and water. I then poured everything into the slow cooker. I cooked it on auto for about 11 hours, and the cheeks were meltingly tender. I didn’t need to use two forks to shred the meat, I stirred the pot and it all fell apart!
However, there was way too much sauce (as expected), so I turned the heat to high and left it for about 4 hours with the lid off. this reduced the sauce to the perfect level.
The taste is spectacular, so rich and meaty. This rates as one of my favourite meals, and I’ll make it regularly from now on since it’s so perfect for slow cooking.
For some reason my dried chipotles are not hot at all (rated 1/5 stars by the vendor). I made a big batch of the dried chilli mixture. I did 25g of each Ancho and Pasilla Chillis and 75g of Chipotle which I whizzed in my coffee grinder. I also added in 3 small dried habaneros to up the heat quotient, which has given it a nice deep heat on the lips.
If you like chilli, you must make this recipe!