My Chinese-style braised beef recipe that makes you feel good | Marion's Kitchen

Not only is this beef casserole super rich and comforting with fork tender beef, but there's also a whole bunch of ingredients here which are working hard to make you feel good. This is my immune-boosting slow braised beef. Whenever I'm trying to be a little bit more virtuous, I'm always thinking about the ingredients that I generally keep on hand that work really hard to help with my immunity or with giving me extra vitamins. I came up with this slow braised beef recipe because we're going to be including a whole bunch of ingredients that help to make you feel good. We're going to start off first of all with some eggplant. I am just using some of these small eggplant because that's what I happen to have in my fridge, but you could use one larger one if you want to. The other thing I like to do also is try to up the vegetable intake in whatever dish I might be doing. Typically with a braised beef, you might not include things like eggplant or sweet potato, but when we're trying to do things a bit nicer for our bodies, I like to include a little bit more of those ingredients. I am just going to heat up some oil. I'm using some olive oil. Add your eggplant in. I'm just going to flip these guys around in the hot oil until they get a nice little sear on them. The trick here with the eggplant is that I wanted to include eggplant, but I didn't want to throw the eggplant in with the beef because it's going to slow braise in the oven and then the eggplant would basically disintegrate. What I'm doing is searing it off, and then I'm going to keep it to the side and add it a little bit towards the end of the cooking. You'll see how it works. It will make sense in the end. Now I've got some really great colour on my eggplant. I'm just going to take that out, pop that to a plate. Next, I've got my beef. I'm using an oyster blade here. You can use chuck steak, gravy beef. I do like to have it in medium-sized chunks, not too small. I'm going to just season that with a little bit of salt. If salt or sodium is not your jam, obviously you can leave it out. I'm all about adding things in, so I add things into my cooking to make me feel a bit better. But if you would rather leave the out, that's totally up to you. What I do want you to do is give your beef a nice searing kind of colour in your pan because that browning that happens, that is flavour. That's going to help out by starting to layer our beautiful casserole here with some good beefiness. Just let that beef sit there and get some colour. We know that beef is a really good source of iron, but did you know it's also a valuable source of ink? Zinc! Not ink. But did you know it's a really valuable source of zinc, which is a mineral that's great for immune function. I need to add some shallots in here. Just want to cut them in half. I like to keep them quite chunky so they maintain a little bit of their integrity as they slow cook. Once that beef is looking really lovely and seared, so a nice colour all over each piece, now you can go in with your shallots. Again, just give them some time to get some colour on them and develop some flavour as well. You can see after a few minutes, I have beautifully coloured beef. I have some nice golden colour there on my shallots. Let's go in with the rest of our stuff. I've got some celery here, some ginger, which I just need to slice. I use ginger a lot in my Asian cooking. I feel like it's one of those things that automatically makes me feel better, particularly when I'm hungover, because ginger does naturally help with nausea, which is why it is helpful when you are feeling a little under the weather after last night. It's also anti-inflammatory as well, so a really good powerhouse little ingredient there. I've also got some garlic, another common ingredient that you use, but also is very good for your immune health. It has natural antiviral and antibacterial properties. Now for some spices. I'm going in with some star anise and a cinnamon stick. The cinnamon and the star anise are going to give us a little bit of that Chinese five-spice kind of vibe, which I think adds to that comforting factor you get with this slow braised beef at the end. Our other little powerhouse ingredient here is some tomato passata. Cooked tomatoes actually contain a higher level of lycopene. Lycopene sounds right. You know when you read stuff a lot? You read a lot of things and then you're like, that's what it sounds like in my brain, but then the rest of the world's like, that's not how you say it. Then you're like, oh. Lycopene is an antioxidant, which helps fight the free radicals going on in your body and also really good for immunity. So there you go. 10 points. Yes, thanks Dax. Okay, beef stock. You could easily use water as well if you like. That would also cut down on the sodium. Now I go in with my soy sauce and then I'm using some Chinese black vinegar here. I don't know, if I was being a little less virtuous today, I might add some red wine here, but I'm going with the Chinese black vinegar instead because you get kind of like a little bit more of that floral detail without adding the alcohol and a little bit of tang as well. So it's good. Okay, and some brown sugar. Just let that come back up to a simmer and cover your dish and that goes into the oven, 170 Celsius for an hour. Then we're going to come back and add some more things. So in the meantime, while that's happening, I am going to prepare my sweet potato. So the cool thing about sweet potato and using it in this beef dish is that sweet potato is a really good source of vitamin C and vitamin C happens to help you absorb iron, which is in your beef. So it's all working together. So just some nice little cute bite size pieces here. Cut to an hour later. So now's the point when your whole kitchen will be smelling really delicious. You'll be able to smell like the star anise and the beefiness and the cinnamon. So let's get our beef out. That looks so good already. Look at it. It's like bubbling and thick and lush. Now what we need to do is put in our sweet potato and our eggplant and then lid on and pop that into the oven for another 45 minutes. All right, so I've been very patient. It's now time to eat. Oh, that looks good to eat my slow braised beef. That just looks so lush. I'm loving it. What I'm going to do is I've got a few final little bits and pieces for the end here. So I'm going to serve this out first into a dish and a little sprinkling of coriander and spring onion and a little sprinkling of green chili because would it be one of my dishes if it didn't have some chili? Also chili is good for you. My Asian ancestors told me so. All right, I'm going to get in here and try this. It's so good. Wow, that beef is so tender. Just those two spices, the star anise and the cinnamon, have added so much beautiful warm spicing kind of flavors to this. It's kind of like a slow braised Chinese dish. Oh, it's lovely. Hey guys, if you want to know whenever I'm releasing something new and delicious then you should hit that subscribe button and the little bell so that I can let you know every time something new is coming out. Thanks, see you.