There are several reasons people don’t eat oxtail, but they all generally boil down to “I’m a vegetarian”, “I’m lying about being a vegetarian”, “I’m on a fake diet for only tonight”, and by far most commonly, “erf...it’s...um...it just seems...gee...I’m sure it tastes good, but....”
I have never understood the concept of not putting something into my mouth simply because it was flapping around in an animal’s poo at one point. If you can’t handle that, don’t eat a lobster or a shrimp ever again; that vein in the middle is not exactly a spinal cord, I hate to tell you. Calm down and allow me to dispel the revulsion:
It’s goddamn clean, OK? Honestly. First, it’s skinned. Second, it’s professionally butchered. Third, if it wasn't clean and tasted like actual crap nobody would be eating it in the first place except French peasants. And fourth, an ox craps out of a hole directly below its tail, not a tube straight out to the tip that makes it flap around like a firehose if the animal has tummy trouble, thus requiring it to be slit open and deveined like a shrimp. Not only would that be authentically gross enough to put any reasonable person off, but it would be goddamn weird too. It’s a tail. Just a tail. It’s bones covered in tough meat, and that’s it.
Note: Ossobuco looks very much like an upscale, meatier version of oxtail, and is tacitly presented as a substitute by yuppie places like Whole Foods. Ossobuco is a cross-cut veal shank, hence the bone with some meat around it. If you ask for oxtail and the butcher tries to tell you it's a perfectly good substitute, order a four-link of spicy Italian sausages and porkslap him.
Oxtail generally comes frozen unless you’re fortunate enough to find it fresh, and it’s composed of a number of successively smaller bones extending out to the end. Imagine your coccyx (the bone you break when you break your fanny) having a few more coccyxes (the plural of the bone you break when you break your fanny—you learned something today!) lined up like tubular dominoes.
What I’ve just described gets to the heart of the problem we as human beings have with some kinds of food: eating oxtail means eating an anatomical structure that we don’t have and can’t relate to. It’s a weird concept, but think about it: what do you ever eat that isn’t also on the human body?
1. Wings=arms
2. Lengua=tongue
3. Pate=liver
4. Oysters=vagina
5. Clams=vagina
6. Butterflied chicken breast=vagina
7. Shrimp=weird squishy lump you found that you don’t tell anyone about but poke all the time for mild entertainment.
8. Monkfish=ex-wife. Definitely not the vagina. Go look up a picture.
The list goes on and on. We’re proxy cannibals, and without a tail to realize how not gross it is we immediately go with the nearest thing we have and extrapolate.
Unfortunately for the oxtail, that would be the anus. It’s unmistakably right there, and gives the distinct impression of having a tail now and again that we then imagine might have a similar flavor.
Fortunately for the oxtail, this is dead-to-rights wrong. If you are a carnivore and you don’t like oxtail, it’s because it was undercooked and therefore the consistency of a tire made of elephant gristle, under-seasoned so it seemed like a mushy waste of time, or served with the tubular bones in the middle. The last one actually kills more dishes than you’d think. I know a lot of people who won’t touch an exquisitely braised lamb shank because the structure of the bones is too recognizable.
I will make this simple. Cooking oxtail is a blunt and straightforward process. There is one—and only one—very ironic way to prepare an oxtail: you braise the shit out of it.
Take the chunks and trim off as much of the gristly crap on the outside as you can. This is easy to do: if it looks like it’s inedible, it is. Then, brown in a pot. For some people this can be a killer too simply because it smells like real cow and not like filet. See, “pig trotter” for what real food tastes like. Set aside, mirepoix in, deglaze, stock, herbs, oxtails, and come back in 2.5 hours. This is what you’ll have for not being a gigantic wuss:
A delicious, hearty stew with a wonderfully collagen-infused sauce possessing a velvety, rich, otherwise unattainably gorgeous mouthfeel. It’s literally that easy. The pieces of oxtail even have their own little turkey thermometer built in to tell you when they’re done. If you pick one up and the bone tube falls out of the middle of the meat like a passed out dog, it’s perfect.
The next part is critical. Take out all the chunks and for the love of god get rid of the bones. If you stick that on a plate and give it to a skeptic noob, you’re done no matter how good it smells. Shred the meat, add it back to the braising liquid, and reduce or add a beurre manie. There is no wrong way to eat it now. Put it on mashed potatoes, pasta, polenta, or just bury your snout in a trough full of it, preferably in a dark room with alcohol to hide your piggy little shame. I cannot overstate how delicious it is. If it was served to me in between the butt cheeks of the raw, severed back third of the very ox from which the tail was removed by a waiter presenting it holding the legs like a wheelbarrow, I’d happily toss everyone at the table a salad.
I only have one word of warning: anything preparation but what I have just described is either a wholly unremarkable waste or pure arrogance on the part of a chef who doesn’t know how to cook, and is very actually bullshit. I’ve seen oxtail soups, stews, and many other things, but unless it’s cooked in some variation of the manner I just described, it will be a waste of your time and actually taste inferior to regular stew meat.
Don’t be an asshole. Eat an oxtail.
Arts and Culture, Food: The Game Birds—The Quail
Arts and Culture, Food: The Game Birds—An Introduction
Arts and Culture, Food: Odd Food—Escargot
Arts and Culture, Food: Odd Food—The Oxtail
Arts and Culture, Food: Odd Food—My Fridge Full of Crap
Arts and Culture, Food: Odd Food—The Compost Bin
Arts and Culture, Food: Odd Food—Pig Trotter pt. 3
Arts and Culture, Food: Odd Food—Pig Trotter pt. 2
Arts and Culture, Food: Odd Food—Pig Trotter pt. 1
Arts and Culture, Food: Odd Food—Squid Ink
Arts and Culture, Food: Odd Food—The Octopus