Alongside brisket, beef shin has to be one of the most underused, underrated meats in the kitchen. But it has soooo much going for it…if you just give it time to do it’s thing - by which I mean slow cooking.
Braised on low, all the sinewy, gloopy bits render down, releasing the most phenomenal umami flavour, and naturally thickening the cooking juices.
The recipe I give today is a little bit fiddly, but it’s something I like to make now and again with my kids, to show them the alchemy of what can be achieved with cheaper cuts.
If you don’t want to faff about making balls, rolling and frying, the recipe (ignoring the shredding and blitzing stage) will yield you enough slow-cooked meat to feed four people twice over - with so many uses. Stir it into a ragu sauce. Tuck it under pastry for a pie. Make pasties. Mix with barbecue sauce and serve it in buns with slaw as pulled beef. Add some spices and dish it up as a comforting chilli. The list is endless.

Beef shin nuggets
(Makes enough for four to six people)


Ingredients
1.8kg boneless beef shin pieces (cut to about 2-3ins)
1 onion, halved
2 cloves garlic, halved
2 bay leaves
Seasoning
3 medium eggs, whisked and seasoned
300g white breadcrumbs
Oil for frying

Method
Place the beef shin, onion, garlic and bay leaves in a slow cooker. Add a bit of seasoning (not too much as you’ll adjust it later). Pour in half a cup of water. Pop the lid on and leave to cook for six hours on high. Turn off the heat. Strain any liquid into a small pan and pop on a high heat until thickened. While that cooks, remove the bay leaves, onion and garlic from the beef pot and discard. Then take off any large pieces of fat from the beef and shred the meat roughly. Add the liquid back into the beef and pop everything in a food processor - blitz to shred finely, then season to taste. Form the mix into balls just a little smaller than golf balls, and place on a lined tray in the fridge to set for an hour. Place the eggs and breadcrumbs in separate dishes and dip each ball first in the egg, then in the breadcrumbs to coat. These could then sit in the fridge for up to two days before cooking.
To finish, bring the balls out of the fridge an hour before you want to eat. Pour about 1.5 ins of vegetable oil into a saucepan and bring to about 170C (or use a deep fat fryer). Cook the balls in batches of five to six, turning carefully, and cook until deeply golden on the outside. Drain on kitchen paper and repeat until the batch is cooked.
Serve with potato wedges, salad and your sauce of choice - mine was a homemade garlic and tarragon mayonnaise. They are divine with katsu sauce too!