A Tender Twist On Easter Dinner

When you think of Easter food, you think of festive cuts of meat: the glazed ham, the leg of lamb, the standing rib roast. What you probably don’t think of when planning the holiday meal — or most other times when you’re pondering a great piece of meat — is a shin.Look around, though, and you’ll find shin meat all over town. It seems like every restaurant in the city is serving a braised lamb shank, and any Italian eatery worth its salt is serving up osso bucco, which is braised veal shank. A few restaurants are serving up pork shank, too.These shank cuts — each of which comes from the respective animal’s foreleg — make excellent alternative approaches for Easter dinner hosts looking to try something new. And although most people don’t realize this, shanks are also wonderfully tasty cuts that generally deliver deeper, more satisfying flavor than steaks or chops.“People like filet mignon because it’s tender, but it doesn’t taste like anything,” the author of the guidebook “Meat Me in Manhattan” (Gamble Guides), Josh Ozersky, said. “If you really like the taste of beef, or other meats, you want to eat shanks.” If you want to understand shanks better, make a tight fist and then look at your forearm. See all those long, fibrous muscles tensed up in there? That’s essentially a shank. The more those muscles are used (and in the case of a four-legged animal, they’re being used all the time), the more flavor they build up. But those long muscles are held together by lots of connective tissue, which makes them tough. That tissue can’t be broken down simply by tossing a shank onto a grill or into a frying pan; it has to be slow-braised in liquid. This tenderizes the meat until it’s falling off the bone and coaxes out all that flavor, plus the collagen and marrow in the bone help turn the braising liquid into a rich, velvety sauce. The result is a spectacularly satisfying meal.So why don’t shanks get the same showcase treatment as the more glamorous cuts? For starters, braising takes a fair amount of time — usually several hours, with a lot of other ingredients in the pot — so shanks don’t offer the primal immediacy of cooking a steak over an open flame, and they’re ill-suited for festive rituals such as backyard cookouts. In addition, because Western culinary culture has traditionally placed a higher value on tenderness than on flavor, shanks were long ago relegated to the ranks of peasant food, a stigma that’s only now beginning to fade.The veal shank has become something of a prestige item, because of the mystique surrounding osso bucco (which literally translates to “hole bone,” referring to the marrow inside the shin bone, which is an essential part of the dish). But lamb shanks are the shin cuts most frequently found on menus, because they’re featured in several different international cuisines and tend to weigh in at a very restaurant-friendly size. “One lamb shank is one serving, and they’re usually about a pound,” the executive chef at Centro Vinoteca (74 Seventh Ave. S. at Bleecker Street, 212-367-7470), Anne Burrell, said. Ms. Burrell’s lamb shank is among the tastiest in town — hearty but not heavy. “That’s because I braise with water instead of stock,” she said. “Stock can give you a sort of sticky feeling in your mouth. With water, you’ve still got all the flavor of the meat, but it doesn’t overpower the palate.”If lamb shanks are ubiquitous, pork shanks are much harder to find. Although the crackling pork shank at Maloney & Porcelli (37 E. 50th St., between Madison and Park avenues,212-750-2233) has been the restaurant’s signature dish for a decade, other venues have been slow to follow. One of the few places where the pork shank has always been featured is Crispo (240 W. 14th St., between Seventh and Eighth avenues, 212-229-1818), where it’s one of the restaurant’s most popular items. “We braise it very, very slowly and then finish it by roasting it in the oven,” the owner/chef, Frank Crispo, said. The result is a crisp exterior and an off-the-bone texture — an irresistible combination. And Mr. Crispo pairs the meat with hot peppers and seasonally available fruit: Last month it was quince; now he’s switched to Fuji apples.If you want to make your own shanks for Easter, you’ll get more than a hearty, satisfying meal, because the lengthy braise will make your entire home smell delicious. And like all stew preparations, shanks tend to taste even better the next day and the day after that, because the sauce gets more concentrated with each reheating.And if the results don’t quite have the visual dazzle of sizzling steak or a grand roast, that’s okay. “A steak is like the perfect Barbie doll sister,” Ms. Burrell said. “A shank is like the sister with personality.”Online Extra: Ms. Burrell’s braised lamb shank recipe.

A Tender Twist On Easter Dinner

A Tender Twist On Easter Dinner

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