阿嬤’s Oxtail Soup

Ingredients

• Oxtail (BONE IN)
• Olive oil
• Yellow onion
• Garlic
• Shallots
• Leek
• Japanese soy sauce
• Rock sugar
• 阿嬤’s herb sack

Recipe
*find an appropriately sized pot for slow cooking*

1. Drizzle olive oil onto the base of the pot & heat on medium heat
2. Dice onions, enough to cover roughly an inch from the bottom of the pot. Add all the
   cloves of a whole knot of garlic, peeled. If feeling spicy, add a dried red pepper (uncut).
   Cook until tender.
3. Add the oxtail and simmer until browned
4. Add soy sauce until it covers the onions. Add a few crystals of rock sugar, around 3 sticks
   of scallions (trimmed) & a few slices of ginger. Add some leek if you’d like. Simmer for
   a few minutes.
5. Add the herb sack. Then add water until everything is submerged. Once boiling, cover
   and reduce heat to low. Give it a taste & add more of anything that you might like, to
   taste.
6. Simmer on low heat for at least 3-5 hours.
7. Prep some rice or noodles. Pour soup on top of your rice or noodles. Finish it with
   cilantro (if it doesn’t taste like soap to you).

AN OX TALE

Oxtail soup is a mouth-watering figment, to me. It’s a recipe passed down from my mom,
my mom’s mom, my mom’s mom’s mom, etc. As our ritual, it interchanges hands in its
enactment. But it has a fatal flaw. It’s contingent on my grandmother’s (阿嬤’s) family herb
sack. After she passed suddenly from cancer, the minutiae of its composition was lost. With each
iteration of the soup, we try to recreate its essence. Fennel, bay leaf, peppercorns, ginger, star
anise, white pepper, cumin, rosemary, thyme. It’s something like that, I think.