Recipe: Roasted Bone Marrow w/ Parsley Salad

Ever watch Anthony Bourdain's No Reservations- New York episode? There's a segment where Bourdain, Eric Ripert and Scott Bryan head over to Prune to chill out and indulge in some of their favorite comfort foods. A plate of roasted veal marrow bones arrive and immediately the boys descend upon it. Bourdain proclaims this as his death row meal. The scene looks rather gross and enticing at the same time. Gross in that here were these men going to work sucking and making slurping noises to get the last bits of marrow out. Enticing because I could picture the delight of gobbling up the rich morsels. I've had bone marrow before since my mom used to make a soup for wonton noodles out of beef bones by stewing it with peeled onions and various spices then let us gleefully suck out the marrow when she was done with them. So I could picture the texture in my mind but not the flavor as I've not had bone marrow this way before. I had to try it!

First a stop at Siesel's Old Fashioned Meat & Deli to pick up some marrow bones. Now they unfortunately don't carry veal bones w/o the meat which was what I was looking for. They'd be willing to order some but there's a minimum order of 75 lbs of bones if you really want it. I'd love to try the veal bones one day so if you and some of your friends want to go in on an order let me know. So I picked up some beef bones and asked them to cut it to size for me(3''-4'').

Check out part of the meat selection. LH picked out some Berkshire (Kurobuta) pork chops to grill for us one time. DE-LISH! Perfectly moist and tender... didn't even need a knife to cut it.
Getting back, I found the recipe Fergus Henderson uses at St. John's on this site.

Roasted Bone Marrow w/ Parsley Salad Recipe
from UKTV Food

Ingredients

• 12 x 7-8cm pieces of middle veal marrowbone
• 1 bunch of flat-leaf parsley, picked from the stems and chopped
• 2 shallots, very thinly sliced
• 1 modest handful of capers, (extra-fine if possible)
• juice of 1 lemon
• 6 tbsp extra virgin olive oil
• freshly ground salt and black pepper
• toast, to serve
• coarse sea salt

Directions

1. Preheat the oven to 190ºC/Gas 5. Place the bone marrow in an oven-proof frying pan. Roast the marrow for 20 minutes until the marrow is loose and giving, but not melting away.
   
2. Mix together the parsley, shallots and capers. Make the dressing by mixing together the lemon juice and olive oil.
3. Just before serving toss the parsley mixture with the dressing and season with salt and freshly ground pepper.
4. Scrape the marrow from the bone onto the toast and season with coarse sea salt. Serve with a pinch of parsley salad on top.

note: I found the marrow too oily for my taste the first time I attempted the recipe so the second time I raised the temperature 25 degrees F and roasted the bones for 30-40 minutes instead of 20 minutes. I'd recommend eye-balling and jiggling it till you get the consistency you want. I also didn't cook 12 pieces so I adjusted the salad portion to the amount of bones I was roasting.

The parsley salad did a nice job of cutting the richness of the marrow. EK enjoyed it so much that he ate the leftover salad.
Look at the masterpiece! I really liked the combination of the toast, marrow and salad. I don't think I could eat the marrow by itself as it was incredibly rich so the toast and salad did a nice job of not making the marrow too overwhelming. I much rather prefer eating marrow this way over the stewed method now!!!

Siesel's Old Fashioned Meat & Deli
4131 Ashton St.
San Diego, CA 92109
619- 275-1234
M- Sa: 9am-7p
Su: 10am-6pm