Braising

This is one of the best ways to cook. If you serve people braised food they will love you. It is economical, personal, delicious and nutritious. Use cuts of meat that have many small muscles held together with connective tissue. Pieces like shoulder and shank, if just cooked briefly on the BBQ are amazingly tough. The way to tenderize them is to cook in liquid until soft, usually about 2 to 4 hours. This is not boiling in large amounts of water, but using just enough flavour-full liquid to barely cover and left in a low oven until perfect. If you boil something in water the water will taste like your something and your something will taste like water. This is a guideline to braising. Like a guide to say BBQing, the options to interchange ingredients are endless. It is never the same and always a miracle. Use the ingredients you like, add a little more or less here or there, trust yourself.

General Guidelines

Season your meat with salt (sometimes sugar) and spices if you like (more about spice later). If possible let meat hang out in your fridge for a while, up to a week if you can keep it on a rack with air circulation. Don't use too much salt if leaving for over 48 hours. When you are ready to cook make a large pan quite hot. Dry off the meat if necessary, use a kitchen towel (it's ok, you can wash it). Put oil in the pan to cover the bottom and let it get hot. Put your meat in the pan gently, not overlapping. Don't overcrowd the pan. Really. Don't do it. Cook in batches if necessary. Now do nothing. Let your meat become very crispy on the first side before touching it. Now turn and make the other side crispy. Do this to all sides. Use medium heat so the meat can caramelize without burning. THIS IS THE MOST IMPORTANT STEP!!!! Do not rush. You do not rush braising. Be a big person and wait.

Once your meat is really actually very crispy you can add everything else. This consists of aromatic ingredients to flavour and liquid to flavour and tenderize. Common aromatics include onions, garlic, ginger, celery, carrot, leeks, fennel tomato and most fruits, herbs and spices. These can be cooked for a while in the pan to deepen their flavour before adding liquid or not.
Add liquid. Use anything you have in the house in combination. Vinegars, beers, wines, spirits, stocks and juices. Balance the sweetness. If you use a bottle of vinegar it will be sour as ...    but if you use a jug of apple juice to braise a pork shoulder you could use a cup or more of apple cider vinegar..
Bring the whole kit and kaboodle to a boil and then fire it into the oven at 325 F or so. Doesn't really matter. You can add potato, sweet potato, squash or yams, but generally they need half the time the meat does. This all depends how you cut them. Tiny little bits of potato cook in 15 minutes, while you can cook a whole potato for a couple hours. Cook until everything is tender, somewhere between 2 and 4 hours. Keep tasting all throughout the cooking process. It is done when it's tender. If the meat is not tender it is not done. When it is done, eat it.
**Braised meat wants to cool in the liquid it was cooked in. The heat in the oven forces juices out of the meat, while it cools in the 'braissage' it sucks all that tasty liquid back in.
The very best thing to do is let it cool over night. Remove the congealed fat on the top. Warm the meat back up in the liquid, then reduce until it thickens slightly.