Steak with Herbed Garlic Butter

I've talked here before about eating less meat but of better quality for the sake of our health, the environment, and so on.

When it comes to eating better meat, you can't go past Eye Fillet Beef Steak.

OK, I see you throwing your hands in the air and declaring (with only the mildest hint of indignation) that who, in the current economic climate, can afford fillet steak? It's not 1986 now, after all.
But here's the thing: Communities can.

Fillet steak follows the same rules in a supply/demand/price-point market as any other product, and suppliers know this. On a per kg basis, no, you can't necessarily afford to buy fillet steak in meal-sized portions off the supermarket shelf. We certainly can't.

But any good butcher or wholesaler (like, say Prestons or Moore Wilsons in NZ) will supply fillet steak in whole lengths, and the price per kg is significantly less than you would pay for cut, trimmed, packaged fillets from the coldshelf.

But still, you argue, the price of a whole fillet ranges into the $40-50 mark, and who can justify that sort of a spend on one piece of meat?

Well, consider this: You're not paying a cent for bone, and virtually nothing for fat. Hunt for a lean cut of fillet steak, and your price per kg is practically 1:1, top-notch meat to dollar. No amount of chops, sausages or stewing steak will give you that degree of economic return.

With a full cut, you can also poke and prod to your heart's content, finding the most tender specimen. Yes, a soft, tender hunk of raw meat will cook up more tender than a tough piece. Amazing, eh?

Sorry, did I say something about community? Why yes, I did. It comes back to that matter of outlay. Who has the outlay to buy these large, if delicious, cuts of meat? Restaurants, for one.

Restaurateurs understand the economy of the whole fillet, and it works even better for small groups of people. Let's say, for example, a 2kg fillet, costing $40, is bought by two couples. That's $20 each.

Now, each of those couples have 1kg of fillet steak. A nice decadent size for a fillet steak if 200g, so that's five steaks, each costing $4.00. That's an $8.00 steak meal for two; I challenge you to find 400g of pre-cut steak on the cold-shelf in NZ for less than $10.00.

And of course, you don't have to be decadent. You can cut that steak into six, or eight, or even ten pieces. You may have a smaller piece of steak, but you still have top quality. And for the sake of our bowels, we shouldn't eat more than 100g of red meat a day anyway.

The only catch is that a 200g steak will cook more nicely than a 100g steak, so to get around this, just cut to 200g, cook as a single steak, then slice and share. Perfect.

It does require someone have a freezer, and that you cut and store the steak in individual portions, but that's not a big deal these days. Freezers are our friends.

This is just one way that reaching out to the people around you can improve not only your budget, but the quality of the food you're eating as well.

Give it a go. You'll thank me for it.

Now, what to do with that delicious, top quality steak? I've already written a detailed post on how best to cook pretty much any steak, but here's another lovely option: Herbed Garlic Butter.
Cook your steak as per that post, but you can flag the garlic at the preparation stage. The Herbed Butter will do all the hard work for you. Eye fillet steak will require less tenderising than other cuts as well, but a little bit of a bash never hurt.

Herbed Garlic Butter
Ingredients:
100g soft, salted butter
2T fresh thyme leaves
4 cloves of garlic, minced
4T freshly grated parmesan cheese

Combine all ingredients in a mortal and pestle, or you can probably use a hand blender.
Scrape the butter onto a dish to pop on the table when the steak is served.
Be sure to fry a few mushrooms and onions around the side of the pan with the steak.
Scoop the butter onto the steak, along with the mushrooms and onions. Serve with oven-baked fries, eggs and a little green salad, just for colour.

Steak Stew

This is from a recipe I heard on the radio a few weeks back and decided that I had to try.

Since I'm a big fan of steak, and I'm a big fan of stew, the idea of Steak Stew just seemed like a match made in heaven.

Officially this was called Slow-Cooked Steak in Red Wine with Gremolata Dumplings, but Steak Stew was easier to remember.

To quote this particular rendition of the European classic's progenitor, Meillier Ouvrier chef Mark Gregory,

"In these recessionary times, it’s good to remind ourselves that simple food, slowly cooked is cost-effective, comforting and absolutely delicious. Our grandmothers used dumplings to pad out the more expensive ingredients like meat, and it’s a great house-keeping tip which is more relevant than ever right now!"

Never was a truer word spoken. If you're not making the most of cheaper cuts of meat cooked long and slow in the oven, then now is the time to get into it. And this one is actually pretty darned easy.

Just imagine: You've had a "stew" ticking away in the oven for a couple of hours, and when you come to dish it up, it's not stew but steak that slaps down on the plate, tender and melting and drowning in delicious red wine gravy.

With dumplings, of course.

I followed the recipe pretty much to the letter, only reducing the quantities by half. I have copied most of the recipe direct from the Radio NZ website, indented for clarity.

Beef steak
4 x 300 - 400g beef blade or chuck steaks
plain flour to dust steaks
¼ cup olive oil – or use other if not available
2 medium onions – finely chopped
3 cloves garlic – finely chopped
300ml red wine
1 cup tinned chopped tomatoes
½ cup chicken stock
pinch dried chilli
3 sprigs rosemary – from the garden if you have it
6 pieces anchovy - optional

"First choose a casserole dish large enough to hold the steaks.

Heat a frying pan, add three tablespoons of olive oil then sweat the onions and garlic for 5 minutes until soft and sweet. Scrape all into the casserole saucepan."

"Re-heat frying pan, add 2 tablespoons of olive oil, lightly dust steaks with flour then pan fry until golden – you may have to do this in batches depending upon size of fry pan. Place the coloured steaks on top of the onions."

"Add red wine to the frying pan and reduce down for several minutes until it’s nearly all evaporated, add the tomatoes, stock and chili, rosemary and anchovies if using. Stir well before scraping everything over the steaks. Cover with a lid and place in oven at 325F/160°C for one-and-a-half hours."

Don't forget the dumplings:

Gremolata dumplings
2 cups plain flour
3 teaspoons baking powder
1 teaspoon salt
1 clove garlic – crushed
1 lemon, zested
½ cup parsley - chopped
1 cup grated butter – place in freezer for 1 hour first before grating
¾+ cup milk

"After 1 hour make the gremolata dumplings – sift flour into a large mixing bowl, gently mix in all other ingredients except milk. Now mix in sufficient milk to make a moist dough (similar to scones).

With wet hands, roll dumpling dough into golf ball-sized pieces and place on floured bench top. Remove steaks from oven, take off the lid and place gremolata dumplings evenly around the surface, be sure to leave one inch between each – if there’s too much dumpling mix do not use the extra.

Recover steaks with the lid and place back into the oven a further 20 minutes to cook the dumplings."

This was pretty yummy, but I think they should've cooked for even longer to really get down to that melt-in-your-mouth stage. The Gremolata Dumplings were different, and a curious change from my usual herbed dumplings, but I think we'll stick with the original for a while yet.

So there you have it, a bit of a recipe review. I just keep moving into new, exciting fields of endeavour, don't I?

Seasoning the BBQ in the BBQ Season

Summer is the season of the barbeque, as we all know. Barbeques are a classic kiwi tradition, as I'm sure they are in much of the rest of the world. Yes, for some reason we seem to think this is a unique condition.

I have a few curious observations to make about barbeques and the culture that surrounds them, which I'd like to share. Please be aware, some gentle male sensibilities may be offended (the rest of us are permitted to laugh ourselves silly, if we so desire).

For starters, I have yet to understand why barbeque tools seem to come in such ridiculous sizes. Personally, I use the little paring knife and a pair of tongs from the kitchen when I barbeque. We concluded that the reason for barbeque tools being so stupidly big is so that men can stand around the barbeque with their beers in one hand and compare the sizes of their tools.

Which I'm sure is also not a uniquely kiwi practice.

While we're on the subject of men and their misplaced sense of entitlement to the role of barbeque chef, may I ask what it is about having the appropriate chromosomes that makes so many males think that suddenly, despite not having stepped in front of any piece of cooking equipment more technical than a toaster for ten months of the year, they can suddenly claim dominion over the outdoor gas (or charcoal) grill? They then proceed to stand over said grill, drink beer, talk sh!t, burn the sausages, reduce the steak to hunks of leather, drink more beer, talk more sh!t, and complain about where the salad is and why the bread isn't buttered already.

Gents, I hang my head in embarrasment for you. The barbeque's a glorified frying pan, that's all, and if you can't drive a frypan, then you have no right to ruin everyone else's food by declaring yourself its master. "BBQ FLAVOUR" is not a substitute for basic culinary competence. Get into the kitchen, make the salad and butter the bread, and let the cooks do the cooking.

Full credit to all those men who can and do cook; you have every right to be out there, drinking beer and talking sh!t to your hearts' content (so long as you made the salad and buttered the bread before you started!).

The other thing that men seem incapable of doing more often than not is cleaning the barbeque after it's been used. The excuse for this is also BBQ FLAVOUR, that indefinable taste which seems to be not so much a matter of ingredients and technique but rather one of cultivation; as in, strains of bacteria. Perhaps there is some primal urge among men to bulk up their immune systems by allowing all manner of germs and micro-organisms to breed on "their" cooking grills, and the obligatory overcooking of any meat that comes within range is therefore more a matter of survival than anything else. That special flavour can only be achieved by allowing the petrie dish to fester and then cooking that flavour off onto the meat, which must then be virtually incinerated to ensure it is safe to eat. All of this men know instinctively, and is perhaps why they can't actually cook on a barbeque despite what all the advertising tries to tell us.

Please note, I write the above lines in the full knowledge that my own barbeque is sitting outside uncleaned since last I used it, but I assure you it will get a thorough scrub before it is used next.

Do I have anything useful to say, or am I just taking great pleasure in deriding my fellow man? (Ah, the joy of picking on people who aren't here to defend themselves...)

In fact, I do. This comes back to the cleaning of the barbeque. There is the small matter of the last of the soapy taste that you can't quite get rid of, and who wants to cook on that?
Here's the solution:Chop up a large onion and a handful of fresh herbs and garlic, mix it up with some rice bran oil and freshly ground pepper and salt, get the barbeque really hot and season it with the onion-herb mixture. Cook this stuff right down, constantly shifting it around the grill. Some of it will stick, and thats OK. Scoop the rest off, and you have a seasoned barbeque, with no soapy residue whatsoever. Real Barbeque Flavour, without the heirloom cultures.
A couple of weeks ago Liz E. Bear's Mum brought a pile of steak around, dressed in fresh sage and rosemary from their garden, and I didn't want to waste it. So I proceeded to RESEASON the grill with the herbs before cooking the steak, letting them wilt and adding a little more oil and salt, so that there was a lovely herbed oil sizzling away on the barbeque for the steak to go onto. I then removed the herbs and put the steak on to cook, placing the wilted herbs back on top of them to infuse the meat as it cooked.
Blimmin' delicious it was. And if you want to know how to cook the perfect steak, go read this too.

Hooray for real Barbeque Flavour!

P.S. To anyone out there who may feel offended by what I've said here, tough. Pun intended.

EDIT: Go on, read the comments. You know you want to. Heeheehee.

First Barbeque of the Season

Summer is most certainly upon us now. It rained today, but it was warm. That must just about prove it.

In honour of the season of long slow evenings, sandflies, mosquitoes, sunburn, and sand in places where it shouldn't be, we have duly broken out the barbeque and given it a run, to ...er... season it ... for the season.
Cooking here we have: Wai-ora Lamb and Mint Sausages; Gluten-Free Sausages; Homemade Gluten-Free Meat Patties; and Egg-Free, Gluten-Free Meatballs (I just did a couple of meatballs before I added the egg to make the patties, and squashed them down really tight so they didn't fall apart). When everything else is done - since all of the above can happily sit on the edge of the BBQ and stay warm - we drop in the steak. Hammered with the back of a knife, seasoned with freshly ground pepper and salt, crushed garlic and olive oil, and cooked as per my Perfect Steak Technique.

Serve up with fresh bread and crisp green salad, sauce and a cold beer for a perfect summer evening's dining. May there be many more to come.

Steaking it Out

After London Mayor Boris Johnson's little outburst about reducing our meat intake, I felt it was time to talk a little bit about meat. The write-up was carried by the Dominion Post last week, who, to their credit, made a somewhat ironic point of the title, "A Load Of Bull." Which is what it really was. Morgue has paraphrased this little diatribe quite succinctly, and to borrow his words directly:

"Some UN chappie says I should forgo meat one day a week to cut carbon emissions. But the world is overpopulated! The end."

The point is not that an excess of people on the planet drives up demand for beef, therefore people are the problem. The problem is that people demand it in the first place. Now, I'm no vegetarian, nor do I pretend to be. But life is about balance and moderation. Johnson's bellowings about "vast Homeric barbeques" of "chops and sausages and burgers and chitterlings and chine and offal," smacks of the typical Western arrogance and overconsumption that shames us all in the eyes of the rest of the world, even if he is making a wildly weak attempt at humour. Whick-Whack was funny, Boris. Quit while you're ahead.

Would it really hurt to not eat red meat every day? We certainly don't. We've been making an active effort in our house to reduce the amount of red meat we're eating and to eat vegetarian at least once a week. We also prefer to buy quality meat in smaller portions over big dishes of cheaper meat.

The point that Boris Johnson misses is that his desire to feast on red meat purely to spite Dr Rajendra Pachauri of the UN comes at a huge cost, both in terms of the environmental damage being done to the planet to farm the millions of cows and sheep and pigs that we eat, and in the food miles racked up to bring it to the market. Is Mr Johnson a fan of New Zealand Lamb? Does he plan to offset his carbon footprint by planting a few native bushes in our backyard? Probably not.

We're not perfect. We recycle, reuse,and compost; we use cloth nappies, eat all our leftovers (most the time), and have made a conscious effort to only eat produce grown in NZ whenever we can. But we still drive about 600km a week and we still eat meat. So what can we do about that? I say, we respect the meat. We outlaw huge barbeques of sausages that won't get eaten, and we make it a criminal offence to overcook a steak. We legislate for serving sizes, and we educate the masses on how to make the most out of less meat.

Where am I going with this? Perfect Steak. Yes, after all that invective, I'm going to write a post about cooking the perfect steak. We got this steak on special and so it was a bit of a treat. We eat steak about once a month, and we always appreciate it. So we make sure that it's cooked well and that it tastes delicious. The cow deserves no less (apologies to any vegos out there - I admit I have my weaknesses, and steak is one of them).

Steak (It's That Simple)

(Serves 3)

Take 300-400g of good frying steak, either Porterhouse or Scotch Fillet. With the blunt side of a heavy knife, tenderise the steak in a crosshatch pattern. Finely chop 3-4 cloves of garlic and spread this over both sides of the steak, along with freshly ground salt and pepper and olive oil. Leave to rest for at least half an hour if possible.
Heat 2T of olive oil in a heavy iron pan until almost smoking. Slice an onion and put aside. Lay the steak in the hot oil and spread the onion over the top. Keep the heat high for the first 3-4 minutes, lowering slightly when the steak is ready to turn.
Here's the secret that can make the difference between a steak and a perfect steak: Only turn it once. Lift the steak and peek underneath to see if it's done and ready to flip. Once you turn it there's no going back. Follow this rule and your steak will always come up well, whether you like it rare or well done. Remove the onions to the pan and turn the steak over, then replace the onions on top of the steak. Cook the steak for a similar time on the other side, with the heat a wee bit lower. If you want to know if your steak is done, don't cut into it - this will just undo all your hard work. You can judge the done-ness of a steak just by prodding it. If the steak feels as soft as your cheek, it's rare. Soft as your chin, its medium. Soft as your forehead, its well done. Ah, all the secrets are coming out now!
Remove the steak to a warm plate, leaving the onion in the pan. Add a little water to the pan and scrape all the good stuff off the bottom to make a gravy.

EDIT: Also add about 2T of tomato paste to give the gravy a bit of texture and colour - Just found my notes on this!

Reduce the onion gravy rapidly and spoon over the steak. Serve with mashed kumera and pumpkin and steamed greens. Perfect.