STEAK FRITES & "THAT SAUCE"
how to cook big steaks, nail oven chips and make that very famous sauce.
Hello!
Welcome back to How I Cook+, it’s great to have you here and thanks a million for the continued support!
This week we’re dedicating the newsletter to mighty steak frites. More specifically, the steak frites that is sold at viral sensation (and just all round great restaurant) Le Relais De Venise.
This recipe was released on instagram as part of the Beer Snacks series, but I thought it deserved it’s own special newsletter. We’re going to run through how to nail oven chips, how to cook and rest steaks a few different ways, and how to make that mythical, bright green steak sauce that is ladled over steaks at that fabled meat joint.
We’ve also got new music out of Madrid and my thoughts on the first few episodes of Industry.
Enjoy, and please do let me know if you give it a go!
Cheers,
B x
Steak Frites!
J’adore steak frites. It’s one of my favourite things to eat in the world, a perfect meal, if you will. I know it’s a bit of a stretch to call this a beer ‘snack’, it’s really a full on meal, but it goes so well with a cold one that I just had to include it. Steaks for me are best served with chips. I’m not really into steak and mash, steak and pasta is a “hell nah”, and you can forget sticking them in a sandwich altogether (this is a hideously overrated steak eating format).
Steak frites is a really great test of a restaurant’s chops and is a good tell of how confident the cook in the kitchen is. I cooked thousands of steaks in my time in restaurants, and learnt a few bits and bobs along the way. I want to help you make some seriously good steak and chips at home, a plate that would rival that of your local bistro. Frozen chips is the first hack, but let’s get into the real nitty gritty…
How to pick your steak
The first thing you need to do is decide whether you want to share or not, and how many steaks you want to cook. If it’s just you and a date or a mate, I’d say buy two lovely sirloin steaks, one each. If you’re feeding more than two people, I’d suggest going for one or a couple of big steaks. The less individual things you have to get right, the better and if it’s just one or two big boys you’ve got to nail, it’s much better than trying to nail 4, 5 or even 6 individual steaks. If you know someone in the party doesn’t like their steak rare or the same as the person next to them that they’re sharing with, try and cook a steak that tapers at one end, or intentionally expose one part of the steak to more heat than the other.
I love Bavette for an individual steak frites, but Sirloin is also delicious as well as boneless Ribeye. If cooking for a few people, I’d grab a bone in Ribeye or even better, a T-bone or Porterhouse.
Method of cooking
To sear, grill or BBQ?!
Each have their own benefits, and BBQ is almost always the one I’d pick. You make your big smoky mess outdoors and the flavour of wood and charcoal is just spectacular. However, this is probably a seasonally led decision, and I don’t blame you for it. I grilled the porterhouse pictured above in the rain and it was delicious but pretty annoying. As summer bows out for another year, I think most of you will be looking to the stove for your steak cooking endeavours, so we’ll go with that for now.
If you’re cooking a steak for one, you ought to try and cook it the whole way in a frying pan, rendering the fat, searing the surface and then basting hot browned butter over the steak until it hits that magical temperature (more on that shortly). If you’re cooking a steak to share, I’d advise the sear and oven method. Sear the exterior of the steak and then slide it into a very low oven (100-110°C) until it hits the internal temperature you’re looking for. This is a really great way to cook steaks for a crowd too, as you can get all the messy, smoky work out of the way early and then let the oven do the hard bit. You also barely need to rest meat cooked like this, as it is cooked so gently. Be warned, it can take a good bit of time to come up to temperature.
Doneness
Now, you can cook your steak however the hell you like. It’s your prerogative, your given right to decide whether or not you want to eat your steak raw or burnt to a crisp, or somewhere in between. There are a few steaks that benefit from being served rare, and for me, it really is only a few.. Maybe just one. The only steak I’d ever order rare, would be a fillet. Most others I would serve somewhere between medium-rare and medium.
Texturally, steaks like sirloin, ribeye and bavette benefit from a little extra cooking. If you serve this steaks super rare, they can be a bit bouncy and chewy. When cooked closer to medium, they become more tender, their beefiness is accentuated and the eating experience is far better overall.
When cooking a lovely piece of beef, one that I might have spent a few pennies on, I always and I mean always, use a digital thermometer to help me. A hardened grill chef might laugh at your thermapen, but they can do one. It’s smart cooking to use thermometers. It entirely removes the guess work of cooking meats and ensures you’re dialling in the exact doneness you’re going for. I always pull my steaks out of the pan or off the grill about 6-8°C before they hit that perfect temperature. Resting in a warm place, they’ll climb that final few degrees to pink perfection.
Some handy temperatures -
Rare - 46-49°C
Medium-Rare - 50-53°C
Medium - 54-59°C
F**ked it - 62°C+
NB: You’re the master of your own steak destiny, so if you like a well done steak, tell me to shut up!!!
Resting
You all know about this, right?! It is probably the most important step of the process of cooking a steak. You can nail the air drying, the seasoning, the render, the sear and the baste but if you cut right into that thing before it’s had time to chill, it’s game over. No matter how well you’ve cooked your beef, it’s going to give up all its juice to the cutting board. Happy cutting board, sad chef.
A little on the science of resting…
Essentially, it’s all about what happens when you apply heat to a muscle, and the way it contracts and changes shape. Steaks are muscles, and when you expose muscles to heat, they contract and tighten. These muscles are full of little fibres that hold onto water, the ‘juice’ of the steak. The muscle fibres contract and squeeze on that water held within the steak but the water can’t get any smaller, so when you open up an exit route for that water (the moment you carve), it’s going to get the hell out of dodge. It’s all about temperature, and as your rest your steak and it cools, those muscle fibres chill out, relax and allow the juice in the steak to be under fare less pressure.
That’s the elevator pitch, there is a fantastic, achingly comprehensive deep-dive on resting meats here, by the master, Kenji Lopez-Alt.
Bulletproof Oven Chips
I am not a big fan of the classic fish and chips, and I will not apologise for it. This is principally because I do not enjoy soggy chips, at all. There are some things that just head and shoulders above their peers and for me, that is what the french fry is to basically any other form of cooked potato.
To pull off a french fry starting at raw potato and ending at salty, crispy, fluffy stick of pleasure, is no mean feat. Homemade french fries are pretty hard to make and for the most part, not worth the effort. I challenge most to make a french fry at home that will rival a nicely cooked frozen oven chip. In the same vein as frozen peas, it’s ok to prefer them to fresh. Work smart, not hard, buy your french fries frozen. I guarantee that 95% of your favourite restaurants do exactly the same thing.
So what’s the secret to a really, really good french fry out of the oven? The secret is space. Giving your french fries room to breath on their tray is of utmost importance. This is all about moisture loss and allowing steam to escape from the tray. In order to become crispy, your little frozen chips need to give up as much water as possible. If they’re all piled on top of each other, the little chips around the edge will crisp, but the folks in the middle will form a big fat soggy mess. I bet £20 you’ve done this before, haven’t you? Well, fear not. Those days are in the past. You also need to toss the chips a lot. Like every 5 minutes a lot. No domestic oven is able to cook perfectly evenly, meaning some spots in your tray are seeing more heat than others. To combat that, and cook a tray of evenly crisp chips, you want to move everything around as much as possible. Get your oven nice and hot, follow these steps, and you’ll be eating perfect french fries at home with a big fat smile on your face. It’s too easy.
If you want these to be really good, deep fry them. Yes, you can do that!
The Sauce…
There’s a mythical quality to the sauce they serve at Le Relais de Venise, and I’m not entirely sure why… It’s not hard to make and there are heaps of recipes that do very well at approximating the ingredients and makeup of the swamp green sauce that perfumes that dining room.
I’ve tried a handful and the ChefSteps iteration is probably my favourite. Grant Crilly has done a marvellous job of replicating the herbaceous, deeply savoury twang of the steak sauce. I’ve developed my own version, adding a few ingredients that I love and always have in my store cupboard (tabasco, I will never not love you).
Any good chop sauce should bring out the umami, beefy qualities of the steak, and this one does it very, very well. It’s a smart sauce, and a little more refined than a sticky, over reduced demi-glace or au poivre. Herbs, funky anchovies, worcestershire sauce and lemon juice all come together in a really magical way. There’s a shed load of butter in it, too (obviously).
STEAK FRITES