Steak au Poivre: Saucy!

Eating Steak with Herbed Frites.

We picked up a few New York steaks from Costco in preparation for this dish. While the steaks were being made, I was focused on making the fries, which I have already made a post about.

This post... is about steak! Anyway, prior to our trial, we had seen Andrew and Yurah's posting and I noticed in their photos, their sauce was yellowish. We had very different results.

As per the recipe, we tried tor crush whole peppercorns. We didn't get the green ones, but instead used mixed black and white peppercorns. I think here, we didn't really know how fine to crush them. Since crushing was fairly difficult without a mortar and pestal (or without a vice!), we left them fairly rough.

Then the mustard was added to one side of the steaks while the cast iron was heating up. We weren't sure which side went down, the mustard side or the bottom side. But we figured, it must be the mustard side to get it into the pan. As the mustard touched down on the fiery black metal, the mustard seems to burn up. We let it cook for 3 minutes, then flipped it. We questioned whether we should have added mustard to both sides, and after some discussion, we added mustard on the bare side, now facing the top. Then, into the oven the cast iron went with its temporary inhabitants.

Once done, the steaks were put out on plates to rest, and the cut shallots were tossed into the pan with the remnants of seared meat crust, crispened mustard, and near whole, but somewhat softened peppercorns. Then the wine was poured in. Anything's better with wine. Especially red wine.

The wine reduced a bit and an interesting sauce was born. We scooped the red-gray concoction onto the steak, and we were done. But our sauce didn't look too appetizing. The mixture of mustard yellow with maroon-red wine resulted in a muddy looking sauce that sat between us and our medium-rare protein.

Frites dropped by, on a plate asking to accompany our steaks. We obliged and dug in. However unappealing the sauce looked, it actually tasted pretty good. I would eat this again, but maybe figure out how to make it look better. In fact, I thought, it'll look better with some fries on top... and voila... Steak Frites!! Anyway, Kirk and Ei-lun's photos of the steaks looked awesome, and inspired us to step up our presentation. So check out our Scallop and Endives photo! =P

New York steaks from Costco.

Crushing peppercorns and prepping the herbs for the fries.

Putting Dijon on the steaks.

Steaks are ready to go into the cast iron.

Let the searing begins.

Shallots with wine. Where'd the mustard go?

Adding the red wine/mustard sauce on top of the steaks.

Steak with sauce.

Frites + Steak = Steak Frites!

Tarte Au Citron

Tarte Au Citron

(Post written by Lee)

I was very excited to see lemon tart as one of the recipe items since I love all desserts LEMON... especially buttery tarts!

The recipe calls for 2 cups of pine nuts, but since we only had 1.5 cups, I substituted 0.5 cups of walnuts (both have high fat content). The pine nut flavor probably would be more pronounced if we had enough, but the result was still very good. As I was making the crust (easy with the food processor), I was very surprised that the recipe did not call for salt. We just made tarts a few weeks earlier for the first time and all the recipes I looked up called for salt. It took everything in me to follow the recipe so I could taste the end result. Next time, I would make two just to taste them side by side, especially since I love lemon tarts! The crumble was very thin as we were pressing to the tart pan, but we tried to spread it out as evenly as possible. I thought that there was a standard 9-inch tart pan, but then realized when washing up that we had a 10-inch! One change would probably be to split the crust into halves instead of thirds since we have a larger pan. We baked the crust for 10 minutes and rotated for the second 10 minutes. I think we would try 15 minutes next time to get a more nutty flavor. When cooking late at night, we always seem to use the shorter of the recommended times =)

Since this was my first time making a sabayon, I wasn't quite sure what the consistency was supposed to be. I used an older (more stiff) whisk and I don't think I whisked vigorously enough. It looked fine to me, but when I saw Andrew and Yurah's post, I realized mine did not get that light and/or fluffy. Next time, I am going to try faster and/or get a new whisk. Next, pour the sabayon in the crust and broil while you lick the bowl! I was watching it like the recipe called for, but it seemed to be slow, so I turned around to wash some dishes. One minute later and it was a little more brown than I would like. I rotated very briefly and then removed the tart from the oven. It is very sensitive at that high heat, so lesson is to follow the recipe and the warnings. "Do not leave the oven."

We served the Tarte Au Citron along wtih the sorbet as Momma Joh's birthday cake. Everyone loved it. I will definitely be making this more often since we still have Meyer lemons on the tree!

Starting the mixture for the crust.

The crust mixture.

Crust in bags.

Making the sabayon.

Getting the crust onto the tart pan.

Making the crust.

Whisking the sabayon.

Pouring onto crust.

Coquilles St. Jacques à la Fondue d'Endives: You Complete Me!

Lemon Butter Seared Scallops on a bed of Endives.

We originally went to Whole Foods to get a few scallops. We got four large ones to make this dish, but then Lee’s brother, Chen, mentioned that we should get the Japanese scallops at Trader Joe’s, since they were sweeter. So we sashimi’d the WF scallops, and got TJ’s scallops for our trial run.

We only bought one endive, so we cut it up smaller than the recipe had indicated. Lee cooked up the endives, and seared the scallops, while I prepared the lemon butter sauce.

Plating the three elements (endives, scallops, and sauce) was fairly easy. I put some swipes of sauce on the sides for presentation (Kirk stepped it up on that steak photo!!), and sprinkled the chives on.

Each element had its distinct flavor. The endives were a little bitter and crisp, the scallops were soft in the center with a crusted edge, and the sauce was lemony, buttery, creamy, and lightly seasoned. But when the contrasting parts came together (you have to eat all the pieces together Tim/Lee, not separately!!), they balanced out and complemented one another. I really liked this dish when put together. It's very simple yet complex in taste.

Endives cooking.

Endives laid to rest.

Searing the scallops.

Starting the sauce with fresh-squeezed lemon juice.

Voila! Plated and ready for a photo.

Moules Mariniere: Freshness Is Key!

Mussels!

We had a little trouble trying to find fresh mussels. Lee went to Whole Foods in Palo Alto, and they had some for $5.99/lb. But, when tapped, none closed, so they were pretty dead. The clerk said to come back the next day. Lee was thinking about trying the Los Altos Whole Food since it’s bigger but ended up looking at Najiya Market in Mountain View, but they didn’t have them. Across the street, at Ranch 99, Lee found very fresh mussels for $3.99/lb., but they came in a bag, so you couldn’t sort through individual dead ones.

We started off going through the recipe but we didn’t have thyme, which probably was a major element that was missing, but the freshness of the mussels made up for that. We cooked the mussels for about 3 minutes. Most of the mussels were cooked well, but a few were still a little raw. So, like the other posts mentioned, probably a little longer would be better, say 4-5 minutes. We substituted chervil for the parsley since we had a bunch left from the frites trial.

Overall the mussels were very good in the onion, butter and wine sauce. I think the key element is freshness when it comes to this recipe. We had a few dead mussels, but not to many. So I’d say sourcing your seafood is a very important part of making this dish. The sauce went well with bread as well.

Onions, butter, and wine, all cooking in harmony.

Adding the mussels into the pan.

Mussels opening up. Fresh!

A lone mussel wades in butter and wine. C'est la vie!

Steak au Poivre with Herbed Frites: Lessons Learned

Kirk had a semi-early roller hockey game this evening, so I started the prep. for our last assignment, Steak au Poivre with Herbed Frites.

Unfortunately, I forgot to consult with him before he left about whether he had wanted to sous vide the NY strips vs. searing/baking them like the recipe mentioned. Of course, the decision was "yes", so in hindsight, we should have popped those into the water bath while he was gone to save ourselves the 90-minute wait. Nevertheless, everything turned out great, and we enjoyed a late, post-game dinner, paired with the Chilean wine we had used for the sauce - Montes Alpha's Series Cabernet Sauvignon 2007.



Herbed Frites
Like others, we opted for the oven fries, as we don't have a deep fryer and are ever-wary of our finicky, fire alarm. I was able to prep. the majority of this while Kirk was away, so by the time he was back, we just popped them in the oven while waiting for the steaks to sous vide.

• Minus Mandolin. Like John mentioned, a mandolin would have been super helpful for the prep. here - although it was just two potatoes, it seems like it would have been a lot faster and more uniform if we had one - registry item?
  

• Over-Oiled. I was super liberal with the olive oil, as I didn't want anything to stick to the pan or be burnt. We ended up taking a hybrid of everyone's suggestions and pre-heated the oven to 400°F, tossed the potatoes on a heavily oiled baking rack for 20 minutes, then broiled them on high for five. They were definitely cooked, but still didn't look completely crisp, so we flipped them over, then broiled them for another five to finish. Next time, I'd definitely use less oil, as they still had a glossy sheen when they came out of the oven.
  

• Herb Abundance. I decided to just throw it all in there. We had chervil, thyme, parsley, rosemary, and chives from previous recipe preparations, so I figured we could just pick out what we didn't like. Kirk wasn't too fond of the chives, and in hindsight that was probably a bad choice. I think the rosemary was a decent addition, and I liked the parsley in there for the contrast and leafy look. If we hadn't already bought all of the herbs over the weekend, I probably would have enjoyed the sage leaf variation that John & Lee went with the most.

Steak au Poivre
As you know, we went sous vide for the steak preparation. There's been some discussion on here about portion size, so I thought I'd share what we ended up buying. We found our NY strips at Costco, and bought them in a pack of three steaks weighing 2.22 lbs. total. We cooked two of these, lightly coated in pepper and salt, in a vacuum-sealed bag at 128°F for 90 minutes.

At some point, we had been contemplating whether or not we should have added the Dijon mustard to the steaks in the bag, but after a brief discussion with John & Lee, we decided to play it safe and coat them afterwards in case the entire steak ended up inundated with the flavor of mustard.

The other thing to note is that we cheaped out on green peppercorns, as we would have only needed 1/2 a tbsp., so we substituted with black instead, which we have plenty of. Additionally, I used our coffee grinder to grind up the peppercorn coating, which is apparently a faux paus in Alton Brown's book, as k explained to me later.



Kirk can elaborate on the searing part in a separate post - one note here is that instead of using olive oil as recommended in the recipe, we used refined sunflower oil, with has a higher smoke point than EVOO, so as not to set off our alarm.

While he was tending to the meat, I prepared the cabernet sauvignon/cream/shallot sauce. Like everyone else, in the interest of time, we purchased some pre-packaged demi-glace at Whole Foods. I didn't read the ingredients all that carefully prior to going to the store, so we didn't actually get a veal demi-glace. Instead, we bought a packet of Savory Choice beef demi-glace, which I think worked equally well (at $3.99 for 1/2 a cup). Another note is that I had read Andrew/Yurah's post beforehand and made sure to halve the pepper and salt portions, as I'm overly sensitive to salty foods. Even at half portions, I still found it just a bit salty for my taste, though that could have been due to the use of beef vs. veal?



All in all, a delicious recipe and a quick/easy preparation (save for the 90-minute wait time due to our sous vide variation). We couldn't resist using the sous vide machine again for this, as we have gotten consistently good results every time, but we'll try the recipe to the tee at some point for comparison's sake.

...and onto Dessert, Round II!

Coquilles St. Jacques à la Fondue d'Endives et Moules Mariniere: Lessons Learned

We celebrated Kirk's birthday last weekend up in Calistoga, and this weekend down in Mountain View, so had fallen behind on our homework!

As a result, tonight we decided to double up on our assignments and dined on bread, butter, and both of the bivalve courses: Coquilles St. Jacques à la Fondue d'Endives and Moules Mariniere.

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Moules Mariniere

• Selecting/Storing the Shellfish. Going into Ranch 99, we were prepared to follow some of the standard selection tips on the Web as well as request all live ones per Agnes' post, but they only sold them in bunches of purple, mesh bags that were on ice, so we took our chances - I would say about 20% of them were DOA. Also, I believe they were probably farmed, as we didn't need to clean or debeard them all that much. We had originally been planning on cooking them Saturday evening, but that didn't happen so we ended up storing them in a bowl near the bottom of the refrigerator, covering the bowl in a damp towel.
  
• Missing Minutes. Like Andrew & Yurah, we found that three minutes wasn't enough time to cook the mussels fully, especially over low heat, and we were working with a halved recipe (2 lbs.)...now if only we had read their post prior to preparing this! ;) If we were to do this again, we'd likely cook them for a longer period of time, or at least until a majority of the shells opened up fully. We had halved the sauce preparation as well, so I might just go ahead and prepare the entire portion next time so that the mussels were fully immersed.
  
• Superb Sauce! The sauce was easy to prepare and really delicious paired with bread, which we made sure to stock up on, thanks to previous posts.
  

Coquilles St. Jacques à la Fondue d'Endives

• Scallop Selection & Shortcuts. Unlike the mussels, you can select your sea scallops at Ranch 99. When buying, we just tried to make sure the fishmonger didn't pick any that looked brownish. We read a tip online that also said not to pick ones that looked stark white (vs. creamy white) because they may have been soaked in water to increase weight - I'm not sure if there's any weight to that or not. Generally, you would look for firm texture, a mild sweet odor, and fresh, moist sheen. We found the rest of the greens and the crème fraîche at Whole Foods. We were contemplating trying the homemade crème fraîche recipe, but will probably save that for another day.
• Straightforward & Quick. Not too much to say about the prep., it was pretty straightforward and the result was delicious! I wish I had tried one of the scallops prior to saucing, for comparison's sake.
• Endive Evaluation. I can't recall trying this dish before, so I don't have a baseline as to what the endives should have tasted like. Texturally, ours was nicely cooked with a slight, bitter undertone which I liked and found added some complexity to the dish. I've read recipes where it appears the endives are first blanched, then caramelized, which might be an interesting variation for a Round II experiment.

Next up...Steak au Poivre with Herbed Frites!

Mussels, scallops, tart

On Saturday we attempted the rest of the menu. Steve and Sarah kindly served as our guinea pigs, as well as lending us an ice cream maker for the sorbet. We got about 4 lbs of mussels and 12 scallops from Whole Foods. We had to take 2 lbs in Green mussels since they only had limited black mussels. We also learned that you had to take the mussels out of the plastic bag immediately, then rinse them and put them in a bowl in the fridge, covered with a towel with ice on top. This seemed to keep them fairly fresh for the couple of hours before we cooked them. Cooking the mussels was pretty easy, except that we found we had to keep them in the pot for longer than the 3 minutes as specified in the recipe. This could be due to just too much mussels at once (all 4 lbs went in). So after about 10 minutes almost all of them opened up, though there were a few that were a bit undercooked (we learned to tell them by the very small openings of the shells). Otherwise, the sauce was quite good and easy to make up, and we ate the dish with plenty of toasted baguette. Although in the future I think I prefer the black to the green mussels.

The scallops went pretty smoothly as well. They seared on the skillet easily with the butter. We kept the time to about 2 minutes for the first side, and less than that on the flip, and they turned out not overcooked and very sweet. The endives could have used some more seasoning, but the sauce was good even though we used some sour cream instead of creme fraiche (we were cheap).

We made the tarte the night before. We were apprehensive about the finicky nature of the sabayon. Luckily we already had a double boiler, and the custard thickened up without too much trouble. I think the key is vigorous whisking, like constantly, until the thickness appeared. The crust was made with food processor and kitchen-aid, and we made sure to bake it pretty well as suggested in the earlier posts. We also browned the top using the broiler method, and you really do have to watch it the whole time. The top browned in way under a minute, and we weren't too sure how brown to let it get, so we quit while we're ahead. The tart turned out lemony and light, everyone liked it a lot.

We also made the candied peel ahead of time, and it turned out better then expected. We boiled the sugar solution for like 40 minutes, but the temperature never got above 190 on our digital thermometer. So we just gave up on reaching 230 and stopped cooking it. Perhaps our thermometer was busted, but I doubt it. The peel by that time was translucent and in thick syrup. We waited till the next morning, and put them on racks to drain for a few hours (read this in another cookbook). Then we took them out and rolled them in sugar, and they actually turned out pretty good! The sugar seemed to dry them out a little, so they can be handled easily, and they are chewy and not crunchy. Not sure if that's how candied peels are supposed to be, but rolling them in sugar seems to be the key, and doesn't seem like they need to be cooked until 230.

Finally we took a crack at the sorbet. We juiced about 6 blood oranges to get half the recipe (1 1/2 cups). However the ice cream maker insert was not completely frozen by dinner time, so we'll have to attempt this later in the week. Instead we substituted with vanilla ice cream from Ben and Jerry.