T-Bones, Fondant Potatoes and a Salad with Vinaigrette
Jennifer and I both managed to get hit with the Flu this week so the meal prep laxed as we both laid our heads down to try and beat this ick. Going into the end of the weekend I felt well enough to try and cook something that tasted really delightful. We needed some reprieve from crackers and soup. The local store had T-Bones on sale so I grabbed a few and figured I would try and cook them up for Sunday dinner. I don’t remember the last time I cooked a T-Bone and honestly since we have been in the new house I haven’t cooked much beef steak at all. It was time for an indulgent meal and the T-Bone hit the spot with all its friends that came with it.
The meal consisted of these parts.
- T-Bones
- Fandant Potatoes
- Leaf Lettuce Salad with toasted pine nuts and orange wedges
- Home made Vinaigrette
- Home made Demi Glace
In all honesty the steaks were pretty sub par in quality but I will tell you that the sauce that I placed on top of them made them taste like a 5 star restaurant. Below you will find the intricacies of the secret sauce, but it is not for the irresolute. This stuff took me 3 days to make and the process would have gotten Tyler Durden’s attention. If you can find the tenacity to get it done, your going to tell Frank that he has lost his right to say ” I put that #*@& on everything” at least when it comes to beef.
The Salad
I just used some red leaf lettuce that I had in the fridge. I chopped it up after a good rinse and placed it in the salad spinner to dry off. I topped it with some toasted pine nuts and wedges from an orange we had in the house. Be careful when toasting pine nuts, they go from perfect to garbage in seconds. I like mine lightly toasted in a dry pan on the stove over medium heat. Watch them intently.
For the dressing I mixed the following
- Prosecco wine vinegar
- Olive Oil
- Dijon
- Minced Garlic
- Minced Shallot
- Sugar
- Salt
- Pepper
Just be careful not to over dress the salad. Leaf lettuce is fragile and if over dressed gets really soggy under the pressure of oils. I put mine in a squeeze bottle so that I could just add more if I felt it needed it. The only issue with this is that the darn shallots kept clogging the nozzle; mince well my friends.
Fondant Potatoes
Super easy and super tasty. Simply peel a potato into as much of a perfect cylinder as you can and slice them in half. Once you do, fry each end in some butter, salt and pepper to your taste, poor some vegetable stock in as a braise, and place in a 425 degree oven for about 20 minutes. Have you ever eaten a perfect hash brown with a wonderfully crispy exterior and a nice soft potato inside? This reminded me of a really great hash brown, the entire family enjoyed these too. I’ll provide a good recipe below.
T-Bone
No, its not my new street name although that would be cool. Yes, I used the ole’ Sous Vide. I’m addicted to delicious food. Water bathed for an hour until medium rare and then pan seared on my cast iron and finished with salt and pepper. YUMMMM, It was really that easy. Cook these however you like them. I wish I would have grilled them but they were still perfectly cooked with my new friend the Sous Vide.
The Magic
Alrighty then, if you have made it this far there may be some hope to pretty much save any piece of meat you chose to use here. Demi Glace! I have never attempted home made demi glace before but I will absolutely be doing it again. This stuff is awesome sauce; figuratively and idiomatically.
I started with 2 very large sheet pans. The first one contained my mirepoix of chopped yellow onion (skin on), washed but unpeeled carrots, and celery. I lightly oiled these veg and coated them with a can of tomato paste. The second sheet pan contained two whole chicken carcasses that I saved from the last time I broke down a few birds. I also included the wings and neck. I then supplemented some additional beef bones for flavor. My local store literally had packages of bones called soup bones. Connective tissues and marrow are what is needed here.
A traditional Demi Glace uses roasted veal bones but alas, I could not find them so I emulated the flavors with the mixture above. Using all beef bones may begat to much earthy beef flavor.
Both sheet pans went into the oven at about 400 degrees until the contents of them were nice and brown. The bone pan took about 30 minutes longer to roast. I watched the vegetables until my onion started to char a little on the ends.
I then transferred both pans of goodness to a very large stock pot and covered it with very cold water. I deglazed my sheet pans with some red wine over the stove top and dumped that slurry into the pot as well. I added some bay leaves, pepper corns, parsley, and thyme. Note that I never add salt. I put this on the stove top over high heat until it started to boil and then dropped it to a very low simmer temp for the size of the pot I was using. You basically just want to see a bubble or two every few seconds. This sat on the stove over night, about 18 hours in total cooking time.
Once I felt I had extracted all of the flavor from the roasted meat and veg I placed a colander into a large bowl and strained all of the meat and veg out of the pot. Discarding the solid ingredients, I then double strained through a fine sieve, the rest of the liquid and then placed it back onto the stove to reduce for another few hours. I started with about 4 gallons of broth which I then kept at a low rolling boil on the stove until it reduced to about a gallon of liquid.
Are you still with me? Remember the Tyler Durden reference? Here it comes again. At this point I took my remaining stock and put it into a deep plastic kitchen pan and placed it into an ice bath as to cool it enough for the refrigerator. As the liquid cools, the collagen rich broth and fat will separate and become gelatinous in the cold fridge. Once the product had fully set and was cool I pulled it from the fridge and skimmed, with a large spoon, the fat from the top of the greatness below it. I suppose you could make some beefy soap if you wanted at this point but I don’t have a recipe for that. I then divided the demi glace gelatin into some freezer bags for use as I wanted to grab one and use it from the deep freeze. This brought me to the end of the 2nd day of cooking this demi glace. Fun pic below.
The final step in creating a sauce for the steak was to simmer the thawed demi glace in a pan until it was reduced to a nice viscous syrupy texture. I added a dollop of butter, a squeeze of lemon, and salt to taste. I then spooned this over my finished steak and found myself lapping up the pan with my steak after I ran out on my plate. I couldn’t believe how wonderful this sauce was. Massive undertaking yes, but the result was absolutely astonishing.
Conclusion
Yes, you can buy and use the knorr pre-made demi glace and that will certainly get you by in a pinch here. I would encourage you to try and tackle the sauce. The development of flavor from the reduced sauce is very apparent. You can literally taste the love and effort put into it. I cannot wait to look up some new derivative sauces that I can experiment with.