Kitchen Zink - Chocolate Sauced Filets

Missed a day, but it was just leftovers, so it’s fine.  Hey, it’s my blog, and I’ll contribute when I feel like it!  Actually, there’s really only 3 to 4 meals per week that are worth commenting on, so my earlier estimate was perhaps a bit ambitious.  Not that we really hold high standards around here, but something akin to “Tonight we boiled water, cooked pasta, and poured sauce on top” isn’t exactly riveting content.  Regardless, we did have one meal in the interim that was awesome, so today I’ll write about that.

I’ve never really been much of a steak person, until I learned that it’s safe to eat it rare.  As Stacia (who worked in a meat locker) informed me, for a full-muscle piece of beef, the E-coli danger resides in the surface, so once the outside is cooked, the inside should be fine.  It’s the same concept that makes steak tartare edible.  Note that this doesn’t work for ground beef, since the inside and outside of the cuts are all mixed together, or for white meat, where parasites and salmonella are the main threats.  Pretty much anything else needs to be cooked through, but I’ve come around to letting steaks bleed a little, and now usually shoot for medium-rare.

Medium-rare steaks are usually pretty awesome, but as an eco-conscious guy, I do try to only eat beef every other week.  The fact of the matter is that it takes a ton of land and resources (energy, grain, water) to raise beef, and a socially-minded fellow can’t feel good about eating it too frequently.  Last week featured no red meat, so when it came up in the meal plan, I thought let’s go nuts and have something great.

We ended up selecting the tantalizing Beef Tenderloin with Rosemary and Chocolate from Ellie Krieger’s great book The Food You Crave.  Ellie is way cool, and has a very similar food philosophy to my own, perhaps warranting its own post sometime in the future.  There was some broccoli lying around in the fridge, so the side dish became a Roasted Broccoli with Lemon and Pecorino, from Fine Cooking Annual.  Very fancypants, but hey, we can splurge every now and then.

Now, a beef tenderloin is a big piece of meat, and Ellie called for 2 ½ pounds of it in the recipe, which obviously wasn’t happening.  As a substitute, Stacia somehow convinced me to get two filet mignon steaks (6.99 each at Gateway!) which are actually the same piece of meat, just cut into smaller pieces.  While we were there, we picked up a piece of actual Pecorino cheese, instead of being lazy and just using Parmesan, so we were all set.

With a modified set of ingredients, the recipe needed to be reordered a little, so we started with the sauce.  Sauteed shallots, carrot, celery and garlic formed the aromatics, into which some beef stock, rosemary, and cheap red wine were added and cooked down until the whole sauce was reduced.  While that was going, we started the broccoli on a cookie sheet in a 450 oven, and began searing the steaks.  Once the sauce finally reduced, it got poured through a fine strainer to remove the veggies (kinda sad but they were pretty used up by that point), and added a little bit of cocoa powder.  Tossing the broccoli with some lemon juice and shredding the pecorino on top meant that both the sauce and broccoli were ready to go.

The steaks were the star of the show, so cooking them right was imperative.  I feel like such a badass because we got it almost perfect, using a trick restaurant kitchens use and presumably few home cooks know about.  The secret is to only cook the steaks on the stovetop to sear the outsides, then move the whole pan to the oven to cook the rest of the way through.  Apparently it takes a lot longer to get the heat in through the pan only, so you end up overcooking the meat to get the insides done right, whereas the radiant heat of the oven cooks it from all sides so the interior can remain juicy.  Or something like that.  I’m just a cook, not a food scientist – all I know is that it works.

So we seared on the stove, cooked in the oven, rested on the counter, and finally were ready to plate.  I cut into my steak and was instantly worried that I had cooked it longer than intended: not quite pink enough in the center.  Then I tasted it, and realized that it was probably the best steak I’ve ever eaten.  Not sure if it was meat quality, cooking method, or what, but it was more tender and juicy than any piece of beef I’ve had before.  I mentally kick myself a bit that it would have been even more fantastic had it had been pulled from the oven a few minutes earlier, but since it was so awesome, I can’t complain too much.

The sauce was pretty neat, too; as advertised it didn’t really taste like chocolate, but just had a really great hearty and beefy flavor that really accentuated the meat.  The broccoli was the only disappointment in the meal.  Roasting it was supposed to really give it a distinct, sweeter flavor, but the difference was pretty subtle compared to the usual steamed.  I suppose it was tastier, but the recipe called for a bit too much lemon, and as far as I could discern, the Pecorino cheese was pretty indistinct.  But, sitting alongside the chocolate-rosemary sauced steaks, no side dish was really going to shine, so overall it was a phenomenal meal, one to repeat, just not really one we can have all the time.

Final note – taking pictures of food is hard, and mine seldom look much like the real thing.  So, this pic might not look great, but trust me that the food looked and tasted much better, and I’m still learning on the photography.