Beef steak

If you follow Prymitywna on Facebook, you already know there was no messing about today. Hence this recipe for one fine-looking beef steak 🙂

But steak out of the blue on a Tuesday? Well, not quite.

You probably know those Facebook book chains. Somebody nominates you and lists 10 books whose titles have stuck with them all their life. And then, as with any chain, it’s your turn to nominate people and list your titles.

You probably don’t know this, but PrymitywnaKuchnia.pl joined in too. So what did we write?

“Right then, here are the books that matter most to Prymitywna (in no particular order):

1. Gordon Ramsay, ‘Dania w pięć minut’ (Meals in Five Minutes) – because sometimes we literally have five minutes,
2. Nigella Lawson, ‘Nigella ucztuje’ (Nigella Feasts) – because I feast sometimes too, though I don’t snort,
3. Michał Bardel, ‘Zbrodnia i wina. Sensacyjny przewodnik po winach świata’ (Crime and Wines: A Thrilling Guide to the Wines of the World) – because it’s a crime not to drink wine,
4. Jamie Olivier, ‘Każdy może gotować. Naucz się gotować w 24 godziny i przekaż dalej’ (Anyone Can Cook: Learn to Cook in Twenty-Four Hours and Pass It On) – because you know I like passing things on,
5. De Lauro Silwana, ‘W kuchni. Potrawy jednogarnkowe’ (In the Kitchen: One-Pot Dishes) – you know how many pots I own? Exactly,
6. Agnieszka Maciąg, ‘Smak miłości’ (The Taste of Love) – just look at the cover,
7. Redelbach Aniela, ‘Ukraina smaków’ (A Ukraine of Flavours) – because #jedzpolskiejablka (‘eat Polish apples’) and try to make sense of that,
8. Wan Gok, ‘Kuchnia chińska według Goka’ (Chinese Cooking According to Gok) – because that’s practically Van Gogh,
9. Scarpaleggia Giulia, ‘Kocham Toskanię. Kolory smaki i zapachy’ (I Love Tuscany: Colours, Flavours and Aromas) – because I’m not very original, and last but not least, or actually yes, least,
10. Pustelnik Anastazja, ‘183 nowe przepisy siostry Anastazji’ (Sister Anastazja’s New Recipes, All One Hundred and Eighty-Three of Them) – to see if she’d hidden that microphone in there, the one a nun nicked off me in one of my first religion classes.

All right, nominations time. Nobody’s going to reply anyway, so here goes: Magda Gessler, PROSTA HISTORIA, przepisy.pl, the duo Pascal Brodnicki and Karol Okrasa and finally Spakowana walizka. Phew, I did go on a bit. Piotrek, OK? :)))”

So, what do you think? Did anyone reply?

And what does all that have to do with steak? Yesterday my friend Jarek wrote on Facebook:

“Either induction hobs are no good for steaks or I’m doing something wrong. I’ve got a really heavy cast-iron pan. On my gas hob I used to heat it on full blast for about 10 minutes. Then two minutes’ frying on each side. The steaks turned out great. And now? They only cook ‘from underneath’. The sides are completely raw. It’s as if the sides of the pan weren’t heating the meat at all. Disaster. I miss gas :(”

I’ll admit I much prefer this sort of challenge to hunting down cookbook titles. I took him up on it. And I’ll admit it wasn’t that straightforward. Never mind the induction hob: I don’t even own a steak pan. But where there’s a will…

So I knocked up this steak. It came out rather closer to rare than well done. Burneika, the coconut champ, would have been proud of me.

If you prefer yours more well done, just fry it a little longer. You develop a feel for it 🙂

I love my meat, so the red centre of a steak doesn’t scare me in the slightest. Naturally, I’ll recommend a beef steak anytime, anywhere.

At a glance: 

Preparation time: 40 minutes

Serves: one on one

Calories: the calories got scared and ran away

Ingredients for an unbeatable steak:

• a half-pounder of beef (that’s about 230 grams of beef: rib-eye, sirloin or fillet)
• two tablespoons of clarified butter (I didn’t make it myself, I bought it)
• a sprig of fresh rosemary
• a few sprigs of fresh thyme
• black pepper (whole peppercorns)
• a drop of olive oil
• salt
• a tablespoon of butter
• a small clove of garlic

Recipe for a proper beauty of a steak:

All right, is cooking a good steak an art or isn’t it? Opinions differ. Mine is that it’s no great art provided:

• you’ve got fresh meat
• the meat is good quality
• the meat isn’t chilled (it needs to be at room temperature, so if it’s from the shop, leave it out for about 40–50 minutes)
• you’ve got the right attitude
• and the proper motivation

If you’ve got all 5, you’re addicted and ought to go into therapy 😉 Seriously, though, it really does matter. Especially the bits about the meat (beef, of course).

Another important thing: don’t salt the beef before frying it.

Here’s what I did. I washed the meat thoroughly (the piece was perhaps a little too thick, about 3 or even 4 cm thick – you can see it in the photos below) and set it aside for roughly an hour to come to temperature (so it wouldn’t be cold).

After an hour I transferred the meat to a plastic container and sprinkled it on all sides with fresh thyme leaves, rosemary leaves and freshly crushed black pepper. I poured literally a drop of olive oil over it and gently rubbed in the “marinade”. I set it aside (but not in the fridge).

After about 25 minutes I brushed the “marinade” off the meat (no need to “wash” it clean, just make sure there are no large bits of herbs left, as they’ll start to burn during frying).

In my frying pan (a fairly ordinary one) I heated two tablespoons of clarified butter until quite hot, setting the induction hob to 8 on a scale of 1–10. I laid the beef by hand in the middle of the pan and dusted the top lightly with salt. I fried it for 3 minutes (turning the “flame” down from 8 to 7 on a scale of 1–10). I didn’t press it down or prick it. I just let it fry. Then I turned it over, dusted it lightly with salt again and fried it for about another 4 minutes.

Meanwhile I prepared the butter for the top. I took a firm piece of butter from the fridge (about a tablespoon, though I tried to cut a rectangular piece) and sprinkled it with fresh thyme leaves and a very finely chopped clove of garlic.

When the steak was done, I put it on a plate to let it “calm down” a little. After 4 minutes I transferred it to a plate. I served it with homemade chips and a simple salad of tomato, cucumber and shallot. Naturally, I put the garlic butter on top and it melted beautifully.

Don’t forget to serve the steak with a proper steak knife. Enjoy!