Another corker from Ottolenghi’s Plenty
I won’t go into ingredients or technique here; the whole thing is listed on the Guardian’s website.
Category: bread
Some days of the year call for pure luxury, and I think New Year’s Day should be one of them. This renegade of the 70s is a favourite of mine in a decent old-fashioned restaurant, and is complete indulgence. In essence it’s fillet steak, sitting on pate and a crouton, in a red wine sauce. Traditionally it calls for foie gras but I’ve scaled it back to good old chicken liver pate. It’s absolutely delicious and great for a real treat. The tender meat, al dente mushrooms, smooth pate and crisp crouton, all going down with a savoury sauce… yum.
Tournedos rossini:
500g fillet steak, at room temperature
5 – 6 closed cup mushrooms, sliced
Slightly stale bread, cut to rounds (preferably the same size as the steak) and toasted
Pate, cut like the bread
For the sauce:
1 garlic clove, unpeeled
Small glass of red wine
Splash of balsamic vinegar
500ml beef stock
- Fry the mushrooms in a little oil and butter. Get on with the steaks while they cook. You want them to be fairly soft. Don’t season them until right at the end to make sure they don’t release water early.
- In another pan season the beef with pepper and fry in a very hot pan for 3 minutes either side. You’re looking for a nice bounce to the meat when pressed with a thumb – please keep it medium – rare. Leave the meat to rest on a hot plate while you make the sauce.
- Add the garlic clove to the steak pan and deglaze with wine. When this has reduced to a nice syrup add the stock and vinegar and bubble fast to reduce this liquid down.
- Check for seasoning, remove the garlic and throw in the mushrooms.
- Season the meat with salt and add the meat juices to the sauce.
- Assemble the dish with bread, then pate, then the meat, finally top with sauce.
The Good Food Channel has recently whipped through Rude Boy Food starring the genial, funny and inventive Aaron Craze. It centers around street food, bursting with honesty and lively flavours. I was instantly hooked by the tongue-in-cheek approach spiked with great recipes.
In the “New York” episode he made these extremely cute hot dog rolls, essentially a sausage baked into bread dough. I dashed over to the Good Food website but this was one of the few recipes not featured. It had already been deleted from Sky+ so I had to invent a bit of a hot dog roll recipe, usually a little sweeter and softer than a regular roll. His also featured skewers of rosemary and cherry tomatoes but that wasn’t for me.
I cobbled something together I was really pleased with, and served it with ketchup and American mustard for dipping. Great party food.
Hot dog rolls (makes 16):
16 cocktail sausages
250ml milk
125ml water
50g unsalted butter, melted
500g plain flour
1 sachet yeast
1 tablespoon honey
1 1/2 teaspoons salt
1 egg
- Fry the sausages quickly until browned on all over. Leave aside to cool.
- Mix the dry ingredients together (flour, yeast, salt).
- Mix the wet ingredients together (butter, honey, water, milk, egg) and gradually add to the dry mix until combined.
- Knead on a floured surface until stretchy. Leave covered in a warm place for an hour.
- Preheat the oven to 180C. Divide the dough into 16 small pieces and roll the sausages up so a little sausage pokes out of either end of the dough ball.
- Brush with egg wash and bake for 30 minutes, or until lightly browned and sound hollow when tapped from underneath.
I’ve tried treacle tart on this blog before, and was somewhat disappointed with the results. I should’ve gone with my gut and cooked Heston Blumenthal’s recipe as described in In Search of Perfection
I won’t bother listing the full recipe – Heston himself has listed the method here. I did however make some significant tweaks: I’m not a great pastry chef (big hot hands are not useful implements) and I had enough to do so I bought some of Sainsbury’s ‘dessert pastry’ enriched with extra butter and sweetness. I also have to admit to not ageing the treacle, but used as is straight from the tin. It’s a fairly straight forward affair; heated syrup is blended with eggs, cream, lemon juice + zest, melted butter and brown breadcrumbs then poured into a blind-baked pastry case.
The results were absolutely fantastic. Heart-stoppingly, incredulously good. This is exactly what treacle tart should be. A crisp and melting base giving way to dense, hyper-sweet filling that bounces along with gingery-style spice and zesty flavours. But the real genius ninja touch is the addition of vanilla salt – literally vanilla seeds and sea salt mixed together – as a last-minute sprinkling garnish. When it hits your tongue that salty falvour dissipates and blooms a perfumed aroma that hangs around as you chew through the immense treacley pleasure. It’s utterly superb and I’ve run out of adjectives to get it across accurately. Please try it.
(PS. as a complete aside, the Sainsbury’s pastry was really good – very light and just sweet enough. I definitely recommend it if you’re in a hurry).
The next day it was somehow better – the bread had congealed to a christmas pudding style texture. Heavenly.
I did make some of my own ice-cream to go with this. I wanted a compromise between clotted cream and ice cream but again, wanted to cut down the work a little. So I used good quality shop-bought custard to kick it off. This too was a great accompaniment to the dense flavours. I didn’t even bother with the frequent stirring – just left the bowl alone in the freezer and the ice cream was beautifully textured.
Heston’s perfect treacle tart recipe is here
Clotted cream ice cream:
300g good quality custard
250g clotted cream
4 tablespoons glucose syrup
- Blend the ingredients together well and freeze for at least four hours or overnight if possible. When serving this will need a good twenty minutes to defrost – the clotted cream doesn’t want to go anywhere for a while! A scoop dipped in boiling water will help too.