My first recipe.
Beware.
I have arrived.
Finally, after months of trials and errors (ratio 1:2) during which I tried out some recipes and yet failed miserably each time, I have finally perfected my own steak recipe. My style. My taste buds. My recipe.
This is an extraordinary achievement for me. One I should celebrate with flying confetti and a glass of champagne. Yes, yes, yes, I have yet to learn a ton of recipes in the next few decades. But for all it’s worth, I am one happy smiling person today.
What I made today was Pan-grilled Tenderloin with Red Wine and Lemon Reduction. I served it on a bed of crunched potato and crispy garlic croutons. Not garlic bread. Garlic croutons. Garlic bread is soft in the middle and buttery on the outside. Garlic croutons resemble garlic bread in shape but the texture is completely crispy. I am just making this up because what really happened was I baked my garlic bread a bit too long and it turned out too crispy to be called garlic bread.
Ahem. So, for the steak, you can use ribeye steaks or sirloin cuts. There is not much difference - I used tenderloin cuts because it was on sale when I bought it. Hallelujah.
Here is the recipe. My recipe.
Pan-grilled Tenderloin with Red Wine and Lemon Reduction
Ingredients (to serve 1-2 persons)
First, make the compound butter. It is important to make this the day before. You do not have to make it exactly one day prior to your steak grilling - but you would not want to make it on the same day because it needs refrigerating. Some recipes say you can refrigerate it only for 30 minutes but if you are using high quality butter such as the Dutch butter, you would want to refrigerate it at least 1 day.
- So to make the compound butter, put your butter in a mixing bowl. You have to use softened butter - not melted, not refrigerated. Then peel 7 garlic cloves nicely and put them in boiling water. Do not crunch them as you would lose the juices. Blanch them for around 10 minutes. While you are blanching the garlic cloves, take your fresh herbs (you can use any but I like basil and parsley as a combination) and roll the herbs into a small roll (like rolling a cigarette). Chop them finely. Do not chop your herbs more than once as the fragrance will stick into your knife and you do not want that. Put them in the mixing bowl along with the butter.
After 10 minutes - take out your garlic cloves and grind it with your mortar and pestle. The garlic cloves will be soft enough to be ground into fine paste. Smash and grind. Repeat 10 times. Mix it together with the butter and herbs and combine together with your spatula. To store it, take your plastic wrap (or cling wrap) and spread it across your cutting board. Put the butter nicely on one edge and try as best as you can (I can’t) to form a rectangle. Then roll the wrap so you would form a nice plastic tube containing butter. Make sure the tube is tight and secure both ends. Refrigerate it and smell your fingers. Heaven. - Back to the steak. First - you gotta make the marinade. Yes, the steak is well marinated before I grilled it. Take a mixing bowl and pour in 5 tablespoons of soy sauce. Peel your ginger patiently (I discovered that I am very impatient when I peel gingers) and chop them roughly. No need to be fine as you would discard them later anyway. You just want the magic happen when it is combined with the soy sauce. Put in the chopped ginger and squeeze in the juice of half a lemon. Splash in one tablespoon of white wine and a generous sprinkle of ground black pepper. Then add in your rosemary. See, if you live in a country where fresh rosemary sprigs are not hard to come by - please use fresh rosemary to substitute all herbs in this recipe. But I do not live in such a country so I am using dried. Not a sin if you have tried your best.
Combine the marinade well. One thing to remember, do not season it with salt. The soy sauce is salty already. You can put in some sugar to combat the acidity of the lemon juice but personally, I find it fresh and need not to be tainted by any sweetness. Take your steak and sink the meat into the marinade. It will not be able to sink completely so you would have to turn the meat to coat both sides well. If you are cooking one steak only, leave the steak in the marinade bowl. If you are cooking two steaks - coat both steaks well and cover both in a plastic wrap. Separately wrapped. Refrigerate for 30 minutes. - You have 30 minutes to cook the crunched potatoes. I do not want something mashed because I know my sauce will be very rich. Mashed potatoes are usually creamy and rich in flavor - and I do not want it to be overpowered by the sauce. So I made crunched potatoes. Here’s how. Take a small pan and fill it in with water. Put it on high heat and let it come to a boil. Put in a generous amount of salt and let it boil and bubbly. Cut the potatoes into chunks and put them into the water. I do not peel my potatoes. Potato skins have their own nutritions and it is a waste to see it getting washed away in the kitchen sink. So don’t peel and boil the potatoes for around 10 minutes or so. While doing so - cut a piece of your compound butter and (just a little) and put it on a metal ladle and touch the bottom of your ladle to the boiling water. This will melt the butter at a warp speed. This is a great method because you do not have to wash a whole container just to melt the butter.
Once you stab your fork into one of the potato chunks and it does not come with your fork (in other words, fall back to the water) it means it is ready. Turn off the heat and drain the potatoes. Return the potatoes back to the empty pan. Do this because the pan is still hot and emitting hot steam. It will evaporate the water in the potatoes. Set aside and let it cool. Again, if you want to do mashed potatoes, this is when you mash them but we do not want that. So we want it to cool a bit and harden before we crunch them. - Now, take your other half of lemon and make two thin slices. Set the lemon slices aside and take 4 garlic cloves. Peel them by crushing them. You have to crush them. We want the juice to run out later in the pan.
- Take a frying pan, heat it on medium-low heat and put in some oil. I use vegetable oil because I ran out of olive oil. Some people use butter - I do not want to. Too much butter is no good. Remember that you want to live for a long time and be healthy so unless you want to have a cardiac arrest - avoid unnecessary abundant use of butter. While waiting until it is hot, take out your meat from the refrigerator and drip the excess of marinade. Put it on the pan presentation side down. Do this because the pan is still clean and what you will have is a clean nice caramelization on the presentation side without any brown bits on it. For medium-rare steak, wait until 3 minutes before flipping it over. But I do not like medium rare. I would go for medium-well done and for that reason, I waited for a whole 6 minutes before turning it over. Take the two lemon slices and put it on top of the steak like the picture below.
Press the lemon slices a little bit (but not too hard) to let a little bit of the juice seep into the steak. - After some minutes, flip the steak and you would see some good brown bits sticking on the pan. DO NOT PANIC. This is the marinade and the natural sugars in your beef being caramelized together in holy matrimony. So calm down, and flip your steak, put the lemon slices on top of the steak again and wait for another 3 minutes for medium-rare and another 5 minutes for medium-well done. At this point, your pan is smoking hot. It is a good time to put in your garlic cloves and basil sprigs around the pan. Arrange one sprig of basil and some garlic cloves on top of the steak nicely so the garlic flavor will infuse into the steak.
- While your steak is cooking, crunch your potatoes with a masher but do not mash it finely. At this point it will be a bit cooled and harder to mash completely. Put in the melted compound butter to smooth the texture a little bit and give it a nice extra flavor. Arrange it nicely on a plate.
- Remove the steak after few minutes and set it aside. Keep it warm by putting a tin foil on top of it (just put it loosely) but the point is, keep it warm. Take out your lemon slices, ginger, and basil sprigs and dump them into the marinade bowl. With a spoon, press the garlic cloves hard and mix it well with the marinade. Take 1 cup of red wine and pour it into the hot pan. Act fast. Scrape the brown bits in the pan with a wooden spoon while the wine goes bubbly and fragrant. Then take a strainer and strain half of the marinade liquid into the wine. Do not pour in all the marinade liquid as the flavor of the marinade will overpower the red wine. Discard the rest half of the marinade liquid with everything you strained in the strainer. Then increase your heat to medium-high. You want the sauce to bubble and thicken. The reason why it needs to bubble is because you want to get rid all the bacterias contained in the marinade liquid (bacterias extracted from the raw meat). And you want it to thicken nicely. While it is bubbling, squeeze in the rest of lemon halve you have by straining the seeds with your palm. Stir and season with salt and pepper. Put in some sugar here because the sauce is very acid now and you do not want that either. Taste and season to your liking and let it thicken.
- Once the sauce is done, pour it onto the crunched potatoes. The sauce will flavor the potatoes nicely. Do not pour the sauce on top of the steak because your steak will be packed in flavor already. So put the steak on top of the sauce and potato bed and top it with a nice slice of compound butter you made.
Hope you enjoy this.
I have arrived! Muahahahahaha.
