One of my favourite cookbooks is Harold McGee’s On Food and Cooking. If you’re a fan of Heston Blumenthal’s somewhat awkward TV programming, you’ve probably heard Harold mentioned a few times. His book is exactly what a cookbook should be – a textbook. It contains no recipes. Instead, at just over a thousand pages it details nearly every technique, ingredient and nugget of knowledge that someone who wants to learn about cooking will find invaluable. The point here is that cooking is not something to be rushed.
I have very mixed views about Jamie Oliver – on the one hand I think he has exposed a lot of people to cooking, but he doesn’t teach people to cook, he teaches them to cheat and copy. Don’t slice your vegetables in the blender, slice them by hand and in a week or two you’ll be just as fast but won’t need to do the washing up. Don’t use express rice, use rice – who can honestly say they don’t have the time to cook rice from scratch? Fifteen minute meals are rarely a good idea, because the people who only have fifteen minutes to cook each day aren’t going to have the knife skills, the speed and the culinary common sense to get it done in anywhere near that time. Cook for an hour, or two hours instead; put something into it, and you will get something out of it.
Students should be excited about cooking, and begin the process by burning the collection of ‘student cookbooks’ they’ve amassed in the pre-university period, because beans on toast is not a dish that requires a recipe. A student cookbook should show you the cheaper cuts of meat and teach you how to cook them well. Ham hock terrine, braised shin of beef and pressed pork belly can all be made extremely cheaply and are excellent dishes to build culinary technique. Make confit duck legs, pork rillettes, and pickled vegetables, so when the money runs out at the end of term you still have long lasting, incredible food in the fridge. Club together with your friends and buy a more expensive cut like the ones listed in the recipe below, but make sure you get the most out of them.
I loathe most cookbooks that are out at the moment because clueless, gimmick-rich TV personalities are saying things like: ‘Sear the meat to seal in the juices’ and ‘Cook the chicken through’. The former is complete nonsense and the latter a vague, useless piece of advice. Below I’ll offer a recipe that comes out perfectly every time if you follow the instructions carefully. No gimmicks; it’s food.
Temperature controlled beef.
Throughout I’m going to work on the assumption that you like your beef medium rare. If you prefer rare, change the oven temperature to between 50 and 55 degrees.
Ingredients-
1 kilo of top side
Or 1 kilo of rump
Or 1 kilo of Prime Rib
Fine Mirepoix (1 onion, 1 carrot, 1 stick of celery cut into 1cm pieces)
300ml of Good quality beef stock (Not from a cube)
100ml of red wine
1 Tsp Unsalted Butter
1 Tbsp Vegetable oil
1 Bay leaf, 1 sprig of thyme.
Salt, Pepper.
You will need both an oven thermometer and a digital probe thermometer – both available for ten pounds or less. Heat the oven to 55-60 degrees Celsius. This very low temperature ensures that the beef is cooked to the same temperature all the way through – no chewy grey-brown parts. You will have to check on the oven at times – if the temperature is too high, open the oven door for a few minutes to cool it down.
Take the meat out of the fridge at least an hour before you start and season with salt all over, then loosely cover it with Clingfilm and leave for an hour to come to room temperature. A finely ground salt works best at this point.
Heat a pan on the highest heat possible; add the oil and then the beef. You’re aiming for a good sear all around the meat, a rich brown colour for caramelised, meaty flavours. As soon as the meat is seared all over, take it out of the pan. You want this step to be as quick as possible to minimise the amount of overcooked edges.
Leave to cool for 5 minutes, then place the meat in a tray with the oven thermometer next to it. Cook for 2 hours.
Pour away most of the leftover pan oil, leaving just a small amount. Add the mirepoix of vegetables, thyme, bay leaf and a few peppercorns, and cook on a medium heat until softened and beginning to caramelise. Deglaze the pan with the wine, scraping all of the bits stuck to the bottom into the sauce. When the wine has cooked past the point where it no longer smells alcoholic, add the beef stock, transfer to a saucepan and reduce the heat to low. Simmer for 25-30 minutes, adding water if it’s beginning to dry out. Strain through a fine sieve and reduce by two thirds – that is, cook it until 1/3 of the original volume of liquid remains. A small amount of intensely flavoured sauce is superior to a watery one, and no sauce at all is better than Bisto.
After 2 hours, remove the beef from the oven- as it’s been cooked to the correct temperature it does not require resting- no intense heat has been applied. Slice thinly across the grain and add a little pepper and salt (this time Maldon Sea Salt, for texture and little pockets of flavour). Reheat the sauce, adding the butter and swirling in at the end, serve with usual accompaniments!