Avigayil Damm

My hubby arrived back last Friday and I had planned to make him a cheeseburger. Unfortunately I came home a little too late from the office so we called Izzi Pizza instead because we didn’t want to bother with the preparation and all that.

Yesterday when I wanted to make cheeseburger, I realized that I forgot to buy the burger bun. Doh! So my hubby and I decided to make burger steak instead. I thought this wasn’t such a bad back up plan. Since we had plenty of minced meat, we had enough burger steak for today as well, but we served them differently. Here’s how.

The photo on the left is how we served it on Saturday: with boiled potatoes, grilled tomatoes, caramelized onion and brown sauce. The brown sauce is nothing fancy, just cream stirred into the pan which was used to fry the steak and onion, and then we added a bit of brown food colour to make it less pale. Looks quiet and pretty plain eh. But I tell you, it tasted damn good.

The Sunday version was served with roast potatoes, sunny side up egg and béarnaise sauce. For a recipe of béarnaise sauce, click here. Which one looks to be to your liking? If you ask me, I liked them both.

My visiting friend and I went out today for a successful shopping spree at Melawai and Pasaraya, and we arrived home rather late in the afternoon. Having anticipated arriving late from the shopping, we decided on a simple menu: wagyu steak – simple to make but tasting very good.

We bought the steak at Gourmet Garage, the only place we know so far that sells good steaks. This wagyu steak, as my hubby claims, is the best meat we could have, and it’s so juicy and tender, that asking for it to be cooked ‘well-done’ would be the crime of the century. The carbohydrate source choice of tonight was boiled potatoes. We also caramelized some onion rings for additional taste. As for the sauce, we opted for our own home-made béarnaise sauce.

The steak, caramelized onion and boiled potatoes are of course easy to make, nothing that I can share with you. But the béarnaise sauce recipe may be of interest.

Ingredients:

• 150 gr butter, melt separately and let cool
• 6 egg yolks
• 150 ml beef bouillon (or use 1 cube beef stock in 150 ml water)
• 3 tsp white wine vinegar
• 1 tbsp lemon juice
• 2 tsp dried tarragon

In a medium heavy sauce pan, I mixed the egg yolks with the beef bouillon, white wine vinegar, lemon juice and dried tarragon. Once the butter has cooled down, I added it into the sauce pan and started to cook it at very low heat, stirring.

Now, in the original recipe the butter is melted in the sauce pan and then the egg mixture is added in it, but one time I accidentally discovered that my way (as above) is much better. It’s important that the butter is cooled down first, because not only does it help avoid heating up the egg yolk too quickly so that it becomes scrambled eggs, but it will also allow you to heat the sauce slowly, giving enough time to allow the sauce to thicken. Once the sauce starts to thicken, turn off the stove to stop the heat, as the heat from the sauce pan will be enough to keep it ‘cooking’. I have come to ‘master’ this sauce and my hubby has voted it as his favourite. Try it out and tell me what you think!