Forever Summer (17 page)

Makes about 8 bulging sandwiches.

BLACK AND BLUE BEEF

‘Black and blue’ is the New York restaurateur’s term for the way I like my steak cooked: charred on the outside, meltingly, quiveringly rare within. It is in the spirit of internationalism that I suggest this Korean style, in a soy, ginger and garlic marinade, and then thinly sliced so that you end up with a plateful of spice-seared, ruby-fleshed rags, the whole both scorched and tender.

1 approx. 4cm-thick slice, cut from the top of the rump (approx. 1.5kg in weight)

for the marinade:

5 tablespoons soy sauce

3 garlic cloves, minced

2.5cm fresh ginger, minced

2 tablespoons sesame oil

2 teaspoons caster sugar

black pepper

4 spring onions, roughly chopped

Put the steak in a large freezer bag and add all the marinade ingredients. Tie the bag expelling any air, and squidge everything around before leaving in the fridge overnight (or even for a day or so), or for at least an hour at room temperature.

Grill on a viciously hot barbecue or on a griddle. I like to do not much more than blacken the outside (which means about 5 minutes per side) but you, of course, should cook this just as long as you like. Leave to stand for a few minutes before carving into thin slices.

I love to eat these red, savoury, straggly slices mounded on plain steamed rice, wodged into buns with a splodge of brown sauce or piled into the centre of a Chinese-pancake-thin soft flatbread, drizzled with some of the
Vietnamese Dipping Sauce
and rolled up to form slaveringly dripping wraps.

Serves 4.

STEAK WITH BARBECUE BUTTERS

This is the Euro-alternative to the Korean-flavoured steak above. I tend always to give people their own individual steaks when I make flavoured butters, simply because this is best with a retro-disc of herb-flecked butter sitting melting on each one.

Make up one or all of these butters as you want. The point about them is, you can leave them in their clingfilmed sausage shapes in the deep freeze, then slice off what you need when you want.

I love making them, not least because all that squidging and rolling makes me feel quite uncharacteristically brisk and competent. I normally avoid any sort of cooking
where deftness is required, but somehow this does it all for you: no expertise is necessary at all.

To go with any of the butters below (or add your own flavourings as desired), cook rump, sirloin or fillet steaks and add a herbed medallion on each the minute you put them, hot, on the plate. I specify unsalted butter but require you to add salt. I promise you this does make sense: on the whole, unsalted butter is of a vastly superior quality; it’s not the saltiness itself to which I object.

for the bagna cauda butter:

1 x 50g tin anchovies

200g unsalted butter

125ml extra virgin olive oil

4 cloves garlic, minced

black pepper

for the lemon and thyme butter:

10–15 sprigs fresh thyme

juice of 2 lemons

200g unsalted butter

generous sprinkling Maldon salt

for the lime and coriander butter:

40g fresh coriander

juice of 2 limes

200g unsalted butter

generous sprinkling Maldon salt

for the blue cheese butter:

200g Roquefort cheese

200g unsalted butter

black pepper

The method for all these butters is the same and relaxingly simple.

Purée all the ingredients for the butters in the processor; the butter should not be rock-solid cold, but it works better when it isn’t very soft either. This makes things easy, actually, because it means you don’t have to get the butter out of the fridge hours before using it. So you can either make this in advance and keep it all in the freezer before using it, or regard it as a quick, last-minute idea for pepping up the odd steak.

Now, forming the butter logs is easy enough; the hard thing is to explain it.

Tear off a sheet of clingfilm and lay it on the counter, longways, in front of you. Splodge out the processed mixture in the centre to form a rough sausage shape, but don’t worry if all the splodges aren’t connected. That’s to say, they will all come together to form a log as you roll. Wrap the butter by covering it first with the top bit of clingfilm, that’s to say, the bit that is above it, then cover it with the bit below. Twiddle the ends as if you were making a Christmas cracker then, working from the top of the counter and coming towards you, keep rolling the loose cracker shape and with each roll, a sausage shape will take form in front of you, the butter compressing together and turning into a fat round log. Either sit this sausagey butter log in the fridge or in the deep freeze. Let the frozen discs thaw a little before using, and sit a slice or two on top of each hot, grilled steak.

Each log of butter is sufficient for 10–12 steaks.

COLD ROAST BEEF WITH LEMON SALAD

The roast beef you see to in advance; the salad you do just before you eat. Although, I should add, in case you’re getting nervous, it doesn’t spoil on sitting during the ordinary course of the evening (or indeed, lunch). And I love this salad either with the beef as it is or when hot; either way carved into tender pink slices and abundantly. I should also tell you that I make it often, in reduced form, as an easy but treaty supper for two, with a quickly grilled fillet steak, to be shared and sliced on top, tagliata-style, wafer thin and oozing its red juices over the tangy salad. This reduced form often means a lemon, peeled, sliced and chopped, left to steep in oil, salt, chilli and parsley while I’m cooking the steak and then tossed through a packet of designer leaves with some parmesan shaved off with a vegetable peeler. It follows, too, that the leaves indicated for the salad below are meant to be a suggestion only: I love the tough bitterness of radicchio alongside the juicy sourness of the lemons and toothsome saltiness of the shards of parmesan, but a plain green salad, boosted with the chilli-prinked lemon, is pretty damn fine as it is.

And whether you choose to eat the roast beef hot or cold with this, I implore you to add a pile of sweet, fluffy-tummied baked potatoes alongside. I wouldn’t provide butter to melt within, though, but bowls of cold crème fraîche or soured cream flecked with chopped chives.

2.5kg (or thereabouts) topside or contre fillet if you’re feeling extravagant (or whatever cut of beef you prefer)

5 lemons

1 teaspoon Maldon salt

3 fresh red chillies, deseeded and finely chopped

5 tablespoons fresh parsley, chopped

5 tablespoons extra virgin olive oil

1 head frisée lettuce

2 heads radicchio

4 cos lettuce hearts

approx. 75g block parmesan

Preheat the oven to 210°C/gas mark 7. For rare beef, cook for 12 minutes per 500g; it will continue cooking as it cools so be prepared to take it out of the oven when it still looks underdone to you. This should give you divinely ruby-rare roast beef; obviously, though, cook for longer if you want it less red. Anyway, set aside till cold. If, however, you’re going to eat the roast beef rare and hot, then just stick it in the hottest oven you can for 15 minutes and then turn the oven down to 180°C/gas mark 4 and cook it for 15 minutes per 500g plus 15 minutes at the end. I’m hesitant about making this all sound too exact, because ovens vary enormously and the length of time it takes to roast rare roast beef in one oven can leave it either leathery and overcooked or still cold in the middle in another. Perhaps I exaggerate, but not by much. Probably the best advice is to say to go slowly and test often, though not by stabbing (you don’t want to lose all those glorious red juices) but by pressing: when the beef’s rare it will feel soft and eiderdown-bouncy
to the touch; when medium rare it will feel springy; when well cooked it will have pretty much no bounce left in it. Of course, you can pierce with a knife to make really sure, but just try to leave that to the end, rather than puncture repeatedly throughout its cooking.

To make the salad, cut the tops and bottoms off the lemons. Sit them upright on a board on one end, and cut away the zest and pith from top to bottom with a sharp knife till only the juicy lemon remains. Now slice into rounds, then chop each round into about four, and place on a large plate or shallow bowl. Sprinkle the salt over them then scatter with the chopped chillies and parsley and pour over the oil. Leave to steep while you carve the beef and get on with the rest of the salad. Which simply means, tear the frisée, radicchio and cos lettuce hearts into rough pieces and mix together in a large bowl. Shave in most of the parmesan with a vegetable peeler and pour in most of the lemon chunks, and all of their oily juices. Mix together thoroughly with your fingers then decant into a couple of large, flat serving plates (I so much prefer salad on plates than in bowls), adding any more oil (or indeed lemon juice) if you think the dressing needs thus augmenting, then add the remaining lemon chunks and shave in a final few slithering curls of parmesan. I regard this as pretty well instant, all-year sunshine, so maybe here’s the place to sneak in the suggestion that you consider this (perhaps with a squeeze of Seville orange juice should this be possible) with your leftover Christmas turkey. After all, when more do you need the hit of, even artificial, sun?

Serves 10.

FOUR CHICKEN SALADS

There is not much linking these salads save that they all start with the idea that you might have a piece of cold chicken leftover in the fridge. So even though each recipe seems to require one cold cooked chicken breast, it really doesn’t matter which part of the chicken you’re using or, unless it concerns you, how much. This sort of cooking – indeed my sort of cooking generally – isn’t about weights and measures, but is just a matter of using what you’ve got how you want it.

GOLDEN JUBILEE CHICKEN

This started off life as a reworking of Coronation Chicken, that mixture I can’t help liking, against all contemporary culinary strictures, of cold chicken, mayo, mango chutney, curry powder and apricot purée (or that’s how both my grandmothers made it). But still, I wanted to pare it down, make it lighter and fresher, and so this is it. Given the year of its inception, and its derivation, it seemed only historically right to rename it thus; believe me, no political affiliations are thereby intended.

1 mango, cut into approx. 1cm cubes

1 spring onion, finely chopped

1–2 red chillies (to taste), deseeded and finely chopped

juice of 1–2 limes (to taste)

1 cold cooked chicken breast, cut into chunks

1 Little Gem lettuce, sliced or shredded

1 large handful fresh coriander, chopped

1 teaspoon groundnut oil

few drops toasted sesame oil

Tumble the mango cubes, and any juice they make, into a bowl and, with your hands, mix in the chopped spring onion and chilli and squeeze over the lime juice: use as much or as little as you want; frankly, the amount of juice you can get from a lime varies enormously from one to another.

I tend to leave all these to steep while I get on with the rest of my shredding and chopping, but whatever way you do it, tumble in the chunked chicken and shredded lettuce and most of the coriander and, using your hands, toss to combine. Add the oils and toss again then decant on to a large serving plate and sprinkle over the remaining bit of coriander.