Fridge that meat

Fridge that meat, a recent post on another blog bought this back into mind and raised a couple more questions about salting, I had in fact done just the thing a couple days prior and tend to do it when I have steak, I’m a fan of rump and this does wonders to that cut. The principle is simple, place the meat, steak, on a rack and place it in the fridge uncovered for 18-24 hours. Now you can salt the meat before you refrigerate it, it will draw out moisture and work it’s way into the meat seasoning it, I like to do this if I want a more cured meat flavour, works great for steak sliced up and served on a roll with lashings of horseradish. If you choose not to season the steak before the fridge, moisture will still be drawn out, the exterior will dry and will make for far superior crust when cooked, I usually don’t season first if it’s a steak to be plated, I’ll season it in the pan and as I baste with foaming melted butter.

My usual cooking method is to bring the meat out of the fridge at least half an hour before cooking, heat a heavy cast iron pan over a medium high heat, place the fat cap side down and cook for one minute, before placing a meat side down move the fat around the pan, place the first side down, season the upside, cook for one minute, flip and season the upside. Keep cooking for one minute and flipping until almost at your desired temperature. For the last two flips add in a healthy tablespoon or three of butter, this will cool the pan slightly, when melted and foaming slightly tilt the pan and baste, using a spoon, with the butter for a minute, flip and repeat. Place the cooked steak aside to rest for five minutes or so.

Rough Puff Pastry

I’ve been revisiting pastry recently and making more than my fair share of pies, cheese and chard, custardy bacon and egg, and the most recent a vegetarian pithivier, a round pie made by putting a filling between two pieces of puff pastry. Not one to buy something when I can make it, I set about taking another look at easy at home puff pastry, my previous version was worked by hand to ensure large chunks of butter remained, so when rolled and folded you’d end up with good lamination, I wasn’t completely satisfied with how this pastry turned out, and I figured there had to be an easier way.


Super Simple Rough Puff pastry.
200 Flour
200 Butter
2g Salt
Milk, ice cold

• Make sure everything is cold before you start.
• Blitz half of the flour with the butter in a blender until a fine breadcrumb consistency.
• Tip out into a bowl and add the remaining flour and salt.
• Adding a splash of milk at a time, work into a dough ball, don’t overwork the dough.
• Wrap in cling-film and refrigerate for 20 minutes.
• Lightly flour the bench and roll out the dough into a rectangle (about 20x30cm).
• Fold into thirds and roll out again, repeat and then wrap and place in the fridge for 20 minutes.
• Roll and fold the dough 3 more times and refrigerate, repeat this step once more, for a total of 9 folds.
• Wrap in cling-film and refrigerate until needed.

Beurre Monté and cavatelli

Well I could wax lyrical about cavatelli, yet again, and perhaps bore you all to death with yet another combination of flours, toasted grains and instant potato flakes, but not today, yes this ultimately ended up as a pasta dish, a cavatelli dish, but it’s not so much the pasta as it is the sauce, in fact I ended up trying this out on two different versions of cavatelli, popcorn grits variety, that had been languishing in the freezer, as a tester, and then the finished dish with roasted rye cavatelli, both good combinations.

The sauce, and the excuse for more pasta, was heavily influenced (read, copied and modified) from Ideas in food’s bullet proof beurre monté and their later post bean monté. I had for a while wanted to have to make this extravagant sauce, with guests coming I had an excuse, plans started forming.

The great thing about the sauce and the cavatelli is they can both be prepared the day before, if not two, so it makes for a much easier cooking experience when guests are due, and heck you can even cook out the cavatelli on the day and shock it in an ice bath then refrigerate until needed, sautéing it until warm through and crisp on the edges. With the sauce, unlike a traditional beurre monté, it can be cooled down and reheated without the fear of it splitting.


Beurre Monté
250g Water*
225g Butter, cut into 1cm cubes and fridge cold.
0.7125g (0.15%) Xanthan Gum
2.375g (0.5%) Salt

• Place the water and salt in a pot over a medium heat.
• When at a simmer, use a stick/immersion blender to mix in the xanthan gum, blend on high speed for about 30 seconds.
• With the blender still running, start adding the butter a cube at a time, letting each piece melt and emulsify, continue until the butter is all incorporated and the sauce thickened.
• Taste, adjust salt if necessary.
• Transfer to a container, allow to cool and refrigerate until needed.

*I used water that I had cooked a batch of whole rye in, and then infused it with thyme and rosemary.


Infused oil
Over a low heat, infuse a large amount of rosemary leaves and half a dozen or so garlic cloves in about half a cup of olive oil and half a cup of canola oil. Let it bubble and warm through on the heat for about 15 minutes, then remove and cover, letting it sit for a further 15 minutes to extract all possible essential oils from the wood herb. Strain and transfer to a glass jar. Keep in the fridge until all used up.

Putting it together
Place a sauté pan over a medium heat and add a splash of the infused oil, when hot, add a sprigs worth of rosemary leaves and let them sizzle. Add the cooked, drained cavatelli to the pan and sauté until just crisp, and if chilled, warmed through. Reduce the heat to low, add enough of the beurre monté to coat the cavatelli and toss until warmed through. Plate up, finish with a smothering of finely grated sharp hard cheese and a few turns of black pepper. 

Hot water pastry–Pork Pie

Hot water pastry–Pork Pie
500g flour
200ml water
100g dripping (or lard)
80g butter
1tsp salt (5–10g)

• Gently heat the water, butter and dripping over a low heat. Once melted bring to a boil.
• Sieve the flour and salt together into a bowl, make a well in the centre.
• Mix together to form a ball of dough.

• Wrap and leave to rest for an hour at room temperature.

• Roll the pastry into a rectangle and then fold in thirds, repeat until the dough is smooth, 2 or 3 times).

• Roll out the pastry to about 5mm thick. Line the dish, fill and bake. I used a terrine to make this pie, it was greased with butter and then put in the fridge to set before lining with the pastry.
• The filling was a mixture of pork, nutmeg, chilli, salt, pepper, and mustard. Half of the filling was placed in the pastry lined terrine, hard boiled eggs placed down the centre, the remaining filling tightly packed in and the whole terrine banged to dislodge any air bubbles.

• An egg yolk wash was brushed on before laying the pastry lid, with air vents cut out, on top and crimping the edges, then a final egg yolk wash.
• Cook in a 200ºC oven for 30 minutes before lowering the temperature to 180ºC and cooking for a further hour.

• Allow the pie to cool in the dish completely before carefully turning out. Best served room temperature with some relish or hot mustard.

Grape Bread and Chestnut Purée

Slightly sweetened and only a little butter enriched bread makes an ideal match to a warm cup of coffee on a lazy weekend afternoon, and topped off with some sweetened chestnut purée spread it’s addictive.

If you can’t manage to work your way through an entire loaf, sandwich together slices of the bread with chestnut purée spread, arrange in a casserole dish. Whisk 3 eggs with 25 g sugar until tripled in volume, stir in 500 ml milk, pour over the bread, leave it to rest for 30 minutes, bake at 180°C until the top is golden and the custard set, best bread and butter pudding ever.

Grape & thyme bread

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The night before
2 Tbsp Raw sugar
300 ml Warm water
100 g Flour
1 tsp yeast


Dissolve the sugar in the warm water then stir in the yeast, leave it to stand for 10 minutes, until the yeast has bloomed. Add the flour and mix thoroughly. Cover with cling-film and leave overnight.

The morning after
50 g Butter, melted
25 g Raw sugar
400 g Flour
12 g Salt
Grapes, about 18
Thyme, fresh leaves
Raw sugar for sprinkling
Butter for brushing


Mix together the dry ingredients, add the flour mixture and butter to the yeast, which should be bubbly and aromatic, stir together and form a rough ball of dough, cover and leave it to rest for 5-10 minutes.

Tip the dough on to the bench and knead until smooth and elastic, about 15 minutes, letting it rest every couple of minutes while kneading helps the flour hydrate and will speed up the process. My preferred method for kneading, at the moment, is to roll the dough out into a log shape, fold in half and repeat. This seems to speed up the kneading process and results in some seriously fluffy bread.

Place the dough in a bowl and cover, leave it to rise in a warm spot for about an hour or until it has doubled in size.

Knock back the dough and leave it for another hour to double in size.


On a lined baking tray, shape the dough by forming it into an elongated rectangle tucking the ends under, use your fingertips to dimple and push out the dough. Push in the grapes into a regular pattern. Cover and leave it for about 30 minutes to rise.

Pre-heat the oven to 220°C.


Brush the dough with melted butter and sprinkle over thyme leaves and raw sugar.


Bake for 40 minutes in the top third of the oven, when cooked the bread should sound hollow when tapped on the underside. Remove from the oven and cover with a clean tea towel, leave it cool for a while, if you can, before tucking in.

Chestnut purée spread

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This is pretty simple and well you could go the extra step and roast/poach fresh chestnuts but they’re not always readily available, but I find a can of plain chestnut purée does the trick.

440 g Chestnut purée
200 ml Water
100 g Sugar
1 tsp Vanilla paste
Decent pinch of salt


Place a pan over a medium heat and add the sugar, leave it to dissolve and slowly caramelise, be careful not to burn the sugar. Add the water to the pan, it will spit and hiss a little so add with caution. When the caramelised sugar has dissolved stir in the vanilla.

Break up the Chestnut purée in a bowl, and little by little whisk in the sugar syrup to form a thick paste, you may not need it all. Taste and season with salt. I like to pass it through a sieve to get a perfectly smooth paste.


It should store in a sealed container in the fridge for a couple of weeks, if it lasts that long!

Butter Burgers

BBQ season well and truly on us it’s time to get the covers off, clean up the winters neglect and get grilling. I love getting a few burger patties on the grill, don’t have to worry about smoking the house out and you get a nice char only really achievable on a BBQ, even better if you have a charcoal grill. I like to keep the patties quite simple, salt, pepper and good beef, don’t knead it to much but gently shape it so it’s just holding together. To really gild the lily I’ve take to folding in grated frozen smoked butter, it adds a great flavour to the burger and of course makes it extra luxurious too.

Asparagus with Egg and Soy Butter Sauce

Eggs are placed in 75ºC water for 13 minutes, then removed to an ice bath to stop the cooking process. Meanwhile asparagus is sliced in two, beans top and tailed and likewise cut into manageable portions and spinach sliced. A pot put on a low heat with a good portion of butter and generous pinch or three of pepper added, soy sauce is swirled into the melted butter. The eggs now move to 60ºC water to heat through for 10 minutes. The vegetables are sautéed in a little butter, and when cooked tossed with a little bit of the soy-butter. A nest of greens placed in the bowl, a warmed through egg cracked and slid out to nestle in place, a glaze of soy-butter spooned over and around and finished with a sprinkling of bonito flakes.

Mister rabbits last meal

Ambition and vision seemed to come into alignment, and as usual I probably went a little overboard on a dish for two, and maybe put in a few or more hours into it, just as well I like spending time in the kitchen I guess. I didn’t have a clear idea when I first saw Mr Rabbit inviting me to take him home from Moore Wilson as we madly dashed around the store on a rather freezing cold morning, rushing home to get a panel heater installed. Not so much a recipe as such, but more a list of what was what in roughly the order it happened.

Rabbit Broken down, loin removed, belly removed, legs removed and deboned.


Bones and scraps into a pan (pressure cooker) with baking soda, carrots, onion, caraway, juniper, peppercorns, thyme and parsley, 1 cup of water and 1 cup of dry suffolk cider, cooked on high pressure for 45 minutes, let to release pressure, strained without pressing the bones and vegetables.




Leg meat was cured in salt (2%), juniper and thyme overnight. Sous vide confit with duck fat for 4 hours at 70ºC. Roughly pulled apart and formed into a torchon, wrapped firmly in layers of cling film. Refrigerated overnight.


The leg “torchon” is sliced in half, and one half in half again, the intact half rolled in flour, egg yolk, panko crumbs, yolk and then finally crumbs again. Left in the fridge for at least half an hour.


Carrots peeled, sliced and cooked in enough water until tender, passed through a mouli, then a fine sieve, returned to pan and cooked with some butter until enough water has evaporated and a thick purée is left, seasoned.


Sauce, red onion, thyme, butter, cooked until the onion is tender and 1 cup of dry suffolk cider is added, reduced to 1 quarter, strained, 1 cup of rabbit stock added and reduced to 1 third of a cup, seasoned and enriched with a little butter to thicken and add shine.


Radish is sliced thinly then placed in an ice bath. Brussels sprouts broken down to individual leaves, blanched in boiling salted water then transferred to ice bath.


Leg quarters are seared on one side in butter and left to heat through. The crumbed half is fried in butter, spooning over the foaming butter to help create an even golden brown coating, drained on paper towels, and sliced in half on a bias just before serving.

Loin, pan seared and spoon with butter until medium.

Parsley and thyme picked over for garnish.

Plated with what one could call a skid mark of carrot purée, loin sliced in half, then the uncrumbed leg, crumbed leg, radish and sprout leaves arranges, and dressed with the rich sauce, and a scattering of herbs.

Venison and Beet Salad

It’s always a pleasure when you’re presented with a little wild fare, such as the beautiful venison filet the other half (now wife) came home with after a laborious day up in Masterton working on the farm. Equally as pleasurable is when a plan comes straight to mind what to do with such a tasty piece of meat. I set about making room in the fridge so the fillet could have a little room to age and dry a little. It was sliced in equal halves and one went straight in the fridge for a few days, and the other ended up in a bag with 1% salt (by weight), brown sugar, thyme, and juniper, to cure for 24 hours or so before being patted dry and joining its uncovered other half to dry and age a little, they ended up in the fridge for about six days.


The fillets were taken out of the fridge about half an hour before cooking, and a pan put on a high heat, with what one could describe as a f*#k tonne of butter, because butter makes the world better. When the butter had finally calmed down, stopped foaming and spitting, the uncured portion went in the pan, seared golden brown, rolled around in it’s butter bath, then the cured portion went in about half way before the other piece was cooked and bathed in buttery goodness, in total they got about 6 and 4 minutes in the pan respectively, which resulted a perfectly rare temp.


As the meat was put aside to rest, a handful of diced shallots and thyme were liberally tossed into the pan to soften and perfume the butter before a splash of red wine and stock, we’re talking about equal parts butter, stock, wine, so quite good for you and your arteries, and especially your taste buds. It was left to reduce to a thick rich syrup and finally sieved.


A simple salad of roasted beets, toasted hazelnuts, ewe cheese and rocket tossed in a little olive oil was the perfect partner for the oh so rich gamey meat, with the two distinct textures and flavours of the cured (left) and uncured (right), and not forgetting the ever so rich pan glaze that brought everything together. Now I just need to get my hands on more of the venison goodness!

Popcorn Grits

Well I managed to stumble my way through my allotted 20 slides, when my turn came up at the City Market Visa Wellington on a Plate event, Pecha Kucha: Imbibe. I won't lie, I was a bunch of nerves standing on stage, all eyes on me, and my slides, mouth dried up, but words managed to flow, I think, although it is a haze, I managed a joke or two, wasn’t booed or humiliated, not suffering from PTSD, in the end it was a lot of fun, and quite proud to be part of the 14 presenters who took to the stage that night. Well on to the regularly scheduled blog post.

I hate waiting for packages, the ten days between seeing “item dispatched” on my orders and the package arriving, I find myself checking the mail daily with growing anticipation followed by soul crushing depression, until it finally turns up. Having a magazine subscription, I get to go through this cycle regularly. The termination of the latest hope-sadness cycle was with Lucky Peach finally landing on my desk, and trying so hard to not to flick through it during work hours, but as soon as I got home I started devouring it page by page.

Flicking my way through the lastest issue, with Americana recipes inspired by the film Diner, which I have ever so vague recollections about, I came across Daniel Patterson's popcorn grits (Lucky Peach, Issue #4, page 83), and I knew I had to make it.


Ingredients
½ cup Popcorn Kernels
¼ cup Oil (something neutral, such as rice bran, rapeseed or canola)
3 cups Water
7 Tablespoons Butter, unsalted
Salt, to taste

• Over a medium heat, pop the corn in the oil. Be very careful not burn it, sacrifice a few kernels if you have to, but if you burn it, or it smells slightly acrid, bin it.

• Bring lightly salted water and butter to a simmer.
• Add a third of the popped corn to the water and simmer for 1 minute.
• Strain through a sieve, reserving the liquid.
• Pour the liquid back into the pot, bring back to a simmer.
• With the back of a spoon press the simmered popped corn through the sieve, scraping the underside into a bowl.
• Repeat with the other two thirds of the popped corn.

• Put the purée into a pot loosen with some of the popcorn ‘stock’, I used almost all of mine.
• Season with salt.

It sounds like it’s a more effort than it actually is, it really only takes a few minutes to prepare, and it’s totally worth it, there’s something odd about eating something with the texture of loose polenta and tasting exactly like buttered popcorn, odd but damn delicious. I sautéed chorizo and field mushrooms to pile on to the grits, spicy earthy flavours to cut through the rich buttery grits.

Corn and mushrooms are pretty good friends on a plate together, corn sweet and nutty, mushrooms earthy and can be meaty and nutty, heck even nature puts it together, and man puts it in a can, à la huitlacoche the fungal infected swollen corn kernels.

Steak butter heaven

I went a little overboard for lunch and was far too full for dinner, but if you're going to over do something nothing beats a good slab of beef and lashings of butter.


I whipped up a quick herb butter by blending butter, grated garlic, lemon rind, a splash of cider vinegar, oregano and parsley.


Roll it in to a log and put it in the freezer (it should keep a good few months in there)


Next grill that big piece of beef (as you can see above I like mine rare). I used rump, I really like the rump cut for a good flavoured juicy steak.


Seeing as there is an abundance of asparagus available at the moment. I sautéed some in the same pan as the beef and then deglazed it with some wine and then reduced until the stalks were cooked.

Then all I need to do was assemble it and devour.

Butter makes the world better

Is there nothing butter can not improve?

Butter Burgers

In a bowl mix together with your hands minced beef, a couple of good tablespoons of tomato paste, garlic powder (if using fresh garlic, finely grate it in(or crush it) you can also add grated onion too, but make sure you use a fine grater so it produces a pulp), and grated butter.

Then roll up balls of the meat mix and flatten out in to patties, ready to fry or bbq (I usually can't be bothered with the clean up that comes with a fry up on the stove, so chucked them in a super hot oven)

The meat patty, slice of tomato, cheese, and tomato relish with a bit of aioli on a toasted bun = super tasty burger. After it had been scoffed down, i remembered i had some home made pickled beets in the fridge that should of got between the buns but oh well next time.