Piece of Scotch beef with confit shallots and garlic with red wine and shallot sauce

Dish as in the book

After the success of the salmon dish it was time to open the book back up and figure out the next main course to attempt. I'd spotted some thick cut 21 day aged rib eye steaks of the Aberdeen Angus variety so going along the 'Scotch' theme it made sense to have a crack at the Scotch beef.


The dish is not exactly unheard of, you can hear a customer order it on the 'Marco cooks for...Nico Ladenis' clip 1 on Youtube however the dish is never actually demonstrated in the series. It comprises of fried rib-eye steak sliced thickly alongside slow cooked shallots and garlic, fricasseed mushrooms and topped with a quenelle of parsley puree smothered in a red wine and shallot sauce.


The first step is the sauce, I placed shallots, thyme, bay leaf, red wine, red wine vinegar and port in a pan and left it to marinate overnight, to increase the strength of the sauce. After this the liquid is reduced by half. Veal stock and chicken stock are added and the sauce is reduced once more, strained and then butter is whisked in to thicken and add shine. Veal stock is available from Lakeland in powdered form and is a lot less of a hassle than making it with costly veal cuts from scratch. Its never like Marco to refuse a stock cube is it!

Shallot and Garlic confit about to go in the oven

The shallots and garlic are wrapped in separate foil parcels along with thyme, butter and a little salt and perched on top of a bed of rock salt, baked in the oven until soft and squishy.

All was going swimmingly by this point and along came the parsley puree, the book instructs that you plunge the parsley into boiling water for a few minutes, reach in, grab it, squeeze it out and liquidise it to preserve the colour. Strong recommendation of using rubber gloves for this and asbestos fingers to go with it! Its then blitzed in a food processor to a puree with double cream, top tip here is to use either 1. A large food processer and a massive bunch of parsley or 2. A small food processer and a medium bunch of parsley.

The base of the sauce

Pied de Mouton mushrooms

 

 

Sauce reducing

 

With the kitchen smelling strongly of garlic, all that was left to do was fry the mushrooms and the rib eyes. I used Pied de Mouton mushrooms as they were the only fresh wild mushrooms to hand, and they are amazing in flavour.

Rib eyes frying

 

This isn't one of the more easy dishes to plate up, heaven knows the pandemonium this must have caused in the kitchen at Harveys with barely room to swing a cat, lots of elements all of which have to be kept warm.



The final plate

After all that excitement it was time to tuck in, its safe to say a decent bit of quality beef and a rich sauce are best friends, throw in a mushroom and some garlic and you've got a classic combo. For me the sauce was incredibly rich and very flavoursome, the puree I'd hold back on as it adds a slight bitter note but is not unpleasant. Overall I wouldn't hesitate to have this again.