Lately I have been honing my steak cooking skills. It is still too chilly to brave the barbecue on the balcony. Call me a wuss if you must, but I don't like to barbecue unless I can do it barefoot without getting frostbite. So the steak has been getting cooked inside during these cold winter months.
I recently went to Jane's on the Common, a fabulous restaurant here in Halifax. It wasn't my first time there and it surely won't be my last. In fact, someday in the future I will have to go back simply so that I can tell you all about it. While this post is not about my experience at Jane's, it was my inspiration for cooking the other night. When I was there I had their 6 oz. Char-broiled Beef Striploin, a delicious piece of meat cooked to my desired perfection and topped with caramelized onion jam and
green peppercorn herb butter. It was soooo good. SO Good!
Fast forward to this week. There are two vacuum sealed NY Striploins hanging out in my freezer and I am craving caramelized onions on top of something, or maybe just by themselves.
Now, I have been practicing the art of caramelizing onions. It takes patience and time and the right onions and just the right amount of heat. I have done it right a few times and wrong a few times. And the other night things went a little wrong, but fixed themselves in the end.
I started by getting the steak ready. The strips were thawed and ready to go. I used my lovely friend, roasted garlic paste. Roasted garlic paste is fabulous to me because I don't have to spend time roasting the garlic myself, then mashing it all up. Which honestly, roasting garlic isn't hard, but it isn't convenient either. I get my roasted garlic in a lovely little refrigerator tube from the produce section at Sobey's. It's got six ingredients, all of which I can pronounce (garlic, oil, fruit sugar, sea salt, vinegar and lemon juice), and none of which are seriously bad for us in small quantities. So I don't feel bad about not making my own.
Anyway, here's my method. I put about half a teaspoon of roasted garlic paste on each steak, and rub it in with the back of a spoon, making sure it gets all coated and lovely. Then, I season with a sprinkle of Montreal Steak Spice, and rub that in a little with the spoon too. Then, flip the steak over and repeat the process, so both sides are smeared with roasted garlic and steak spice. Yumm.
I set the steak aside and take care of the onions. I used one regular yellow onion because that's all I had and there are only two of us, so one is enough. I slice the onion thin and use a metal skillet to cook them in, with 1Tbs olive oil and one Tbs butter. Here is where my steak mistake developed. I was impatient. I had the heat up too high to start so some of the onions got brown and crispy while the others did not. When I realized my mistake I of course turned the heat down, but I wanted the onions to all caramelize and be wonderful. Knowing yellow onions have less sugars in them than other varieties, I sprinkled on a little sugar to try and speed up the process. Dun dun dun...
Well, the onions caramelized but I also ended up with a clump of hard chewy candied onions. Not quite what I was going for, although I'm sure it could lead to a wonderful new recipe in the future... ?
I set the onions aside and re-heated the pan to cook the steaks.
The problem with me and steak? I and my boyfriend like our steaks well done, or at the very least medium well. I can handle some pink in my steak, but he is really not a big fan of it at all. But I have learned a trick to telling doneness of meat and I use it, and most of the time it works. So here's what you do. Take your hand (either one, I use my left because I'm a righty) and hold it open palmed and relaxed. Use the index finger of your other hand and poke at the fleshy palm bit below your thumb. That squishy bit feels about the same as a rare steak. (Go on, poke your steak, and poke your palm). Then put the tips of your thumb and index finger together, but relaxed. Use your other index finger to again, poke the fleshy bit. Hello medium-rare. Then use your middle finger and your thumb. This is medium. Then your ring finger, this is how a medium-well done steak feels. Lastly, pinky and thumb together, and this is what well done steak feels like. Practice with this and you will be able to cook your steak to the right doneness and hopefully not end up with a piece of dried out, sinewy cardboard flavoured meat. Once I was satisfied with the steaks I set them aside to rest before we cut into them.
Now, what to do about those sticky-crunchy onions? I put them back in the frying pan. I added another gob of butter (1tsp) and a gob garlic paste, some cracked black pepper and just 3 Tbs of water. I could have used stock but I didn't have any, and it turned out just fine. The water softened up the onions, deglazed the pan, and reduced quickly into a tasty topping for our steak. It was simple. It didn't have a lot of ingredients or complex procedures (as do some of the caramelized onion jam recipes I have seen). And most importantly, it was delicious. It had a great flavour on its own and was super when added with the awesome steak and it was an equally tasty yet less expensive at home version of restaurant food.
I love happy meal endings... don't you?
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