Duck flavoured Beef fillet, potato rosti, ginger and orange sorbet with an orange sauce, orange caramel and a basil and radish salad.
No, this is not something I will ever cook again and no it will never make it to any restaurant menu, I suspect ever.
Yes it is a complete waste of a nice bit of beef fillet, and yes I am slightly worried that I spend my time doing this kind of thing rather than making a nice stew like any sane person would.
It does however prove a very good point. One, which many people choose to ignore, and one, which if taken on board will help you cook meat properly every time, without fail.
When we cook meat we're not just simply heating up a cold bit of meat. It’s much more complicated than that. Raw meat is edible but it’s pretty bland. If steak tartar didn’t have all its seasonings it would hardly be worth eating.
Take sashimi for an example. Next time you eat sashimi close your eyes and have someone feed you different fish cuts and see if you can tell what each one is. Its difficult because the flavours are not as pronounced as cooked meat. Sashimi is all about delicate flavour, fantastic texture and visual presentation. Its also usually marinated or served with a dipping sauce or some other accompaniment. Don’t get me wrong I love the flavour of raw meats but it would get bullied into a corner if you tried serving it with some cooked meat accompaniments.
Uncooked meats are mostly made up of large protein molecules and water. These protein molecules have no smell and very little taste. When we cook meats we denature these molecules. At low temperatures 40oC-60oC we are simply affecting the texture of the meat and the meat still has very little flavour. As we increase the temperature to over 70oC we actually begin to lose some of the moisture in the food and if we cook it for long enough at temperatures much higher than this we risk drying out the meat and ruining the flavour entirely.
So where do we get our flavour from?
Well two places actually. We get a lot of flavour from the fats and connective tissues (in fact every bit apart from the meat itself). Fat contains most if not all of the flavour and odorerant molecules in a piece of meat. Hence why slow roasting a fatty piece of meat yields such good results. As we cook at high temperatures + 80oC the fat and collagen melts, bastes the meat from the inside and outside and keeps it moist. At the same time the flavour and odorant molecules are released into the dish and the pan below. We then use these juices in the pan to make gravy, add to a stock or baste the piece of meat by hand. Fat isn’t a universal flavour, it is very individual to what it is attached to.
The other source and the largely misunderstood source of flavour comes from a chemical reaction at temperatures above 140oC. It is at this temperature that we get browning reactions on the meat. That dark caramel brown colour that we see when we pan fry a piece for meat or roast it at high temperatures is not in fact caramalization at all. Caramalisation is a very small part of what is going on but to understand the browning of meat solely based on caramalisation is much the same as understanding the theory of relativity by looking up the word ‘relative’ in the dictionary.
The whole picture of what’s going on still not fully understood, even by scientists but a very smart French chemist named Louis-Camille Mailard discovered that it was largely a result of a chemical reaction between the amino acids in the proteins and the sugars at high temperatures. It is for this reason that the result is referred to as the Mailard Reactions.
These reactions result in literally hundreds of new flavour compounds. And it is the same reaction that makes fries, bread, and coffee and meat taste so damn good.
So why should you be bothered by what causes the meat to brown? Well its useful because to understand that this is a chemical compound rather than just burnt bits of meat or a sweet sticky sugar substance lets us explore many more ways to benefit from it.
Why do we brown meats before we braise them?
Why do we deglaze a pan after frying meat?
Why do we roast the bones before making a stock?
The answer to all of these is in most part because of the mailard reactions. You see not only can we flavour the meat itself; we can also pass this chemical compound onto something else. Like a sauce or a stock or maybe even another type of meat?
I have unnecessarily big issues with referring to the browning of meats as sealing. I don’t much mind the word sear but I find using the word seal extremely misleading and confusing. We used to say we seal the meat because cooks genuinely thought that browning the meat sealed in some of the juices. We now know that to be an absolute untruth, so why we still use it, why we still continue to perpetuate a myth I will never understand. Why not call it browning or flavouring the meat? Surely then it would provide the novice cook with a better understanding of what he or she is doing even if he or she wasn’t aware of any of the science behind it.
Duck Flavoured Beef.
With all that information in mind I had often wondered if it was possible to cook one type of meat in a certain type of way so as it tastes like different meat. I know a few chefs that wont confit lamb in duck fat because of the duck taste they believe it gives the lamb. Instead they use something neutral like vegetable oil. Which is also much cheaper.
What I needed was a piece of meat that lacked its own flavour and odorant molecules as much as possible. Which knowing what we know above means a lean cut, free from as much fat as possible
I chose a beef fillet in the end. Fillet is a quality choice of meat but because of its lack of fat (high quality Kobe beef an obvious exception) it’s never as flavourful as sirloin. What it lacks in flavour however is more than makes up for in glorious texture, making it ideal.
For the other meat I wanted a highly fatty cut for which I decided on duck leg. On some cuts there is almost as much fat as there is meat so it was perfect for this experiment.
To prove that the transformation worked I would also need a recipe that would work for one and not he other. This was easy as most duck based recipes would be far to sickly sweet to accompany beef. In the end though I want for a retro favourite and something that I thought needed a little updating.
Duck a l’orange it is then…sorry beef a l’orange.
The process
Take your duck leg and remove the fatty skin. Put this separately in a frying pan at a medium heat and gradually render it until it has turned liquid. Slice of some of the duck leg and fry this in the fat until your get some brown sticky stuff in the bottom of the pan.
Take the rest of the duck leg and brown it heavily in a large sauce pan (you want an all over dark brown colour, not black). When you have a good colour remove the legs and add some chopped leaks carrots and onion into the pan. Leave until tender (not brown). As the water escapes from the veg it should deglaze the brown sticky mailard reactions on the bottom of the pan. Make sure you scrape them off as much as you can.
When the veg is tender add a litre of water, a star anise, some peppercorns, a bay leaf and your duck leg into the pan. In other words make a duck stock.
Leave this for 3 hours or longer on simmer then pass it though a sieve.
Next take your fillet of beef, season it and place it in a vacuum pack bag along with the 3/4s of duck fat and the bits of brown stuff from the pan. (If you don’t have a vac pack bag just add it into a small sauce pan and cover with cling film, you may also have to top up with some more duck fat to submerge). Place the bag or the pan into the fridge and leave for 24 hours. (I have no idea if it makes a difference or not but I thought it better to leave in for a decent amount of time. And like any good American cop show police chief knows, 24 or 48 hours are good units to work to. 48 sounded a bit too long). Also I needed the fat to solidify so I could use my non chamber vac pac machine.
Once out of the fridge place in a water bath or with the saucepan place on a low hob heat or oven at roughly 41oC. (If you hob or oven struggles to do this you could try levitating the pan above the heat somehow. Maybe sitting it between two other pans, I don’t know, get creative. I did this for about 4 hours. Once again though, 1 may do. 24 sounded a bit heavy handed.
When we take this out we then remove the meat from the fat. The meat should look broken down, delicate, and a bit sorry for itself. It should also look almost raw. If your using the vac pack there should be very little fat left in the bag. The meat should have sucked it all up.
Pour what’s left of the bag into a heavy based frying pan and add the reserved fat and brown bits from before. Add a little groundnut oil (groundnut oil has a higher smoking temperature, this will help you heat your pan up to the required temperature) and turn on to a high heat.
Season the meat again and once the oil starts smoking fry your meat on both sides until heavily browned.
The Rosti
Slice some fine strips of potato on a mandolin and place in the pan after you’ve fried the beef and fry in the duck fat mixture.
Orange sauce
Reduce the duck stock along with some fresh orange juice and
some grand marnier till thick and syrupy.
Orange caramel.
Rub some sugar cubes on the skin of an orange until they look orange and have sucked up the oil in the skin. Place in a frying pan together with some fresh orange and reduce till thick.
Ginger and orange sorbet
1 part green ginger wine
1 part fresh orange
a slosh of grand marnier
Mix and freeze.
The result
A bit confusing really. Whist the beef tasted more like duck than it did beef, there is still a psychological black spot that stopped me from believing it. Close your eyes and it’s a different story. Open your eyes and whilst you’re eating it does feel a bit weird still.
In summery it’s an interesting experiment but I wouldn’t bother doing it. You’re much better of cooking duck in duck to make it taste even more duck like. Or beef in beef or, well you get my point. And I suppose that was the point I was tying to make anyway, just going a hell of a long way about it, as always.
tata
Comments