venison steak « (y)our food choices™

[A little 1962 trivia: On January 21, 1962, snow fell in San Francisco and accumulated 3 inches!]

Steak Bercy

We were gifted a delightful little Chamberlain Calendar of French Cooking, dated 1962, and decided to cook all 54 of its recipes this year. If you’re unfamiliar with the mother/daughter duo of Narcisse and Narcissa Chamberlain, you’ve missed some of the finest food writing in a generation. They published a mountain of recipe books as well as calendars, diaries and annuals that covered a wide range of cookery including American, French and Italian. The recipes deserve our attention and we’ll be sharing them with you in the weeks and months to come. We’re a few recipes behind, but will soon be catching up in the following weeks. Think, Julie and Julia only a bit more simplistic and with a more realistic timetable.

The first recipe in the 1962 calendar made good use of a package of beautiful deer steaks and introduced us to an old (but new to us) classic – sauce Bercy. Now, sauce Bercy is a white wine sauce and one that might accompany either fish or steak. There are variations depending on the meat to be embellished, but the base recipe is essentially the same – a reduction of white wine flavored with shallot and finished with butter and fresh parsley. When serving sauce Bercy with fish, you add a little fish stock to the wine before reducing it. In the case of the Chamberlain ladies’ simplified version of sauce Bercy, the wine and shallots are reduced before you add lemon juice and butter off the heat. The sauce is strained and then finished with a seasoning of salt and pepper and a couple of tablespoons of fresh, finely chopped parsley. Spooned over simply grilled steak that has been cooked rare, this sauce combines with the natural juices of the meat to make one incredibly tasty dish.

Homemade potato chips

For dinner, we served the venison steak Bercy with a side of beautifully baked potato “chips” that we sliced paper-thin on a mandolin and then layered with fresh parsley leaves between them and a drizzle of olive oil. With just a sprinkle of salt, these simple yet elegant potatoes were the perfect accompaniment to the tangy Bercy sauce.

Preparing the poached eggs and sauce

We grilled more steaks than two guys should eat and with more than a half a bottle of white wine in the fridge leftover we decided to do a little experimenting by poaching eggs in white wine. For brunch the following day, using the same technique as our eggs poached in Champagne, we cooked the eggs first, removed them and added shallots to the remaining white wine then quickly reduced the liquid and followed the rest of the sauce Bercy recipe. The combination of rare deer steak with creamy egg yolks was a wonderful treat. Why can’t restaurants in San Francisco be more creative with their Eggs Benedict? We suggest that if you do try this wonderful sauce and steak you grill up a couple extra ones for brunch the next day. Steak and eggs has never tasted so good.

Steak and eggs

Steak Bercy
[Adapted from The Chamberlain Calendar of French Cooking, For Engagements, 1962]

1 big steak of your choice (enough for 2 people)
1 cup dry white wine
¼ cup shallots, finely minced
3 tablespoons butter
2 tablespoons fresh parsley, finely minced
Juice of ½ lemon
Salt and pepper to taste

Grill the steak according to taste, which the Chamberlain’s hope is rare.

To prepare the sauce, simmer shallots and wine until the mixture is reduced to about 1/3 cup. Off heat, stir in butter and lemon juice. Strain the sauce and season with salt and pepper. Stir in parsley. Reheat but don’t let it come to a boil.

Once steak is cooked, place it on a hot platter and pour sauce Bercy over. Slice steak and plate, spooning the mixture of juices and sauce over the individual servings.

A plateful of happiness.

One of our 2011 New Year’s resolutions was to go vegetarian for the first few months of the year. That ended on January 2, actually, really on January 1 when we took the deer roast out of the freezer to thaw. We do eat meat, and love it, but we also understand all the health and environmental issues associated with eating too much meat–extra weight, exposure to hormones and antibiotics, pollution and waste, the cruelty of CAFOS, etc. But in our defense, we received a cooler full of wild venison and pheasant meat compliments of Steve’s father and we found a great recipe from Cook’s Illustrated (CI) called “Really Good Pot Roast” that we wanted to try. Also, we’re foodies that like to eat, cook, and…well, there’s always next year.

Pot roast and polenta. A good, stick to your ribs, Sunday dinner.

The CI recipe we found comes from their November/December 2010 magazine for Classic Pot Roast. We followed the recipe almost exactly with three minor (or major) modifications: we used a deer roast instead of the traditional beef roast; cranberry juice instead of red wine (we’re on the wagon for a few months); and we added a little soy sauce at the end to give it a little extra umami. The results were a mixed bag. While we liked the roast, it was falling apart when we cut into it and presentation wasn’t what we expected. It probably would have been better had we left it overnight in the fridge and then served it the next day, but then the question arose, “What should we have for dinner tonight?” We decided on the roast. It was served with a nice portion of polenta and a sauté of mustard greens. The dinner was great in spite of the roast being a bit too crumbly. The sauce though had an intense sweetness to it that would not have been there if we had just used wine. It wasn’t a bad flavor, just sweet. The soy sauce really helped give the sauce what it was missing.

The next night, the roast really had its moment in the spotlight. We let the leftover roast sit in the sauce over night. The next day we shredded the roast and heated it with the sauce. Using our favorite Trader Joe’s Pappardelle pasta as the base, we dressed the pasta with the warmed sauce. Incredible! Not only did it stretched our meat consumption by four more meals, it also made for a great sugo. We’ll definitely be making this roast again but instead of a traditional Sunday roast we’ll just use the shredded meat sauce and pasta. This way we still get our meat but not so much all at once.

Classic Pot Roast a la Cook’s Illustrated

Cook’s Illustrated’s recommended beef broth is Rachael Ray Stock-in-a-Box Beef Flavored Stock (a mouthful even before taking the first bite!) but we like using our own homemade broth. Chilling the whole cooked pot roast overnight improves its flavor and makes it moister and easier to slice or shred; for instructions, see “Make-Ahead Pot Roast.”

Pot roast: Before and after.

1 (3 1/2- to 4-pound) boneless beef chuck-eye roast , pulled into two pieces at natural seam and trimmed of large knobs of fat (or if you’re lucky, deer, elk, or other venison roast)
Kosher salt
2 tablespoons unsalted butter
2 medium onions , halved and sliced thin (about 2 cups)
1 large carrot , chopped medium (about 1 cup)
1 celery rib , chopped medium (about 3/4 cup)
2 medium garlic cloves , minced or pressed through garlic press (about 2 teaspoons)
1 cup beef broth , plus 1 to 2 cups for sauce (see note)
1/2 cup dry red wine , plus 1/4 cup for sauce (for our version we used cranberry juice)
1 tablespoon tomato paste
1 bay leaf
1 sprig plus 1/4 teaspoon chopped fresh thyme leaves
Ground black pepper
1 tablespoon balsamic vinegar

1 tablespoon soy sauce (our altered addition)

1. Sprinkle pieces of meat with 1 tablespoon salt (1½ teaspoons if using table salt), place on wire rack set in rimmed baking sheet, and let stand at room temperature 1 hour.

2. Adjust oven rack to lower-middle position and heat oven to 300 degrees. Heat butter in heavy-bottomed Dutch oven over medium heat. When foaming subsides, add onions and cook, stirring occasionally, until softened and beginning to brown, 8 to 10 minutes. Add carrot and celery; continue to cook, stirring occasionally, for 5 minutes longer. Add garlic and cook until fragrant, about 30 seconds. Stir in 1 cup broth, ½ cup wine (or juice), tomato paste, bay leaf, and thyme sprig; bring to simmer.

3. Pat beef dry with paper towels and season generously with pepper. Using 3 pieces of kitchen twine, tie each piece of meat into loaf shape for even cooking.

4. Nestle meat on top of vegetables. Cover pot tightly with large piece of foil and cover with lid; transfer pot to oven. Cook beef for three hours flipping halfway through cooking. Continue cooking until beef is fully tender and sharp knife easily slips in and out of meat, about 30 minutes to 1 hour.

5. Transfer roasts to cutting board and tent loosely with foil. Strain liquid through mesh strainer into 4-cup liquid measuring cup. Discard bay leaf and thyme sprig. Transfer vegetables to blender jar. Allow liquid to settle 5 minutes, then skim any fat off surface. Add beef broth as necessary to bring liquid amount to 3 cups. Place liquid in blender with vegetables and blend until smooth, about 2 minutes. Transfer sauce to medium saucepan and bring to simmer over medium heat.

6. While sauce heats, remove twine from roast and slice against grain into ½-inch-thick slices. Transfer meat to large serving platter. Stir chopped thyme, remaining ¼ cup wine, and vinegar into sauce and season to taste with salt and pepper. Spoon half of sauce over meat; pass remaining sauce separately.

7. (For Sugo): Cool and refrigerate the roast and sauce together. The next day using either your hands or two forks, shred the roast in the sauce. Prepare your favorite pappardelle pasta according to the package directions, (or make your own pasta). While the pasta cooks, re-warm the sugo in a sauce pan. When the pasta is al dente, transfer it to the sauce. Finish the pasta in the sauce, tossing it so every noodle is coated. Off the heat, grate parmesan cheese and drizzle some good olive oil over the top.