Steak + salt = love (+ rediscovering sweet potato)

I don’t really cook ‘Meat and 3 Veg”, never have. Cost, lack of a dining table and too much washing up all factor as reasons why, but mostly it just seems plain boring to me. To be honest I picture chewy, tasteless, overcooked meat, mushy veg and packaged salad dressing. So I decided to change my mind. It was time to tackle steak.

Yeah, I know, I’m supposed to know all about it, but that TAFE course was years ago, and I was never good enough to cook meat in the restaurant – too much responsibility for me to handle, I presume. But I don’t remember which cuts are good for what, especially as everyone seems to call the same things something different.
Anyway, I chose rump, and racked my memory (and the internet) for pointers. So, some steak rules:

- Let meat come up to room temperature before cooking.

- During cooking, only turn it once.

- REST IT! In a warm place for at least 5 mins, preferably longer, after cooking.

I had read alot about salting the meat, and because rump is flavourful but can be tough I thought I would give this technique a try. It seems the opposite of everything that I have been taught about steak, but boy does it work.

I massaged the salt in, left it while I prepared some veges (roasted sweet potato, and potato, green beans and mushrooms for sauce), then washed and dried the meat thoroughly and slipped it into a hot, oiled pan. The smell and the sizzle bought F running. The idea of the salt is to tenderise and season the inside of the steak through some fancy chemistry, and I admit, it worked a charm. Tender enough to cut with a butter knife the steak didn’t even require the mushroom sauce I made for it (I’m glad I was too lazy to make Cafe de Paris Butter).

I removed the cooked steak to rest and added a little water (I would have added wine, though I doubt the Rose we drank would have done this rich sauce justice) to the same pan to get all the beef cooking flavour into the sauce. To that I added 1/2 a chopped onion and a few cloves of garlic, then a whopping pile of sliced mushrooms and some seasoning. Cook these down until soft and stir in a lump of butter and any extra steak juice and spoon it over the steak.

What else can I say about this steak, other than try it. TRY IT! This meal was a revelation, many vegetables, no fancy seasoning or technique and sweet potato, did I mention the sweet potato? No? Well I’m sure that you’ll hear about it soon, because in tackling steak and the old ‘Meat and three Veg’ I rediscovered sweet potato (now I just have to find something interesting to do with it).