This is a great beer, and it added a wonderful dimension to the pan sauce I put together last night.
I was determined to keep this as simple as possible, in terms of flavors, so I decided to create an utterly simple pan sauce. Fortunately, I still had some of the "semi-glace" that I try to keep on hand, and that's really all you need, but rather than crust my top sirloin with crushed black peppercorns, ala au poivre, I figured that I could just deglaze the pan with some butter, a few cubes of semi-glace, and some crushed peppercorns.
The steak was simple, too, I used some amazing Hawaiian sea salt on the steak before pan frying it in our Tibvrtini Novello organic olive oil, and some butter. Pulled it once it was medium rare, and let it rest on a plate.
Happily, as it turns out, I didn't have enough sauce to deglaze the size of the pan I used, so I needed to add some more liquid. I was planning on drinking the Ommegang Abbey Dubbel anyway, so I splashed a bit of it in the skillet, swirled to deglaze the fond, and reduced it until it was nappé.
Serving it with the rigatoni and cheese seemed like an unlikely match, but it was great, and the sauce worked really well with the pasta, too.
This was almost unbearably good, and pretty simple to put together. Here's another picture of the finished dish:
That Biersteak is making me crazy , sometimes I use a dortmunder dark and saute walla walla sweets , w/ potato pancakes and pickled red cabbage , thanks for the inspiration and great explanation of the Demi's we love so much
Holy crap !!!
Yeah, ya know, I get questions from people. Most along the lines that they want to know all the fancy things I do to get my food so well done, so tasty. So far, they've all been pretty disapointed that I tend to keep things exceptionally simple. Celebrate the meat & the gravy! That's my motto.
Biggles
Thanks, gents. Yep, there's nothing better than using a few exceptional ingredients in a dish.
As I'm thinking about it, there are interesting parallels between cooking and a great sound mix, referring to a former life of mine. What you fight for in a sound mix is a sense of air and space. Adding stuff is easy, paring something down to its essence is what makes art and food exceptional. It's a constant challenge, but it's worth it, I think.
Celebrate the meat and gravy!
I am making stuffing, for Thanksgiving: Homemade sausage and bread cubes, vegetables, herbs,water chestnuts and a Bucket of Gravy. Of course I am going to add a splash of "Survival Spice" to the stuffin.
Sounds great, Chili. I'm thinking that I'm going to go in the Hatch chile/pine nut stuffing direction myself. Maybe throw a little polenta in, just for the heck of it.