Cooking With Richard

I watched Channel 4’s “Cooking It” yesterday, featuring Jun Tanaka, a cooking teacher. He’s obviously not read his McGee because he would have known that meat is not cooked on the outside to “seal it”, so I had my serious doubts about this and other things he said. Anyhow, Jun’s mission is to get people cooking haute cuisine food, and so I set upon his recipe for Fillet of Beef cooked in a Herbed Salt Crust with polenta and roasted shallots. I’ve wanted to make a “salt crust” for beef for a while.

Unfortunately the result was pretty awful. The meat was too tough. The taragon in the dressing was overpowering and didn’t go with the meat. The polenta was dreadful (but that’s a story for another blog entry). But most of all despite all the effort that went into the “herbed salt crust”, it really wasn’t clear exactly how the meat was any better for all that work.

If in doubt, present it well …

Anyway, here is how it was made:

This is the meat after seasoning and coating with herbs:

The herbed salt crust is made with flour, salt, herbs, an egg and water, and so after wrapping it around the beef and cooking it for around 20 minutes it looks like this:

After another 20 minutes to rest the beef, I sliced it:

I made this with polenta, and roasted garlic and shallots:

This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 18th, 2006 at 9:30 pm and is filed under photos, food. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.