Pathetic Humans, Prepare to Write Down the Recipe!!!

There are going to be quite a few pictures in this post, so when you come to one that is awkwardly placed in the middle of a section, please imagine that as I am telling the story to you, I am turning the book toward you so that you can see the pictures.¹ (and since I'm still here in the intro section. Apologies to anyone who got notified of this post twice. I had to go back and fix some HTML because I'm that obsessive.)

Recently, I purchased a new stainless steel pan and since it wasn't a non-stick surface like the rest of our pans, I figured it would be a good time to work on my pan sauces.






Now, one could make a pan sauce from all sorts of things, but to be quite honest I hankered for a hunk of, a slice, a slab or chunk of, I hankered for a hunk of beef.² Since I watch Good Eats fairly often, regardless of whether I have seen the episode before or not, I happened to have recently watched Alton Brown make steak au poivre in Tender is the Loin, Part I. I decided that with a few minor adjustments, including using New York strip rather than tenderloin steaks, I'd give the recipe a try.

First up was a little butter an olive oil in the pan. Once that was hot, it was time to add the steaks which were coated in coarsely crack black pepper. I do mean coarsely; I used the mortar and pestle rather than a pepper grinder.






Once the steaks were done, they were taken off to rest while I made the sauce. The first step was to deglaze the pan with cognac.

Ok, I'm going to go on a tangent for a minute, so bear with me. Cooking with something that I would never keep around, like cognac, is a pain. As many of you know, I believe that pretty much anything containing alcohol tastes exactly like everything else containing alcohol, which is to say like cough syrup. Needless to say, this makes my need for cognac or any other alcohol pretty limited even for cooking. When I decided to make this, I went looking for cognac with the intent of buying something inexpensive and preferably only a small amount, after all, I needed only about 1/3 of a cup. Once I got to the grocery store, my idea went straight out the window as I saw that the smallest bottles to be had were around a liter. (I guess it's good that I hadn't gone to Sam's Club.) On my way home, I figured I'd give the local convenience store a try. As it turned out, they did have smaller bottles, as long as a half pint of Hennessy was ok. So, now I look less like I'm planning to cook and more like I'm trying to reenact any one of a million different rap songs. Ok, back to the main post.


I added the cognac to the pan, and then brought a lit match (a very long one) to the pan to light the vapor.






Note that in this picture, there is very little flame. That gave me a confidence that would come back to haunt me later.


Once the alcohol had burned⁴, I added heavy cream and mixed, scraping the bottom of the pan to get the fond off, then let it simmer for around 5 minutes to thicken.






After that, it was just a matter of adding the steaks back to the pan to get them nice and coated in the sauce and then serving.⁵






It turned out pretty well. It was a little hot because of all the black pepper, but it tasted great.


Steaks were still cheap at the grocery store, so I tried it out again. This time, I was working without a recipe, but still following the basic method from the steak au poivre. I minced one shallot clove⁶, then set about cooking the steaks as I had before. Once the steaks were done, I deglazed with cognac and flamed, then added the shallot and some beef stock. Once the sauce had thickened, I brought the steaks back to the pan and covered them in sauce. This one turned out pretty well, too. I wasn't sure about the amount of shallot to use, and I probably would have increased it a little if I were to do it all again.









Now, remember how I said that confidence would come back to haunt me? The second time, we captured the lighting of the cognac on video. If you have sound on you will hear the whoosh of the flames followed by the dogs barking and then, at the very end, Melissa saying that we shouldn't try that again. What you don't see is that the flames reached all the way to the ceiling and that while I was moving the pan back and forth I was also looking around to see if anything was on fire. It wasn't. After the flames had died down and the video was over, I did check in the mirror to make sure I still had both eyebrows. (I do.)







So, what did we learn? If you let me cook, I may or may not burn down your kitchen. But if I don't burn the place down, I can produce some tasty food.<sup>7



1</sup>You did know that I picture you all as a bunch of kindergartners sitting cross-legged in a circle around me as I tell stories, right? Ok, good.
²Apparently, I was so hungry I could eat a wagon wheel.³ Also, I'm sorry.
³Those of you who either are too young or too old or didn't waste your youth watching cartoons and therefore don't know what "Time for Timer" means can go here to check it out.
⁴Note that I'm not telling you that it had completely burned off. No matter what you have been told over the years, all of the alcohol in a recipe does not evaporate during cooking. You're never going to get drunk off of what is left, but if you do not for health or other reasons want any alcohol in what you eat, don't use it at all. Even in a case like this where you burn it, I wouldn't trust that it is all gone.
⁵This is my other big deviation from Alton Brown's recipe. He added more cognac at the end. I didn't add any extra due to my very limited tolerance of the flavor.
⁶Is that even the right term for one section of a shallot? It is now.
⁷More pictures can be found on Flickr by clicking on any of the ones in this post and viewing the entire set, which Laziest Girl has helpfully decided should be called "The Idiot's Guide to Setting the Kitchen on Fire."