Jay Rayner’s Steak Bake

Inspired by the iconic item sold by Greggs, the high street bakers.

Am I a man blessed with exquisite and refined taste, or just a greedy bloke who happens to have an expense account? I’d go with the latter every time. Not that it’s how people view those of us paid to review restaurants. They think it’s all braised otter and roast swan, with a dollop of caviar on the side. And obviously there is a bit of that, or at least the legal equivalent. For the record I have never eaten otter or swan. But one of the qualifications for the job is certainly very broad tastes, encouraged by a healthy appetite.

There’s one question I’m often asked which is related to this. It’s always put with a mischievous grin, as if the questioner imagines they’re about to do something akin to asking a nun if they do a little stripping on the side to make ends meet. It’s a variant on this: have you ever eaten McDonald’s? Or Burger King? Or KFC? Oh, you dear sweet things. Of course I have, and many times over. I even reviewed McDon- ald’s once, though only as an act of solidarity with an Italian counterpart who had been sued by the company for criminal libel and £15 million in damages. Edoardo Raspelli had pub- lished a disobliging review in which he called the food ‘gastronomically repellent’. My review was hardly more posi- tive. I deconstructed a Big Mac by laying into the ‘slimy grey puck of a burger’ and the way ‘the thing leaked hot, greasy, salty water into my mouth’. I slagged off the ‘fatty cardboard’ of the chips, and the Chicken Selects which were ‘a truly remarkable example of fast-food science. Although they are clearly pieces of breast, they taste of chicken not at all.’ At the end I invited McDonald’s lawyers to ‘come and have a go if you think you’re hard enough’. I never heard a word. They later dropped the case against the Italian critic.

This whole episode could be misconstrued. It was not an attack on fast food in general, only on McDonald’s in par- ticular. I loved a bacon double Swiss from Burger King and mourned its passing. I have been known to do serious damage to a lot of KFC’s finest deep-fried hen. When my kids were small, we used to drive each year to East Anglia for an Easter break which required a stop at a motorway services. It had a KFC from which I would always order. So shoot me. My son, then nine or ten years old, joked that I should pay him not to reveal my KFC habit to the world. Sod that. I wrote a column about it. I wasn’t going to be blackmailed by a child for being myself.

I really wasn’t embarrassed. High street and fast-food restaurants aren’t inherently bad. Eating from them too much might well be, and sometimes too many of them in a row can force out smaller, independent restaurants who can’t compete for the sites or afford the rents. Such is the way of high street economics. But there’s a good reason why so many places have opened over the past couple of years doing apparently fancy versions of stacked burgers, fried chicken and wings. It is food with a clear purpose. Sometimes it is exactly the right thing at the right time, and it can be done well, even by vast corporate concerns.

Which brings me to Greggs. If you haven’t heard of Greggs, perhaps because you are an elderly High Court judge or have just been roused from a decades-long coma, it is a 2,000-strong bakery chain. It was originally founded by baker John Gregg in Tyneside in the middle of the twentieth cen- tury, though, for the pathologically pedantic among you, the company carrying Mr Gregg’s name does not boast a pos- sessive apostrophe. It grew at first through acquisition, making much of its regional identity, until eventually coming together as one national chain in the noughties. For many decades it was indeed a bakery selling bread. Eventually, they concluded they couldn’t compete with the supermar- kets, and so focused on food to go, generally wrapped in buttery, flaky pastry: sausage rolls, pies, and of course, the mighty Steak Bake. They opened earlier to get trade from people on their way to work. By sticking tightly to a narrow repertoire and doing it exceedingly well, Greggs has become much beloved of the British, who have always been a total sucker for a well-made pie.

And so to that Steak Bake, a beguiling rectangular pocket of braised beef brisket and chuck in gravy, first launched in 1999. Greggs now sell over 45 million of them every year. Some of them to me. It is just a genius combination of flaky pastry and deep savoury filling. This is my home-made tribute. In truth, if they ever attempted to market my ver- sion, they’d very quickly go out of business. That’s because it is undoubtedly the luxury steak bake, with the culinary equivalent of go-faster stripes, turbo injection and a ludi- crous aerofoil. To make the money they need to cover their costs – production, shops to sell them from, staff, marketing and so on – and still turn a reasonable profit, most high street businesses need to calculate prices based on making a gross profit of around 70%. So, for 30p worth of ingredi- ents they’d need to charge £1. I have calculated that this version of the Steak Bake would cost about £12 a pop, instead of the £2 charged by Greggs. That doesn’t mean mine is necessarily better. The Greggs version has its place. Mine is just, well, different.

But then there are some serious ingredients in this. I rec- ommend using real beef stock and veal jus, rather than stock from cube. There are some very good ready-to-use products on the market these days. I get mine from Truefoods in Yorkshire. You could of course do it with a stock cube or three. If you use enough flour the gravy will thicken, but honestly it won’t have the same depth of flavour. I also advise you to get shop-bought puff pastry. It’s what everyone else does. There are very few restaurants and bakeries these days that make their own puff. Most of them buy it in on a large roll. That includes some of the fancier places. If you want to make puff pastry from scratch and have the necessary half day to spare, I advise you get a copy of Calum Franklin’s book The Pie Room, published when he was still doing lovely things with pastry at the Holborn Dining Room. He’ll see you right. You’ll also note that I recommend using a pressure cooker for the filling. If you have one, it is definitely the way to go. If you go so far as to buy one just for this adventure, your guide as to what to do with it afterwards is Catherine Phipps. She was certainly mine. Her Pressure Cooker Cookbook will be your bible. And you can use it for the spare ribs on page 89.

The key to this is making sure that everything is good and cold at each stage of the preparation, and then seriously hot for the baking.