Jay Rayner’s Steak Bake
Jay Rayner's luxurious take on the classic high street Steak Bake. Wrapped in flaky, golden puff pastry, this deeply savoury pie is loaded with brasied beef in a rich gravy.
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Introduction
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.
Ingredients
3 heaped tbsp | plain flour, for dusting |
A good tsp | garlic powder |
table salt and black pepper | |
1 kg | braising steak or chuck, cut into 4cm cubes and trimmed of excess fat and connective tissue, so probably 1.2kg before the trim (you can also remove unwanted fat, etc. after it's been braised and chilled) |
vegetable oil, for frying | |
1 | large onion, chopped |
500ml | beef stock |
350ml | veal jus |
1 tbsp | tomato purée |
1 tsp | Worcestershire sauce |
2 x 320g packets | shop-bought puff pastry |
1 | beaten egg for egg wash |
Method
Put the flour and garlic powder into a bowl. Add a generous amount of table salt and use your hand to stir the mix together. Put the cubes of beef into the seasoned flour and mix around until they are all well coated.
Heat a couple of tablespoons of vegetable oil in your pressure cooker or saucepan and brown the beef on all sides in batches, taking each batch out and putting it into a bowl to make space for the next. The flour will start to form a crust on the bottom. Watch the heat and make sure the flour crust doesn’t burn. You may need to add a little more oil for each batch of beef, as it does get absorbed by the flour.
When all the beef has been browned, turn the heat down, add the chopped onion and cook for a few minutes until soft. Again, you may need to keep it moving to stop the crusted flour from burning.
When the onion is soft, add the stock and the jus and as it heats up, use your wooden spoon to scrape up any of the crust on the bottom of the pan. When it gets to a simmer, add the tomato purée and Worcestershire sauce and stir it all in. Finally put the beef back in, with any juices that have been released. Season with a little salt and cracked black pepper. If you’re not using real beef stock and veal jus, use 850ml of beef stock from two cubes.
If you’re not using a pressure cooker, you will now need to braise this in a pan, half covered on a very low heat. Give it a stir every now and then to make sure it’s not scorching on the bottom. It should take about 2 hours for the meat to become tender, but it could need up to 3. Check by taking out a piece of beef and seeing if it will come apart easily when you pull at it with two forks.
If you are using a pressure cooker, put the lid on, bring to pressure and cook for 25 minutes. At the end of that I use a fast pressure release by pressing on the valve with a folded tea towel so as not to burn my hand. Steam burns are nasty.
Use a slotted spoon to transfer all the beef to a dish which can take it in one layer. Allow it to cool for 10 or 15 minutes. Meanwhile reduce the gravy by about a third if using the real stocks and by half if using the stock from cube. If you’re using the latter and it isn’t thickening properly, take a couple of tablespoons of the gravy and put it into a mug with a teaspoon of flour. Mix it to make a slurry, then reintroduce it to the gravy and continue to reduce. If you have cooked your beef on the hob, you may find that you don’t need to reduce the stock very much at all.
When the gravy is reduced, pour it over the meat. Allow that to cool for a further 10 minutes and then put it into the fridge for at least 3 hours. You want it all very cold and for the gravy to have turned into a jelly.
Two hours before you want to eat, make the steak bakes. The Greggs version measures 10cm × 12cm, so you need 6 sheets of pastry measuring roughly 10cm × 25cm. (The product I use, Jus-Rol, measures 23cm × 35cm, which allows for 3 per sheet of roughly these dimensions.) Spread them out across the greaseproof paper that the puff pastry comes on. Mark across the middle of each sheet, so you can see where the bottom half is.
Your beef should now be in a jellified gravy. If you want to take off any lumps of fat and connective tissue do so now. They will come away easily. Use a spoon (or your fingers; I’m not watching) to take pieces of the meat out with just a little of the jelly attached and arrange in a tight square in the centre of the bottom half of the pastry, leaving a 1cm border all the way around. You want it to be a generous filling. Egg-wash all the way around the pastry edges, then fold the top half of the pastry sheet over the filling and press the pastry edges of both halves together. Remember this is a home-made steak bake, not a mass-produced version. It will end up looking a bit rough and ready.
Go around the edges with the tines of a fork, to make little indentations that will help seal them, just like on a Greggs Steak Bake. Then lightly score the bulging surface on the diagonal from one corner to the other, making sure not to cut through the pastry. Generously egg wash the top of the steak bake. Immediately put back into the fridge to chill again for 90 minutes. Reserve what’s left of the egg-wash.
If making 6 small ones feels like a total faff, you can make 2 giant ones, using the whole 23cm × 35cm sheet. Follow the same instructions as above, only this time fill half the sheet with beef, but still leave the 1cm wide border. The key to either version is not to allow too much gravy in with the beef or it will leak. There will be enough with the jelly that’s attached.
An hour before you want to eat, heat the oven to 220°C/425°F/gas mark 7. Lightly oil two baking
trays which are big enough to take the 6 steak bakes. Put them into the oven for 15 minutes until smokingly hot. Take the steak bakes out of the fridge. Egg-wash them again. Take the first oven tray out and put the steak bakes on, leaving the other one in there so it doesn’t get a chance to cool down. Once the first is in the oven, take out the second and repeat. Using very hot oven trays guarantees the bakes will have crisp rather than soggy bottoms. If you’ve made the giant steak bake it will be a little hard to move it across from the fridge, but it is doable, because you’ve chilled it and it has firmed up.
Bake for 25 to 30 minutes, until golden and crisp.
From about 20 minutes in you may have to swap the oven trays around so they get equal amounts of time at the top. Despite your best efforts they may still leak a little gravy. Don’t worry. The Greggs ones do that too.
While they are baking, heat up the remaining gravy and any leftover beef in a saucepan.
Serve the steak bakes with extra gravy on the side.