Chef Aaron Egan’s Steak Potato Dinner

FROM THE HOME KITCHEN OF CHEF AARON

Everyone loves a steak dinner, and it’s easy to make an elegant one in the quiet of your own kitchen. The trick is high heat for cooking the steak and having whatever ventilation solution your house contains active and kicking before you start cooking — the proper method will create a fair amount of smoke, but if you’re careful, you’ll get restaurant-quality steaks. Get hold of a good meat thermometer and learn how fast your stove and pans cook a steak. Never rely solely on times, but rather use reliable metrics like temperatures. 125 Fahrenheit is rare, 165 is well done, and the degrees of doneness go every 10 degrees of temperature in between.

Also, roasting vegetables like this concentrates their flavors and allows you to keep all the nutrients inside the food, rather than losing them to cooking water or poaching

Chef Aaron liquids. Radishes, when

Egan roasted, provide a pungency and funk that works well with the strong umami flavors of the mushrooms and steak.

STEAK WITH NEW POTATOES, ROASTED VEGETABLES AND MUSHROOM DEMIGLACE Yield: 4 full plated servings of food

1. Preheat an oven to 425°F. Heat a grill, grill pan, sauté pan or cast-iron skillet, and get ready to cook steaks in your preferred manner. Prepare the salt-roasted potatoes, as in the recipe that follows.

They will take about 30-45 minutes to cook, so go ahead and do this first. 2. Clean the asparagus, and trim and quarter the radishes. 3. Spread the asparagus, the quartered radishes and the peppers on a sheet tray covered with baking parchment or foil. Drizzle the vegetables with the oil and shift them around to coat evenly. Season well with salt and pepper, and roast for 10-15 minutes, checking frequently and shaking the pan to allow for more even browning. 4. Pat the steaks dry, season them liberally with salt and pepper, and cook them to your desired degree of doneness — use a good thermometer to check that they’re where you want them. This shouldn’t take more than 10-15 minutes unless you got giant steaks that you want well done. Since there will be carry-over cooking, you’ll want to pull the steaks about 5 degrees from where you want them to be when they’re done. If you want medium-rare, 135 Fahrenheit, you pull the steak off the grill at about 130 or so, to account for carry-over. 5. When the steaks are done, pull them from the heat and let them rest on a plate or cutting board, for at least 5 minutes. Tent a piece of foil over them gently (we want to keep in heat, but not seal in steam so well we get condensation and lose our crust.) 6. When the vegetables are soft and lightly browned, remove them from the oven and set aside for plate-up. Similarly, take the potatoes out once they’re browned and cooked through (tender when poked with a paring knife.) 7. Plate up how you like it; I’d probably make a nice compact arrangement in the center of the plate with the demi-glace flooding the front and on top of the steak.

SALT-ROASTED NEW POTATOES This preparation of potatoes is wildly simple, and creates a surprisingly flavorful result. You can smash the potatoes flat, let them cool and deep-fry them for a crispy presentation, or leave them whole and serve them with lots of flavorful olive oil, flaky sea salt and black pepper, and maybe some fresh herbs.

Yield: 6-8 servings

1. Preheat an oven to 425°F. 2. Pour a layer of salt on the bottom of a sheet pan or high-sided baking dish. You want at least an inch of salt on the pan. Spread the fingerling potatoes over the

top of the salt evenly in one layer. 3. Place in the oven and roast for 25-35 minutes. Check for doneness after about 25-30 minutes. It may take up to 45 minutes for larger fingerling potatoes to roast. 4. Once the potatoes are tender, remove them from the oven and allow the pan to cool. With tongs or a slotted spoon, remove the potatoes from the salt. Jostle the potatoes gently in a towel to remove excess salt and serve hot with butter or oil drizzled over them lightly.

MUSHROOM DEMI-GLACE Demi-Glace is a classic French sauce created with a mixture of beef stock and brown (Espagnole) sauce, reduced to a thick consistency; it’s differentiated from “Glace” by including the brown sauce, which is a shortcut to the texture that we want out of the sauce. Glace would involve even more reducing of pure beef stock down to a syrupy substance … which makes a phenomenal sauce, in and of itself, if you can spend the time on it.

This is a more simple approach, using a corn starch thickener to create good texture from a flavorful mushroom base, which will reduce from its starting quantity down to a (hopefully) intensely mushroomy, savory sauce, which will be tremendously good over steak, chicken or even pasta.

Yield: 1 quart

1. Wash the mushrooms, if necessary, or otherwise remove all dirt, trimming if necessary. Chop them roughly. 2. Place a large stock pot over medium-high heat and add the quartered onions. Cook until they brown well on each side, flipping them as needed. Add the mushrooms and garlic, and cook until the mushrooms release their liquid and it cooks off. 3. Pour in the water and add the herbs and spices. Bring the pot to a boil, then reduce to a simmer, and cook for 45 minutes. 4. Strain the liquid through a fine mesh strainer into another pot; squeeze out as much liquid as you can, using the back of a ladle or your hand once things have cooled off enough to touch them. 5. Bring the liquid to a simmer once again and simmer until it reduces to 1 quart in volume. Add a little salt to taste and prepare a slurry with the cornstarch and water. Whisk about half of the slurry into the simmering mushroom stock and continue stirring until the sauce thickens slightly. Add more slurry if necessary to get an appropriate texture (thick enough to coat the back of a spoon and hold a stripe when wiped away, but not gooey.)

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