beef

Tourte de boeuf parmentier

July 24, 2011 Food & drink

This beef pie has a very British feel to it, despite its French origins. I was asked exactly what makes it French, and I must admit to struggling to find an answer. There’s some garlic in it, I suppose, and it has that general feel of traditional French cooking…simple, practical, thrifty and generous of flavour…but [...]

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Messada di bue – Italian-style cured beef

May 10, 2011 Food & drink

I’ve said this before, many times, but it bears repeating – the best thing about cooking is the transformation of unpromising ingredients into something better. Take this dish… normally, I’d never dream of eating a piece of brisket without at least a couple of hours on a low heat, let alone raw, but here it [...]

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Moroccan beef tagine

August 8, 2010 Food & drink

Moroccan cuisine is rich with influences that betray the country’s history as a strategically important place, with distinct Arabic influences laid over more obvious North African traits. There’s also Moorish and European influence in there, too, pointing to Morocco’s closeness to Spain, and its position as a gateway to southern Europe. The tagine is emblematic [...]

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Sri Lankan Red Beef Curry

June 2, 2010 Food & drink

Most meat-based curries from the sub-continent use lamb, mutton or goat as their core ingredient. Beef isn’t used widely, mainly for religious reasons…the Hindu sacred cow is never destined for the pot. Traveling around India, you quickly become used to the sight of cows wandering around the streets, unflustered by the traffic mayhem around them, [...]

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Carpaccio of beef with rosemary

December 30, 2009 Food & drink

There isn’t much cooking involved here, just a little frantic scorching and some very thin slicing. The seared crust of the beef is given a gutsy punch from an excess of rosemary and a good seasoning of salt and pepper. The brief cooking time leaves the centre of the meat entirely raw. It almost goes [...]

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Forerib of beef, roasted with beetroot

November 6, 2009 Food & drink

In the middle of the beef crisis in the UK during the nineties, beef joints including the animal’s bones were banned. You couldn’t buy proper roasting joints anywhere. All beef was sold off the bone, and that was that. My dad had other ideas, and wasn’t about to be scared off by a minor inconvenience [...]

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Keith Floyd’s Beef Bourgignon

September 29, 2009 Food & drink

The passing of Keith Floyd earlier this month caused me to dig out one of his old cookbooks, Floyd on France, a cornerstone of the Floyd canon and packed full of traditional French recipes described and executed with typical flair. Beef Bourgignon, caught my eye. It is, as Floyd puts it ‘a splendid stew (that) [...]

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A completely unseasonal dinner

August 19, 2008 Food & drink

It’s the middle of August, and it hasn’t stopped raining for weeks. No roofer will come near my leaking skylight. Against this backdrop, a dinner of brisket and root vegetables doesn’t seem too out-of-place, so I threw together a mediocre piece of brisket from the forgotten depths of the freezer with carrots, onions and mushrooms [...]

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