Steak Café de Paris Sauce
I am saying "remembering" because I haven't had the sauce in years, since I can never trust the level of happiness that the creature who provided the steak enjoyed in its lifetime. I have always eaten this in restaurants, and very fancy ones at that. But the fanciness of the restaurant is no guarantee that the steak comes from an animal that grazed on a meadow, moved about freely, had a good time while it was alive. All of that, one can only be sure of when one buys the meat from speciality butchers who do guarantee that. So, that means home cooking only, and that means I will probably not have Steak Café de Paris in a very long time to come, since I would never be able to pull this one off at home. Not the grilling of the steak, and certainly not the sauce.
The recipe below is only for the sauce. There are plenty of pages online on how to grill a decent steak that you can look at for that part, of course. In my experience, whenever I have had this, the steak has been accompanied by thin french fries which also get doused with the sauce. In fact, they only pour a little bit of the sauce on the steak itself, more goes on the fries. And then they leave a sauce boat with more on the table so that you can keep adding.
Oh and - the sauce has to look curdled, so don't try to make it something smooth like a mayonnaise. The author of the recipe calls it "broken", and that is a very good description for it.
INGREDIENTS
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INSTRUCTIONS
- Add chopped onions to 1/4 of the butter in a pan. Over low heat, let the butter melt with the onions. Careful to not toast the onions – onions will turn translucent but there shouldn’t be browning at all. The butter should also come to a gentle sizzle.
- Once onions turn translucent, or you start smelling it, add in the rest of the butter. Still keeping a low heat, allow butter to melt slowly. When all of the butter has almost melted, turn off the heat.
- Add tarragon, parsley, sage (and basil if using), anchovies, ground nutmeg, walnuts, capers, ground pepper. Blend this up, so you get a butter cream. Optional: pour this mixture in a pouring or measuring cup for the next step, so it’s a less messier process.
- In a separate bowl, add egg yolk, mustard, maggi seasoning sauce (or worcestershire sauce), and the vinegar. Use a whisk or hand mixer to beat this mixture. Gradually pour in the butter cream from earlier. Eventually this will become a thick creamy consistency, much like mayonnaise.
- Pour 2/3rds of the mixture into a saucepan. Meanwhile, prepare a bowl filled with cold water. Your pan should be able to sit in the bowl easily.
- Heat the saucepan over low to medium heat, and continuously stir. Do not let this come to a boil.
- Stir until it breaks and turns into a crumbly liquid. It should look “ruined”.
- Once it turns crumbly, immediately take the saucepan off the heat and place it in the bowl of cold water. Continue to stir to stop the cooking process. After about 30 seconds, add this mixture back into to the leftover mayonnaise that we did not heat up.
- Give that a whisk to combine the two sauces together. Sauce is done!
Shamelessly filched from:
Thank you Nomadette! :-)
Images: Unsplash, Pexels and Freepik.
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