Day Three : Angus steak with basil hollandaise by Gordon Ramsay

Actually the recipe was for Rib-eye, but I couldn't resist the cuts of Angus on special this week, as Rog loves his Angus meat. To be honest this was the recipe that was worrying me the most, I'd heard about how hard it was to keep hollindaise from splitting.

Ingredients (adapted to serve one)
1 thick steak
2 tbsp extra virgin olive oil
1 garlic clove (in it's skin)
handful of thyme sprigs

For the basil hollandaise
100ml white wine vinegar
small bunch of basil, stalks roughly chopped
few peppercorns
2 egg yolks
250g unsalted butter, melted and
skimmed to give about 200ml



The first step was to chop the butter into cubes and melt it in a pan. When it foams, you skim off the white foam and scum from the top until it's clear. You should be left with 200mls or so. We left that to cool.

Then we put the steak on a plate and rubbed each side with the oil, and rubbed in plenty of pepper and rock salt. Leave it to marinate for ten minutes.

We put the oven on 180 C to heat up, then put a pot of water on to boil, and started heating up the frypan. This recipe called for some serious multi-tasking.

For the hollindaise, put the vinegar, basil stalks, and peppercorns into a small pot. Boil down to about 3 tbsp, then strain. Put the egg yolks into a large deep bowl, add 1 tbsp of cold water, and 1 tbsp of the vinegar reduction, then whisk until light and frothy. Then put the bowl over, but not touching, the simmering water, and whisk to a light, airy foam. Now gradually add the butter, little by little, whisking all the time to make a silky yellow sauce. Keep the sauce warm for up to 30 minutes in a bath of just warm water, then, just before serving add in some fresh chopped basil and a squeeze of lemon juice.




Ours didn't split, phew!

Back to the steak. Add some oil, the clove of garlic and the handful of thyme to the hot pan. Sear the steak for 3 mins on the first side until well browned, basting with the oil and herbs as it cooks. Sear the other side of the steak in the same way. Brown around the edges and then transfer the steak and juices into the oven to roast for about ten minutes. Once cooked, leave to rest.

We plated ours with a couple of hashbrowns and an egg.



Rog thought this was absolutely delicious, he raved about it all night, AND he guessed correctly that it was a Ramsay recipe (Of course it's getting easier to guess now with only three choices!). He was torn between Ramsay and Jamie Oliver for a bit, then decided that it was probably a little fiddly for Oliver.
His only critism was that there wasn't enough, he's already ordered it again.