The Viking Roasts - Sirloin on the Bone with Onion Crisps

So.  You spend the better part of an hour slicing and dicing vegetables, lovingly running a sharp knife through a succulent cut of beef, gently simmering a stock on the stove and getting your hands tacky making a dumpling dough.  You recklessly toss half a bottle of London Pride in to your stock, the beery, hoppy smell racing in to your nostrils, firing memory synapses which light pictures of long, lazy Sunday afternoons behind your eyes.  Your smile widens as you place your chopped leek, swede, onion, potato, carrot and thyme in to the bottom of your slow cooker.  A twinkle enters your eyes, your hands laying beef on to a bed of vegetables before wrapping it all in a blanket of stock, steam rising lazily from its surface.  You add pepper, and salt, a couple of chilis and some cayenne pepper before covering with a lid, setting to ‘high’ and retiring to the lounge for the next six hours to watch the football.  It is, you reflect as you drain the bottle of beer, a perfect Sunday.

Six hours later, you return to the slow cooker.  Your team has lost, and all you have to look forward to now is a nice, thick, fulfilling stew and dumplings.  You plunge your fork in to the vegetables, expecting them to yield softly to your touch and…  they’re still hard.  Solid, in fact.  And, in one fell swoop, you entire weekend has been ruined.  The stew itself gets chucked unceremoniously in to a saucepan to be brought to the boil and simmered for a couple of hours (the way you’d originally intended before you got all high-and-mighty and decided to use the slow cooker), but that’s going to make dinner too late so you’re reduced to an omelette that you eat in front of Top Gear with a strong sense of disappointment. 

That’s what happened to me this weekend.  I ate that omelette with thinly-veiled disgust.  I was Not Happy.  But anyway, that stew will keep for tea for tonight (Monday), and now I must think of something else to write about this week.  Thankfully, I do have a little something else up my sleeve.  And so this week, after three paragraphs of moaning and some unnecessarily flowery language, I present to you my version of a recipe I picked up on Market Kitchen a couple of weeks ago.  It’s another roast – sorry about that – but I’m limited with resources at the moment and it’s all I’ve got ready to write about.

And so: The Viking Roasts – Sirloin on the Bone!

Yes, it’s another roast, but this time I’m using beef and there will also be Yorkshires and everything, so I think it’s sufficiently different from the last roast that I did.  Let’s get cracking, shall we?  You are going to need to get some STUFF.  Firstly, you’re going to need Sirloin, on the bone.  I was feeding two, and was rewarded (in exchange for around £10) with the following joint of beef or, for my American readers, a steak.

I forgot to take a picture of the meat before I covered it in garlic.  So you'll need to imagine it
looking pristine and pure...

You’ll probably have a tough time actually getting Sirloin on the bone in a supermarket (depending on how good their butcher is – no doubt Richard Hammond will pop up on the TV soon enough telling me that a popular supermarket chain does do this thereby making me look stupid, but that’s a risk I’m going to have to take), so take yourself down to your local butcher.  I won’t tell you how much beef you need – just tell your ruddy-faced, big forearmed butcher how many people you’re feeding and lo, he will provide.

You know, this guy.

You’re also going to need:

Potatoes – enough to sink the Poseidon.  I used Maris Pipers this week, but a good, fluffy potato will do just as well.

Garlic, and lots of it.

Pepper

Thyme

Carrots

Parsnips

2 Onions

Olive Oil

Eggs

Plain Flour

Milk

A pan of oil for frying

Quite a list, isn’t it?  We’d best get started before one of us dies of hunger, and I really don’t want that on my conscience.  Firstly, finely slice the onion using a sharp knife, or if you’re all la-di-da a mandolin.  One you’ve sliced the onions, place in a sieve over a bowl and leave them for about half an hour.

Next, take your garlic and crush.  You can either use the flat of a blade or a garlic crusher for this, but I find that the back-of-a-blade-and-then-hit-it method works best here – but that might be because my garlic crusher is from the Neolithic period and half the garlic gets stuck in the little holes.  Whatever your method, once you’ve done you should add the leaves (but not stalks) of a some thyme.  Give it a good pinch, and then using a rocking motion with a sharp knife cut the garlic and thyme together.  Add a tiny bit of olive oil and repeat, so you should end up with a garlicky, thymey paste that you will eventually rub on to the meat:

The next stage in your prep should be making the Yorkshire pudding batter.  This is a recipe that makes enough for four puds, and doesn’t require scales or precise measurements.  In to a bowl, add 2-3 heaped tablespoons of plain flour, 2 eggs and a splash of milk.  Add a good pinch of thyme leaves and beat together, adding very cold water bit by bit until you have a smooth batter, like this:

Once that’s done, set aside in the fridge as you won’t need it until later on.  Now, peel all your other veg, putting potatoes in water on their own and setting aside the carrots and parsnips.

Phew.  What a lot of prep, eh?  I suppose that we should get cooking.  Grab your sirloin, and rub that garlic paste all over it with your fingers.  Revel in that gorgeous smell for a moment, then take a large frying pan and (with no oil) put it over a high heat.  When the pan is shimmering hot, seal the joint on each side for about 30 seconds:

Done that?  Good.  Now, place the joint in to a roasting tin with a cup of water in the bottom of it, and put in to an oven, uncovered, that has been preheated to 200c/Gas 6.  In the original recipe, the meat only needs around 45 minutes to cook – but that was using a much smaller cut of meat from a different cow (a Dexter, I believe) so, depending on the size of your joint you need to adjust your cooking time accordingly.  The meat I cooked was in the oven for an hour and a half, and came out cooked through.  In honesty, that’s a bit too much for me, I’d say if you want it with some pink in, then an hour would do just as well.

At the same time, put another roasting tin in the oven with some oil in it for your roast veggies.  We’ve covered this before, so I won’t go over that again.  On the bottom shelf, place a Yorkshire pudding tin that has a good slug of oil in each of the depressions in which you’re going to make puds.  That oil needs to be really, really hot before you even think about putting the puds on.

As usual, par boil your potatoes for 5 minutes, beat them up a bit in the pan and, after 15 minutes, remove the vegetable tray from the oven and chuck your spuds in there, making sure they each get a good coating of oil as they start to brown in the pan.  You can do this over heat on the hob if you have a lot of potato to get through.  In the gaps between spuds, put in your carrots and parsnips, season to taste, and then put back in the oven for the remaining time. 

With 40 minutes to go, remove the Yorkshire pudding tin.  Careful, the oil will be super hot at this bit can be dangerous if you trip or spill the oil.  Rest the tray on a solid surface and then, using a ladle, fill the individual pudding houses.  I don’t know what they’re called.  A depression of Yorkshire puddings?  Something like that.  Three quarter fill your depressions with your lovely batter, and put back in the oven.  Here’s a Viking Top Tip: don’t open the door of the oven if you can at all avoid it between now and then end of cooking, otherwise your puds will collapse.

And now, go and have a sit.  Open a bottle of Longue Dog Grenache Shiraz (around a fiver from Sainsbury’s), fill a glass and let those nice, berryish aromas fill your nostrils.  Imagine drinking that peppery, dark red wine with your succulent meat.  Dribble a bit.  Go on, you’ve deserved it.

Soon enough, your timer will go off.  Quickly, not letting too much air in to the oven, remove your meat and let it rest.  Put the roasting tin with the juices in it on the hob, add some water, some bisto and some red wine, and cook down over a low heat for 5 minutes, being careful not to boil it.  Turn up the heat in the oven to 220c/Gas 7 to crisp off the Yorkshires and the roasties (sadly, all ovens are different, you will have to use your own judgement here…)

Things are getting a little hectic now…  Half fill a small saucepan with vegetable oil, and heat.  You’ll know it’s hot enough if you can drop a piece of bread in and it goes golden in 30 seconds.  Meanwhile, place your onion slices in a clean tea towel and squeeze the moisture from them.  Coat in flour:

And then fry in the oil until golden.  Don’t – just don’t – leave the oil.  There’s no need to risk burning your house down, is there.  Once cooked, remove using a colander spoon and drain on a piece of kitchen paper. 

Slice the meat in to thick pieces, and remove vegetables and Yorkshires from the oven.  Arrange on a plate, cover in thick, winey gravy, and eat until you’re fat and happy. 

So, I changed Matt’s recipe a little (I substituted onion puree for roasties and veg), and this is a little more fiddly than a normal roast, but the end result is more than worth it.  That bone on the meat helps it retain its shape, and I’m not sure if this is psychosomatic or not but it seems to give an extra level of flavour.  It’s something that I very much enjoyed cooking, and I hope you will too.

And so ends another entry.  Despite the trials and tribulations of failed stews and interviews, the sun is out and there’s a definite feeling in the air that spring is about to, er, spring; and that means Lamb, and lots of it.  In the meantime, any ideas for things I should cook?  Always happy to try something new, for that is the Viking way!

Until next week I am, and remain to be, the Food Viking!