Roast sirloin and Yorkshire pudding

For months my neighbour Frances has been talking nostalgically about the roast sirloin of her childhood.  So last week I finally got organised to cook her one. We ordered it at the excellent Gipps St butcher, and she came with me to pay for it and check that it was what she wanted. 

       I'd never cooked a rolled sirloin roast before, and I don't think I'd ever eaten one. As I wrote in The Colour of Food, in my childhood roast beef always meant "a round of chewy beef [probably brisket] criss-crossed with wooden skewers and tied up with string". Only in recent years did we start having roast fillet.  So I was a bit nervous about cooking this magnificent beast, aged for 18 days.

I took advice from the butcher and the internet, where I found very useful instructions from a London restaurant, and adapted them. To make sure it tasted as much as possible like Frances's childhood roast, I used salt only and seared the meat in dripping.

Rolled roast sirloin

1. Take roast out of fridge at least 2 hours before cooking, so that it's at room temperature when it goes into the oven.

2. Pre-heat oven to 180C, fan cook.

3. Season well with garlic, thyme and salt. 

4. Get a roasting pan smoking hot.

5. Sear in hot pan [with a little dripping to keep it old-school] until coloured all over. (2-3 mins approx).

6. Place on oven tray in pre-heated oven. Turn oven down to 170C fan cook for desired time (see below).

7. Rest, uncovered, on a warm plate (not too hot to touch) for at least 20 mins before serving.

Timing

The timing is always the trickiest bit. I usually like my beef rarish or medium rare, but in this case, I knew Frances would prefer medium, and of course sirloin is different from fillet. 

        Our sirloin weighed 2.1 kg. My meat thermometer gives an internal temperature of 71C for medium beef. It took about an hour and three-quarters to go a little over that, but the meat was still spurting reddish blood when I took the thermometer out. So I consulted with Frances's daughter, who came to dinner along with two other neighbours, and we agreed that it needed a little longer. I gave it 5 minutes more and that did the trick - it was about 77C by then. 

It rested for half an hour, loosely covered in foil, while I made the Yorkshire puddings (recipe below). When I carved it (so easy with a rolled roast) it was exactly what I wanted: the inner slices a very pale pink, the outer ones perfect for Frances and others who preferred it medium. 

She got the outside end, of course - as you can see, it was quite crusty and brown. When she took her first bite she said "Oh joy!" So I knew I'd got it right. 

With it, courtesy of my other neighbours, we drank two bottles of beautiful 2008 Trinity Hill syrah which they'd given me a few years ago, and I'd kept for just such a worthy occasion.

         Frances really appreciated the Yorkshire pudding, too. My first husband came from Yorkshire and his mother Marion taught me to make it properly, but I hadn't done it for years. 
          Again, I found the perfect recipe, matching everything I remembered, on the internet - and I did use dripping. (Yes, I know it's bad for you, but once a year is not going to matter.) As this requires a high oven temperature, I made it at the end, after I took out the meat and veges (all very trad - potatoes, onions, carrots, broccoli).

Yorkshire puddings

4 large eggs (200 g)

150 g all-purpose flour (about 1 cup plus 2 teaspoons)

200 ml trim milk

2 g salt (about 1/2 teaspoon)

100 ml beef dripping, lard, shortening, or vegetable oil (about 1/2 cup)

1. Combine eggs, flour, milk, water, and salt in a medium bowl and whisk until a smooth batter is formed. Let batter rest at room temperature for at least 30 minutes. Alternatively, for best results, transfer to an airtight container and refrigerate batter overnight or for up to 3 days. Remove from refrigerator while you preheat the oven.



I made the batter the day before and put it into an empty soda bottle, allowing me to pour it easily into the muffin wells. It doesn't look like much, but it did 8 puddings and would have been enough for 9 or 10 less exuberant ones.

2. Adjust oven rack to center position and preheat oven to 450°F (230°C). Divide drippings (or other fat) evenly between two 8-inch cast iron or oven-safe non-stick skillets, two 6-well popover tins, one 12-well standard muffin tin, or one 24-well mini muffin tin. Preheat tins in the oven until the fat is smoking hot, about 10 minutes.  (This is the crucial bit that I remember Marion teaching me.)

3. Transfer the pans or tins to a heat-proof surface (such as an aluminum baking sheet on your stovetop), and divide the batter evenly between every well (or between the two pans if using pans). The wells should be filled between 1/2 and 3/4 of the way up (if using large pans, they should be filled about 1/4 of the way up). 

I used a 12-well muffin tin - this amount of batter makes about 9 or 10 puddings, but I overfilled my tins a bit and made 8.

4. Immediately return tin to oven. Bake until the Yorkshire puddings have just about quadrupled in volume, are deep brown all over, crisp to the touch, and sound hollow when tapped. Smaller ones will take about 15 minutes (popover or skillet-sized ones around 20-25 minutes).

4. Serve immediately. (It says you can cool them completely, transfer to a zipper-lock freezer bag, freeze for up to 3 months, and reheat in a hot toaster oven before serving, but I really don’t see the point of doing that!)

Mine came out enormous and properly brown, but they did collapse more or less straight away (in the photo some have done that already) and were a little difficult to get out of the wells. It might have helped if I'd brushed the fat up the sides as well as putting it in the bottom. But it didn't matter - they were the Real Thing, especially when covered in dark brown gravy.

In praise of lamb - and Julia

One advantage of having my son staying with me at the moment is the good excuse it gives me to have a roast, especially a leg of lamb. They were on special this week and I was having my neighbour round for her regular dinner. She's a real carnivore, and she suffers from that living-alone problem of not having proper roasts, so I knew she'd love it - and so would my son.
          Even on special they still seemed expensive. But when the long knobbly bone finally went into the trash on Tuesday, picked very clean indeed, I worked out exactly how many meals we'd had off that leg (which weighed 2.48 kg).
           Roast dinner for three, cold meat for two twice, rissoles for two twice, and a few lamb sammies for lunch as well. I'm particularly fond of slices of pink roast lamb made into sandwiches with nice soft white bread and a good sprinkling of salt and pepper.
          So the initial layout of $27 covered, let's say, 10 servings of dinner (allowing for the fact that I added a soup and some fritters to eke out the meat here and there) - that's $2.70 per person for meat. Not bad, eh.
          And very delicious it was too. The blog has the recipe I usually use for the roast itself and for those rissoles. But this time I decided to use Julia Child's basic recipe for roast leg of lamb, because I was short of time earlier in the day and didn't want to be bothered with the mustard coating in advance.

It was an interesting exercise. I was intrigued to see that she adds salt and pepper only at the end. This seemed odd, so I did sprinkle a bit over the top of mine just before putting it in the oven. I shoved a few slivers of garlic around the bone too. But of course Julia was originally using the famous French "pré-salé" lamb, which I used to think meant "presalted", but actually means "salt-meadow", the seaside meadows where the lambs graze, absorbing the taste of salt with their grass and herbs. Harvey and I had it once for lunch in Rouen, and it was superb.
            Her recipe is for a 6 pound leg, roughly 2.75 kg, but as I've often found it takes longer in the oven for a roast than she says, even though it's on fan-forced, I thought it would be safe to use the lower times she gives for my 2.48 kg leg (starting at room temperature).  But since you do initially sear it at 230C for 15 minutes, unlike the mustard-coating recipe, that obviously makes it cook quicker for the rest of the time at 180C. An hour was plenty - in fact I would have been happy to have it a little pinker (although I think my neighbour probably preferred the way it turned out, well towards medium rather than rare, though still nice and pink in its deeper recesses). I've left her timings in their original form for the larger leg, but if you're using it for a smaller one, check with a meat thermometer after it's been in the 180C oven for 45 minutes, rather than leaving it for an hour.

Roast leg of lamb - Gigot rôti
(From Mastering the Art of French Cooking, Vol. 1)

This is for a leg weighing 6 pounds, approximately 2.7 - 2.8 kg bone in.
Remove the lamb from the fridge an hour before cooking. Trim off as much fat and silverskin as possible, and wipe it dry with paper towels.

Preheat the oven to 230C. Melt 2 tablespoons of butter with 2 tablespoons of oil in a glass jug in the microwave, Brush the lamb all over with this mixture.
Place it on a rack in a roasting tin just large enough to fit it. Place the tin in the upper third of the preheated oven. For fan-forced, turn the heat down to 220C. After 5 minutes, turn it over and baste it again with the leftover butter and oil.
Repeat after another 5 minutes, and again after another 5 minutes. Leave the roast after the final turn with its fatty top side uppermost.
Take out the lamb and turn the heat down to 180C. Strew the roughly chopped pieces of 1 large carrot and 1 large onion and a few cloves of peeled garlic in the bottom of the pan. Set lamb in middle of oven and roast till done, with teh correct temperature showing on the meat thermometer. Basting is not necessary.

Cooking times:
Rare: 15 mins searing plus 45 mins to 1 hour at 180C. Juices run rosy red.
Medium: 15 mins searing plus 1 hour to 1 hour 15 mins at 180C. Juices run pale rose.
(Julia does not deign to give any timing for well done, that would be unthinkable.)

Season the lamb with 1 tsp salt and 1/4 ts pepper, and place it on a hot platter. Leave it to rest at room temperature for 30 minutes before carving slices across the grain. (You can wrap it loosely in foil and leave it for longer.)

To make the sauce: Remove the rack from the tin, and spoon out the cooking fat. Pour in a cup of stock (I use miso) and boil rapidly, scraping up the juices and scraps and mashing the vegetables into the stock. Taste for seasoning. Just before serving, strain into a hot sauceboat, pressing the juices out of the vegetables. Add any juices which may have escaped from the resting roast.
(Or simply discard the veges, add red wine to the pan and boil that with the scraped up juices and scraps and a dash of  soy sauce, taste, then strain.)

Be sure to serve the lamb on hot plates to stop the fat congealing.

I found this entertaining gem online: Julia Child visits 16 master chefs in their own kitchens.

A fine rump

When it came to steak, my father would eat nothng but rump. I didn't know any other kind existed until well after I got married.

           Musing over the meat counter last week, and feeling in need of something really red, I came across a neat little cylinder of rump, secured with butcher's netting, and thought it would be interesting to find out how to cook it. I started by chopping a hunk off one end and fan-grilling it for my dinner. It was good, not as tender as fillet of course, but with more flavour - and much cheaper. There was enough left from that piece to have it sliced the next night.

            Thinking the rest would do nicely for a baby roast to serve my neighbour, I went to the web to find out how to cook it. It always works best to look at New Zealand recipes first, especially for meat. This time I found a great site, My Butcher - they sell meat online and also post some good-looking recipes. The main thing about this recipe was that it was for a fairly small piece of meat. Mine was only about half the stated size, but I thought it would still work well - and it did.
             In the process I found out something interesting about butcher's netting. I always thought you were meant to take it off before you cooked the meat, but in this recipe you quite clearly leave it on. So I did what I was told, and it worked fine.

Herbed rump roast

• Rump roast, approx. 1 - 1.5 kg 
• Small bunch fresh rosemary
• ¼ cup light olive oil
• 2 garlic cloves, crushed
• Salt and freshly ground black pepper

Preheat oven to 200°C. Put a few whole rosemary sprigs to the side and coarsely chop the remaining rosemary. Place the chopped rosemary, oil, garlic, salt and pepper in a bowl and mix well. Massage this mixture over the beef. Thread the reserved whole sprigs of rosemary between butcher’s netting and the beef.

 Heat a fry pan over high temperature and place the rump in the pan to sear all sides to a golden brown.
Once it's browned nicely, place the beef on a rack in a roasting dish and place in the oven.

Cook for 1 hour and 15 minutes for medium or until your preferred level of doneness is reached.
My roast was only about 750g, but that was fine - I just used a little bit less of everything to go on it, except for the garlic, and of course cooked it for less time, about 40 minutes on fan forced at 190C, to get it just on the rare side of medium.

Remove from the roasting dish, place on a plate and cover lightly with foil to rest for 10-15 minutes.  (I leave it for longer than this, up to 30 minutes. I reduced red wine in the roasting pan, scraping up the meat juices - only a little, because of the searing - and bits on the bottom to make a rich brown sauce - it sounds wrong to call it gravy, because that conjures up the much thicker kind my mother used to make.)

Before carving, remove the rosemary sprigs and netting from the roast. Using a sharp knife, slice across the grain.
Once the netting comes off the meat doesn't stay in a very neat roll when it's cut, so it was easier (and tasted better) to cut thicker slices than I would use for fillet. We had this with roast potatoes and kumara, and sliced leeks cooked with butter and lemon juice. We don't have roasts very often these days, so it was a treat for both of us. But I didn't even try to take a dinner plate photo - I didn't want it all to get cold, and by then I was too hungry. Harvey would definitely have approved. We both ate our fill, but there was enough left over for another dinner and a lunch for me - so that little roast provided more than five servings.

The taste of home

Harvey grew up on a sheep farm and I’ve always been a townie, but for both of us roast lamb is the taste of childhood Sundays. Their leg of lamb was home-killed, hung for a while and slow-cooked in a wood-fired oven. Ours came from the sawdust-floored butcher round the corner on Friday, sat in the meat safe and went into the tiny gas oven on Sunday morning.
         My mother, like Harvey's, began by putting a chunk of dripping in the roasting pan. The glistening roast came out well-done – pink was unthinkable – but it was always tender and sweet, with that lovely nutty taste of good lamb or (more likely then) hogget. The neat slices curved gently away from Dad’s sharp knife onto the waiting plates, ready for Mum to lay a curl of butter on top.
       Until his health failed, Harvey took great pride and pleasure in being both cook and carver of our lamb roasts.  With some gentle encouragement from me, they became steadily pinker.  When I had to take over, I decided I needed a little French help. Julia Child gave me exactly what I was looking for: a simple, easy variation that’s guaranteed to produce delicious, subtly seasoned roast lamb every time.
           This recipe needs no higher-temperature searing at the beginning, but the total cooking time needs careful working out. MTAFC recommends just 15 minutes per pound for well-done, but even if you want it rare, New Zealand leg of lamb definitely takes longer, and ovens vary. In mine, it takes 30 minutes per 500g for medium rare, plus 20-30 minutes resting time - this is essential. So a 2.5 kg leg needs to go in 3 hours before serving.

Roast leg of lamb in a mustard coat 
(derived from Mastering the Art of French Cooking, Volume I)
1 small leg of lamb, about 2.5 kg, trimmed of as much fat as possible (for a bigger one, increase the coating recipe)
A few meaty bones and meat trimmings (I used a cheap shoulder chop to get these)
For the mustard coating:
120 ml Dijon mustard (about 1/2 cup)
2 Tbsp soya sauce (I use Kikkoman)
1-2 cloves mashed garlic
1 tsp finely ground rosemary (you can do this perfectly in the blender - put the leaves in and run it before adding anything else)
1/4 tsp powdered ginger
1 Tbsp good extra virgin olive oil
For the sauce:
Approx. 150 ml white wine (I used a lovely Johner Estate pinot gris this time)

* Take the lamb out of the fridge at least 3 hours before it needs to go in the oven.
* Make the mustard coating - a blender is a big help, but not essential. Grind the leaves finely first, add everything else except the olive oil, and blend by machine or by hand. Beat in the olive oil drop by drop to make a thickish mayonnaise-like cream.
* Use a soft spatula or brush (the spatula seems to work best) to paint the leg of lamb evenly all over. (There should be a little left over - save it for the gravy.)
* Place the meat trimming and bones (with a few extra sprigs of rosemary if you like) in the bottom of a roasting tin. Lay the lamb over them on a rack and set aside until ready to start cooking.

* Preheat the oven to 190C. Turn down to 180C when you put the meat in.
* Roast the lamb until just done to your liking, turning once. (A meat thermometer helps - medium rare is around 155C.)

"...the lamb becomes a beautiful brown as it roasts..." Julia Child

* Rest the leg on a warmed plate, with the bone propped up at an angle so the juices run into the meat, and cover with a folded teatowel until ready to carve.
* Before serving, make the sauce: Briefly brown the meat trimmings and bones in the pan, being careful not to burn them, then remove from pan. Add about 150 ml white wine, scrape bits off the bottom of the pan, and increase heat to reduce the wine by about half. Stir in a tablespoonful (or two) of the leftover mustard coating, plus about 150 ml of water. (I leave the coating in the blender, add water, run it briefly to combine and pour it into the pan.) Deglaze the pan and reduce again until the sauce is a good pouring consistency. Strain into a warmed sauceboat, taste for seasoning, and keep warm, ready for serving.

A roast is made to be shared, and last night we invited dear friends over to eat it with us. I made a very simple, eat-on-our-laps starter of Coromandel smoked peppered mackerel with a few leaves of rocket, parsley and endive from the garden.

The one thing I haven't mastered is carving, so I'd asked Tom to do it. He brought his grandfather's splendid carving set, in its purple-silk-lined box.
        While I steamed a few late green beans, warmed the plates, made the sauce  and checked the potatoes - small halved ones, baked in a separate tin with olive oil, rosemary and sea salt - he set to work.

I love the shape of the old "boat" the sauce goes in - we found it forgotten in a cupboard in the first house we bought together. I'm always a bit nervous about making this, but it turned out very well, not too thick or too salty, adding a slightly stronger note of the mustard and the tang of the wine.

The flavour of the lovely brown mustard coat had gone gently through the meat, and helped to keep it moist. The potatoes were crisp and golden outside and creamy inside. The beans were fine, though more and more I've come to appreciate the French habit of serving the veges as a separate course. Good food and good wine with good friends - what more could we ask?