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EATING OUT IS all well and good, but it tots up after a while.
So, if you’re looking for a way to be more economical with your grocery bill may we suggest casting a fresh eye over beef?
It’s a truly versatile ingredient and we showed you just how many different cuts there are and ways to cook it here.
To follow on from that we had a chat with with celebrity chef Kevin Dundon about the best beef tips, recipes and suggestions about what to do with leftovers and now we have the low-down on everything you ever need to know.
Make friends with your butcher
For Kevin, butchers are a great resource for consumers and the place to go when looking for tips on how to cook beef. Pick their brains, tell them what you’re cooking or thinking about cooking for dinner, and they’ll sort you out. They’re the fountain of beef knowledge, so make friends with your butcher.
Kevin is fronting the Better Beef campaign and he tells us how the beef is, in fact, better:
What we’ve actually done is aged it longer, and it’s a different hanging process so the beef is more tender and more juicy.
And now for what you’ve all been waiting for…
Now we did a little piece on roast dinners here, and more on the perfect roast potatoes here, but we think Kevin’s recipe might have us trumped.
He says when cooking a joint of beef for a roast dinner, get a pan on the stove and add a bit of goosefat to it when it’s very hot. Then take your joint, put loads of salt and pepper on it, and pop it into the pan. This will seal the beef all they way round and keep all the juices inside of it.
Put that into the oven for approx an hour and a half at 180 degrees.
Then for fantastic roast potatoes, about an hour into cooking the roast you want to peel your potatoes and get a pan of cold water with lots of salt in it. Bring it to the boil and parboil for 7 minutes and then drain them and pop them around your roast. They’ll take about 45 min to cook.
And for the pièce de résistance of roast beef tips:
When you take your joint out of the oven, you want to cover it with tinfoil shiny side down and leave it to rest for 15-20 min. This lets the muscles relax and keeps all the juices inside. If you carve it now, it will release all the juices and won’t be as tender.
We don’t think there’ll be any of course, but just in case you don’t finish that roast on a Sunday and are worried about waste, we grabbed a few of Kevin’s go-to leftovers recipes.
There are many meals you can make from leftover beef. To name but a few we have -
We’ll get to those recipes in a second but first you must -
It has to be said that a well stocked pantry is the busy person’s friend. With a few staples in there you can cobble together a meal in a flash, without having to head to the supermarket every couple of days.
We asked Kevin what was good to have in your pantry at all times and he listed these ingredients -
Tins of tomatoes, Worcestershire sauce, tomato paste, green curry paste, soy sauce, honey, plain flour.
May we add rice, pasta, chickpeas and stock cubes? You’ll be sorted.
And with those on hand, and whatever veg are lurking in your fridge, you can throw together a curry or stirfry in no time at all.
Stirfry is a great dish to have at the back of your ‘mental cookbook’ as it can be on the table in as little as 10 mins.
Slice up your leftover roast and throw into a very hot wok and sauté for a couple of minutes, then add in your sliced (and peeled if necessary) veg – carrots, broccoli, peppers, mushrooms, whatever you’ve got. After that, it’s a splash of soy sauce and a tablespoon of honey and some sesame oil to create a perfect Asian influenced glaze. Serve with rice.
This is a recipe for stew cooked from scratch with a cheaper cut (ask your butcher for ‘stewing beef’) which is great for a long slow cook, but it can also be made the same way with the leftover roast beef chopped up and added to it.
Kevin says to put a large pot on the stove, and heat some oil to very hot. Add your stewing beef (approx 900g) and sauté that until it’s browned, then take it of that pot and put it aside for a minute. (If you’re using leftover roast beef, sauté it in the same way, just for less time.) Add some more oil to the pot and pop in your chopped garlic (2 cloves) and veg (3 carrots, 2 sticks of celery) and sauté them for a couple of minutes also.
Add the meat back in and pour in a glass of red wine. Reduce this by half and then add about 500ml of beef stock. Let that simmer for an hour and a half. In the final 10 mins, have some peeled bite-sized potatoes ready to throw in and then they’ll cook nicely in the last few minutes and thicken up the broth without the need for flour – perfect for coeliacs.
I think it’s one of the nicest things you can ever have, is to walk into a house and smell this fantastic smell happening in the background.
Kevin says the best tip he can give to any cook is -
The best tip I can tell people about cooking is to enjoy it and cook from the heart. To buy the very best ingredients you can and do very little with them. That’s my belief in food in a nutshell.
And on that note… Let us know your own best recipes and ideas for beef in the comments below.
Check out how to cook a perfect steak with Kevin here.
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I love Christmas but this article resonates on some points and I am sure will do the same for many,
I would add:
Try and get 30mins exercise in each day. A brisk walk will be fine. It keeps the mince pies at bay and boosts your mood. Double whammy.
And remember, if it is not a good time of year, it is short lived. It’ll be over soon.
@Gus McIntosh: I may or may not call clients in my pj’s on my exercise bike when it’s raining.
Stop listening to RTÉ news headlines and Clare Byrne
@James Fox: advice for life, not just Christmas
Dare to hope! Life and love will prevail.
We really are all in this together, look after yourself and your loved ones and don’t put any unneeded pressure on yourself. It’s Christmas, there’s one every year.
@Sean Kirwan: we’re not though. At all.
@Fergal McDonagh: bit if you try real hard when you close your eyes you can convince yourself that we are. Then get back to ignoring the horrible truths in society. Sure its Christmas….Best time of the year to paint over the cracks till next year.
Great article and very helpful thank you.
A whole industry really has grown around the lack of mental wellness that is being driven by contaminants in our food and other man made chemicals we did not evolve to exist with. What we eat, drink and breathe is making us sick and there is no shortage of experts who proclaim to understand our anxiety as an emotion whereas for many it is likely an artificial sensation of fear being triggered by chemicals in our food, drink, breathing air and personal care products. Anxiety is not mental it is immunological for many if not most.
@Gavin Tobin: It can’t be all down to that at all. For an example, watch a few episodes of the Flintstones – Barney Rubble was clearly of a very nervous disposition, constantly worried about things going wrong.
That was a few million years before processed foods and diesel particulates.
@Gavin Tobin: Personally I’m fed up with the constant touting of “detox” products. Our bodies have perfectly functional livers and kidneys and no one needs plastic patches of colour-changing gunk to “filter” any alleged toxins. I wouldn’t take them if they were free, but they’re obviously very lucrative for the sellers to impulse buyers with no notion of human biology at all.
@Fiona Fitzgerald: Yea I’ve seen some fall recently for the ear candle scam which are sold by reputable pharmacies like Boots etc.
One major problem is listed allergens like SO2/Sulphites can be legally hidden and for some this is an overlooked problem.
For example 10% of asthmatics are believed to have a SO2/Sulphite allergy so our food safety laws expose them to a known listed allergen that is hidden from food labelling.
A little bit of inflammation can drive inflammation of CNS driving allergy in particular. Liver & kidneys can’t help here.
@Gavin Tobin: What an absolute load. Being prone to anxiety is a consequence of bad past experiences or just their natural disposition. Some people are naturally pessimistic or wary and never believe good things can happen without ten bad things ruining it afterwards. They might have low self esteem and are convinced they don’t deserve to feel relaxed or happy about anything, and when they do, they dont feel that way for long. Some people think life is empty and meaningless and will feel despair and anxiety over that. Blaming peoples anxiety on what they ingest is completely undermining their anxiety. I feel anxiety constantly, and believe me, its got nothing to do with what i eat and drink and everything to do with my life and the effect its had on me.
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