Steak Diane Recipe - How to Make a Steak Diane

hello this is chef john from food wishes calm with Steak Diane that's right there was a time back in the day when cooking tableside in restaurants was all the rage in this amazing steak was probably the most famous and delicious recipe from that era and it really was an exciting and glamorous way to eat but unfortunately not every restaurant was that great executing the flambe step and after several situations involving guests running around the dining room on fire this one's popular trend flamed out literally but the good news is this recipe adapts beautifully to the home kitchen as you're about to see so let's go ahead get started with the beat before this we're going to want a couple nice tender steaks and what I'm using is a couple perfectly trim pieces of beef tenderloin that I flattened out to about a half inch thick and if you can swing it this is my recommendation for the best cut to use because it's so buttery tender but if you are looking for something a little more affordable top sirloin will work beautifully here and I believe traditionally what was most commonly used but regardless of what cut a steak you use we're going to want to season that generously on both sides with kosher salt and freshly ground black pepper and we really do want this perfectly trimmed okay you're going to see a little bit of internal marbling fat not any external chunks of fat or membranes have been removed and ideally this meat has been cut butterflied or pounded to about a half inch thick and then what we want to do once our meat has been seasoned is simply leave it out at room temperature for about 15 to 20 minutes just to warm up a little bit and while that's happening we can move on to the base of our sauce which is very simple and starts off with a nice spoon of Dijon mustard or a spoon of whatever your favorite mustard is as long as your favorite mustard is Dijon and then we're also going to want a little bit of Worcestershire sauce but not too much many of the recipes I see call four to three times this amount which I believe is going to be overpowering so we really just need a couple teaspoons here we will also go ahead and add a little bit of tomato paste for flavor color and acidity I'm also going to do a little shake of cayenne although traditionally I believe they use a few drops hot sauce but that's up to you you are of course the boss of this historical pan sauce and then we will finish this off with the real secret ingredient a half cup of our homemade Demi glaze see I told you eventually I show you a recipe where we could use that but I have a confession that's not the actual demi-glaze from our video this is a new cheater demi-glaze i'm going to show you next week made without veal bones so stay tuned for that and all we need to do is warm that up and stir it into this mixture it relaxed if you don't feel like making demi-glaze that's fine on the blog post I will explain how to substitute with just some nice rich chicken broth but anyway we're going to stir that together and that's going to be it for our sauce base which is one of three components we're going to need to finish this dish the other two being some cognac or brandy which we'll use to produce a potentially dangerous fireball as well as some heavy cream and once we have all that set we can head over the stove to start cooking our steaks and we will do that over very high heat in a little bit of vegetable oil so we'll drizzle in some oil and let that get very hot until we see sort of the first wisp of smoke at which point we will transfer our steaks in and once that's been accomplished what we'll do is add a few chunks of cold butter here and there and that's going to mix in with our T very hot oil and what we'll get this way is that nice nutty brown butter flavor without the potential of the OO flavor of burned butter okay sometimes if you add it at the beginning there's a chance it can go too far so to avoid that we can just add that right with the steak and then all we want to do here is sear that meat for about two to three minutes per side to get a little bit of browning on it but we do not want to cook these steaks all the way through okay what we're going to do is sear these well but keep them rare and then we'll finish cooking them in the finished sauce which is much easier to control and really that's the only major difference between this version and the classic tableside restaurant version they would have just added everything to the pan and sort of timed it so the steaks finish cooking right exactly when the sauce was perfect which is pretty easy to do if you've practiced like a thousand times but for us home cooks we're moving the meat and finishing the sauce first is much easier so once our steaks are nicely seared but still fairly rare we will remove those two plates reduce our heat to medium and add a nice big spoon of finely minced shallots to the pan which could be finely minced onions but they do carry shallots at pretty much any DC grocery store so try to find them if you can and what we're going to do is cook those shallots on medium heat for about two to three minutes just until they start to soften up a little bit and don't be alarmed but that fond at the bottom of the pan is hopefully going to darken up nicely and it always looks much darker on camera than it really is but be afraid that's really what we want is you'll see when we deglaze which is the next and by far most dangerous and exciting step so what we'll do once we've cooked our shallots a little bit we will turn off our heat and if your guests are watching dim the lights we will pour in our cognac or brandy at which point we can ignite this with a fireplace lighter and voila a giant show-stopping fireball which by the way is completely for show and not necessary so I'll explain why on the blog you don't need to do that but of course off the record I hope you do safely and by the way if you want pictures you better move fast because those pyrotechnics are only going to last a few seconds and once that alcohol burns off to make sure your pan should look something like this and at this point it's safe to turn our heat back on to high and we can pour in that soft space we mixed up earlier and eventually in a couple minutes that's going to come up to a boil and we'll give that a stir at which point we'll let it cook for just a couple minutes just to reduce it slightly before adding in our heavy cream and yes if you're thinking man I bet creme fraiche would be really goodness you are correct that would be fantastic but this time I'm just using regular heavy cream which still produces a pan sauce that's beyond amazing so we will stir that in and we'll continue cooking on high until the sauce just starts to thicken up along with of course any accumulated juices I mean I hope this doesn't sound too harsh but if you're the kind of person that throws away accumulated juices we can't be friends I'm sorry those have to be added back in and what we'll do is we'll continue cooking on high until our sauce starts to thicken up so what I'm going for is something that looks just about like this all right it's not too thick but it's starting to get there and what we'll do once it reaches that point is at our me back in and reduce our heat to low all right you generally don't want a boil meat so we want to finish this off on a nice gentle simmer so we'll add our steaks back in along with again any accumulated juices and basically as soon as that meat is heated through it cooked to our desired level of doneness we are ready to eat and of course because we're not crazy we're going to taste this before we serve it so I sampled a little bit of sauce which was incredible but it did need another pinch of salt so I stirred that in and once a sauce has tasted and looking exactly like you want and that beef is done to our liking we are ready to serve and I'm now using a thermometer by the way as soon as that meat goes from mushy to sort of springing back it's usually perfectly pink so at this point I'm going to go ahead and transfer that onto a hot plate and spoon over copious amounts of our mind-blowing sauce and by the way on the plate I featured a very popular side dish of the time which was generally never a side dish all right you can order some potatoes and vegetables separately but they were almost never on the plate the plate generally just contained your meat and some ridiculous garnish like a piece of bright red candied apple or crinkle-cut pickle beet or maybe like in my case a hand-carved tomato rose but anyway we're going to serve that up and maybe finish off with a little bit of fresh chive and that's it our Steak Diane is done and ready to enjoy and great news we don't have to let this rest let's just go ahead and dig right in and as great as that looks it tastes like a hundred times better just intensely savory with just a little bit of Tang just a little bit of sweetness from the cognac and just the right amount of richness from that heavy cream so I just absolutely loved how this came out to me this is just the quintessential American pan sauce and almost a tragedy that you don't see this on more menus but that's okay because as you saw this is pretty easy to make at home oh by the way in case you're wondering nobody really knows why this is called Steak Diane there are theories it may have something to do with the goddess of the hunt or possibly a special lady friend of the chef that invented it but since nobody knows for sure I'm going to end this video by officially announcing that I plan on changing the name of this two steak Pauline in honor of my mother the late great Polly mitts awhich who I think would really like this and who may have even had this cooked tableside for her back in the day in New York City so I'm gonna go see what kind of paperwork I have to fill out for that but in the meantime I really do hope you give this a try soon so head over to food wishes comm for all the ingredient amounts and more info as usual and as always enjoy you

Channel: Food Wishes

Views: 2,123,139

Rating: 4.8944173 out of 5

Keywords: Steak, Diane, Recipe, beef, sauce, pan sauce, tableside, classic, meat, chef, john, foodwishes, dinner, entree

Id: IuPGQY0nEkI

Length: 8min 45sec (525 seconds)

Published: Thu May 19 2016

Reddit Comments

[u/gizmosdancin]

For those unaware, Chef John is (un)officially renaming this dish to Steak Pauline in honor of his mother, who passed away on Mother's Day. blog post