Intensively farmed meat is bad for everybody involved but proper, dry-aged artesian meat that's the thing of beauty
and I'm I'm on a mission to learn all about it so I'm gonna go and see the
beef barrel of London. Richard Turner. He's worked with some of the most important chefs in
the world Marco Pierre White, Pierre Coffman and
the Roux brothers. Not only is he responsible for some of the most important beef restaurants that have happened in London over the last eight to nine years including Pitt Que and Hawksmoor. He's also the guy that brought the
groundbreaking Meatopia Festival that happens every year that attracts chefs
from all over the world. If there's one guy that can tell me about beef and that's
happened here in the UK over the last eight years... Richard Turner's the guy. I was reading that you were you were a para
and you came out of the army and you're doing close (protection) close protection. So, you used to go to all these top restaurants and that's where, was it, was it
Le Gavroche? Le Gavroche, yes. So the Roux brothers brothers. Yeah, I was eating there sort of
quite a lot, every single day they eventually they they gave me a job. I
left there I went to Harvey's. With Marco Pierre White, then I went to Koffmann's, La Tante Claire and then afterwards I went back to Marco at the restaurant Marco
Pierre White. Le Gavroche was pretty tough. Not dissimilar to the paras and
only longer hours I mean you know they're all tough kitchens. Yeah I was
planning a steak house for some years and I went to eat at Hawksmoor and found
that they had already done what I was planning and I asked them if I could throw
my lot in with them that was ten years ago. I remember when Hawksmoor opened
it's definitely well kind of went 'we're doing... we're stepping up a
gear here' you know? Well stepping back a gear I thought. Okay. I
mean we were taking it we were focusing on flavour focusing on simplicity
focusing on ingredients there's no clever tricks. So at a time
when people go from wishing stars and there were foams around and gels and
and all this stuff going on and we just took it right back to basics. Basically
most of work starts right at the beginning and then it's, you know, from
the animal to how it's kept what it's fed and the breed and then onwards through
to the butcher: how its treated, how its hung. There's a guy in in Northern
Ireland Peter Hannen who is a master of ageing one of the best in in the world I
think. And he's he's ageing some immense beef and then when it gets in your
kitchen all the work is done for you. Yes. All you have to do is add salt and fire and who doesn't want to do that? So what are we cooking?
Okay we're cooking a porterhouse steak here. It's about 13 months old I think
the animal was 30 months old, this has only been aged for five weeks on the bone.
Okay. It's just salt you don't use anything else we used to a little pepper
but we stopped doing that about two years ago. Why the porterhouse? Well a porterhouse has got two muscles you've got the fillet here Then you've got the sirloin there. My
favorite changes depending on my mood but you know, if I'm really hungry,
something that's this size 900 grams is is pretty pretty good. It's only
been out for like 10 minutes maximum so it's not ice cold when it goes (or
fridge cold) when it goes on the grill It's because it will get too dark on the
outside and inside will be too cold so you just want to get it gonna get just starts to come up to room temperature but I cook a lot slower my grill's not quite as hot as some people's
grills. We let it burn down to white. A good handful of salt, all over it. Wow. Lots of salt on there - most of it's going to
fall off on the grill. Okay. So if you don't do that you're under
seasoning okay because people would look at that and go bloody hell that's a lot of salt!
Yeah if you're cooking on the plancha or in a pan then obviously that is an awful
lot of salt. Okay. But because you've got grills. It falls
through. It's all falling through. I'm gonna bang the salt off first on there We turn it 20 times 30 times. Really? We
keep turning to get maximum caramelization on the outside of the steak.
We don't want bars if you look on those pictures that you see outside cheap steak houses. Yeah. They've got bars we don't do bars. It's just silliness. Silliness. Nurturing the steak, looking after it and then it'll go into like a resting area down
there. The leaner the cut the rarer you'd eat it so the more fat the more
closer to medium you have it. I mean people eat medium, well that's fine by me.
Okay. But you want a fatty cut from eating well. I'm not a fan of rare in
any cut, I don't think it presents well so for me medium rare medium well. Rare is
for people that are showing off I think. Well done is probably the same as rare
to me I mean you know it's not, it's not a great way to show steak. Yes, yes.
But you know the customer's always right. I'll lift on the tray and put it on top
to keep warm. Holy cow! Breakfast.(Laughs) It actually is breakfast. I know. So that is a 900 gram porterhouse steak fillet
on the left sirloin on the right. Most importantly it's
been rested for 20 minutes. Like it's 9 O'clock in the morning When a piece of beef has been reared properly, slaughter properly and then aged properly... what you're getting is a really
subtle beef flavour. Because beef's not the most robust of flavours really. I guess the key things to point out are the way they cook it develops
this even crust on the outside it's not cold and too pink on the on the middle
when you ask for medium rare because they take it out for ten minutes and
bring it up to room temperature the moving around all the time
means that you get an even gnarly crust and because they don't even mess around with it they
just put a top quality sea salt on there, what you're tasting is pedigree
beef. Every component, every detail of the steak from field to plate is analysed,
looked at, respected, taken back to the old school and then just delivered. It
was incredible it's and I can see what was delivered in the way
that you cooked it with this sort of crust that you developed on the outside
like it's spectacular. Obviously got to be Peter Hannan in Belfast who's the steak guru. Thank you so much. Thank you. Good man. How totally awesome is that, like, I just got schooled by the the Jedi
Knight of beef Richard Turner. Going back to the old school bringing all those old techniques but paying so much attention to every detail. I think
next up I need to find out about this Peter Hannen dude. He's the butcher
from Northern Ireland that's started to aged beef 200, 300, 400 days old... Come on
let's go find out about him Okay so this Peter Hannen dude... he's a
legend... he's like a rock star butcher. He has learnt how to aged beef past 28 days
without it having that funky blue cheese taste and it's because he developed a
Himalayan salt chamber specifically for it.
That is cool man. Peter? Yeah I sent you an email? Yes, John, yeah. Yeah. So Tuesday? We're off to Ireland! We're going on a little adventure to Northern Ireland
