1 day Ago By Alex Evans
I will be the first to admit, I’m not a Michelin star chef. In fact, in the past my steak has probably been more Michelin tyre. But having dived deep into the world of Nigella Lawson cooking hacks, I decided to see if this old hack could create a meal worthy of a celebrity chef.
I recently wrote about a Nigella Lawson cooking tip on making even cheap steak taste, in her own breathless words, “magnificent”. As a cheap person myself, up in the tight-fisted north, this appealed to me. As a journalist working in northern England, it might shock you to discover that I don’t tend to eat steak all that often.
Nigella says the secret ingredient to making even cheap steak taste good is: time. Time, she says, to marinade the meat, and take the time to make it tasty without rushing it, and even cheap steak can taste good. She told ABC News: “The thing about when a steak is expensive, the thing you can do is cook it very fast and it needs nothing done to it.
“These cheaper cuts are often denigrated, but the cheaper cuts, as all our grandmothers knew, the flavour is better. “The difficulty is, in a way you can only save money when you’ve got one vital ingredient: and that vital ingredient is time. On the days you don’t have time, you can’t use a cheaper cut because it’s going to be tough.
” Following her recipe , I grabbed the cheapest cheap steak I could find: Asda’s Essential beef steak, £2.99 per steak, with a big yellow label. I then tried to follow Nigella’s recipe .
Firstly, I got some lemon juice, some soy sauce, and a spritz of lemon juice, and heated that concoction up. She didn’t give amounts, so I had to guess. I think I guessed wrong, but more on that later.
After what I deemed a reasonable amount of time, this heady mix was sizzling quietly, I added the steak, again keeping the heat low to almost-off, and let it sit in the juices. So far so good. After about five minutes, I turned it over, and it was barely cooked.
I then just turned off the pan entirely, thinking I could let it marinate some more, and came back to it about 20 minutes later. Thinking this was enough, I then followed the next step: cook for 90 seconds per side on a high heat. Throwing the gas hob up high, I quickly realised my error.
I had way too much oil, lemon and soy sauce in here. It was leaping out at me, spitting hot oil all over my arms, my kitchen, my worktops, everywhere. At one point, a big piece of oil spat out onto my arm and caused me to leap backward, at which point I tipped the saucepan and spilled half the oil into the open flame, and then it went up and caused a big lick of flame to roar from the hob and, for a moment, I thought the kitchen was going to catch fire.
At this point I turned off the heat and poured some of the excess oil off into a bowl. Then continued, tentatively, with the other side. The end result: apart from my burns, and nearly burning down the kitchen, it was actually some pretty good steak.
I poured the excess marinade over it at the end, as directed, and served up with some chips. It was soft, tender, flavourful and while clearly not a high-grade restaurant cut, was tasty enough for £2.99 - and my burns will heal.
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