Full Transcript
[00:00] What's up dude? Today I'm gonna show you my favorite twist on a classic steak free. The fries actually double as the garnish giving you a really clean, restaurant quality finish while staying shockingly crisp even under a sauce.
[00:13] And this all results in what I would describe as a textural wonderland. Now let's go! Now the first thing we're gonna do today is make these mini free, which is one of the best garnishes possible. It's not like fries, it's not like chips,
[00:25] it's like somewhere in between. And what I like to do is to just stick a fork in a potato like this at the last restaurant I worked at. I remember the sous chef and chef making fun of me. They saw me stick a fork in a potato before I started peeling it.
[00:37] And then I looked at it and I said, do you wanna race? Cause I just went, they just walked away. Because this is the fastest way to do it without worrying about your hands. Also if you have kids, great for kids as well. And then I just pop,
[00:50] and then I'll just do the back like that. Boom done. You think you can do that faster without a fork? Now you can't. And we are gonna be using russet potatoes today for this. Although you could definitely get away with trying it with gold if you want.
[01:02] It's a sick looking potato. If you ever see black spots, just keep on peeling. You'll get rid of them. And since this is a garnish, I don't want really long fries. I'm gonna slice these in half. And then onto my trusted band-run or mandolin, if you don't have a mandolin,
[01:14] I'll put a link for this one in the description. It is the best. And by far the most bought product from the links I have below the video, FYI, and I'm gonna make a test cut first to see if I like the size. Do a few with my hand.
[01:27] And then once it's flat enough, I can switch to this. Always use a guard if you can. And here we go. We get these little tiny mini fries. And go ahead and do the rest. This is such a cool size.
[01:39] And they're gonna shrink a little bit when we cook up. So I think this is just perfect. As soon as you slice them, get them in water so they don't oxidize and turn brown. And also we're rinsing off more starch, which is what we want. And what I'm gonna do here
[01:51] is strain out this water and change it out a few times just to really remove that excess starch. Really just want our two more rinses should be good because of the next part of this process. Then I'll just fill them up with water one more time
[02:03] and hold them just like this. All right, my friends, when it comes to these potatoes, essentially what we're gonna do here is the double cook method, but not a double fry. The first cook is gonna be done in boiling water, which is a great technique I use for a lot of different fried potato recipes
[02:17] just to make them a little bit less greasy. And it works all the same. So I have boiling water here. What I'm gonna do is just salt it. And then we also add just a little bit of plain white vinegar. You know, I've done videos where I've tested all these different methods for frying
[02:29] and we just love the one with the white vinegar the most. Science-wise, I'm not your guy, but it does something. So I'm going in with my potato straight out of the water here and I'm doing small batches because I don't want to lose my boil too much.
[02:41] So something like that, too big handfuls. And because they are so tiny, we gotta go like literally a minute here and they're done. And here we are. So I did these for two minutes actually. And that just gets them to a point where if I push, I can just split them in half.
[02:54] So they're cooked, but just barely, you know? There's certainly not mushy at all, but they're par cooked. Now I'm getting them out onto a little sheet pan here, lined with a paper towel, dry up any excess water. And these will sort of steam dry here,
[03:06] which is what we want while we do the rest. And so there we are, potatoes prepped and ready to go. I'm actually gonna flash freeze these so that when they fry, the insides don't overcook and the outsides get nice and crispy. You certainly don't have to do it,
[03:18] but if you're making french fries regardless of size for a prep, you can actually freeze them all like this. And that freezer will begin to break down the potato even more and make them even crunchier when you fry them. That's why actually some bagged frozen fries are so good.
[03:33] So I'm going in the freezer with these. Now to finish these fries, I've got a deep pot of peanut oil. It's sitting at about 385 degrees because as I put these frozen fries in, it's really gonna drop the temp. And as you can see, I'm using a big pot for safety.
[03:47] Push it to the limit. How exciting my friends, how exciting. So I live my life for the extremes. So these are gonna cook pretty darn quick. Soon as we see like a light golden brown color, they're done, which should take about two minutes,
[03:59] two and a half minutes, something like that. And you can see after two minutes when they start turning golden brown, it's gonna be quick. I'm happy with some kind of white, some kind of golden brown. So I'm turning off the heat right here. I like this level of cooking.
[04:11] And then out we go into the bowl, line with a little bit of paper towel. And we're gonna hit them with rosemary salt right away. If you know, you know, we're going full rosemary salt for this video, my friends. It just works for all these things. Give it a little toss and get that paper towel out now.
[04:24] And there is our garnish done, my friends. I'm just putting some in a bowl just to show you. Holy crap. Tell you what, that is gonna beat potato chips any day of the week. Let's give these things a taste.
[04:36] I don't see, don't know how any of these are gonna make it to the plate. Like, dude, try eating one handful of these. It's impossible. Like, Martha, come try this. That's not how you do it, come on. Come on, yeah, more. Do more. Oh, gee.
[04:49] Dude, we've got none left of the steak, damn it. Now, before moving on as someone who's always cooking, I am constantly running to the grocery store to stock up on proteins for my recipes. So naturally, when I found a way to get high quality beef,
[05:03] chicken, pork, and seafood delivered right to my door, I was all in. Today's sponsor butcher box comes in with customizable boxes, packed with premium cuts and seafood right at your doorstep. You can build your box from over 100 different cuts,
[05:17] pick exactly what you want and change it anytime. It truly makes meal planning and prepping just so much easier. And the quality of butcher box is the real win, because it's clean, whole food protein with nothing extra and all the meat and seafood are raised without antibiotics
[05:31] or added hormones. Just beautiful ingredients that I actually want to cook with. And my latest box had bone this chicken thighs, which I'm gonna turn into chicken adobo. The strip steak, which I'm using today to make this steak
[05:43] freaks a beautiful piece of bottom round that actually looks really nicely marbled and I'm gonna cook that one low and slow. Some organic chicken tenders that I'll fry up into some of the best little tenders of all time. And some grass-fed ground beef,
[05:55] which I'm gonna turn into Salisbury steak actually. If you make that one right, it's truly incredible. If you want an easier way to keep high quality protein at home, then definitely check out butcher box. And right now you can get $60 off
[06:07] by clicking the link down in the description. Just scan the QR code on the screen or use code that you can cook at checkout plus free protein for a year. Thank you butcher box for sponsoring this video. Now back to the recipe. Copper pan in the works
[06:20] because we are gonna be making board delays for this steak freaks. And I think this is literally one of the best steaks losses you could ever have. When you make this right, there is no beating it. So I'm starting here with just a little unsalted butter.
[06:32] I had clarified butter, I'd use that, but it's all good. And we're gonna be adding finely minced shallots here. If you don't have shallots, you could get away with onions. Sure, it's not technically right, but it's gonna be fine all the same. And I wanna keep the heat pretty low here
[06:44] because we're just trying to sweat these out. I don't want any color on them. And after about two minutes here, I'm gonna add a big load, a fresh ground black pepper, and I'm doing it coarse here. I wanna see some nice chunks in here. And then we're going in with some fresh strips time.
[06:57] Kind of let that crackle and pop here a little bit. A 30 seconds later, I'm gonna add my dry red wine. And at this point, you can crank that heat up. And once it boils, you can flambé it if you want.
[07:10] Woo hoo! Oh, that's disappointing. Come on, baby! Woo! And after three or four minutes, you can see this is really reduced down a lot. It's like thick in syrupy.
[07:22] Probably reduced by about 80%. Now we're gonna add in our beef stock. On this case, it's demi-gloss. Which is essentially just a very rich, reduced beef stock. It's typically made from veal, but I make it with beef
[07:34] because I'm not really down with veal, but any beef stock you use here will work. And then we are gonna reduce this way down again. And if you wanna keep this nice and neat, you can use a little pastry brush in some hot water and you can go ahead and just scrape down the sides.
[07:47] That way, all the sauce is ending up in the pot where it should belong and clean up is a breeze. And this is the full rosemary salt video, so I'm just starting to add a little bit of salt, but I'm going very minimal
[08:00] because this is gonna reduce a lot more. You can definitely wait till the end and just add it then too, but also you want it to dissolve. Now there's six, seven minutes of reducing and my friends look at the concentration of this sauce. Like it's already coating the back of a spoon nicely.
[08:15] We're gonna give it just another minute of reducing and then we'll start cutting it with a fat, doing a little more brushing here, especially in these later stages. Now typically for border layers, what's traditional is using bone marrow instead of butter
[08:27] in the end, which honestly, if I had, I would do, but most people don't and aren't going to. So butter works just as good and cold unsalted butter. It's been in the fridge in these little cubes. Right now the sauce is too acidic
[08:40] and so that butter is gonna rebalance it back to where it should be. So we just add a few cubes at a time. We'll just whisk it in and that's gonna make it nice and shiny as well. Once that first round of butter is worked in, you can go ahead and add more.
[08:52] And at this point, you really want to taste it for seasoning. Honestly, to me, it's like basically perfect. Just one more little pinch of rosemary salt. Oh my god, look at this, you guys. This steam is really taken away from just how beautiful it is.
[09:04] You'll see when we played it up that this is a stunning sauce. And with my New York strip steak here, which is what I'm using today, although you could do this with whatever you like. I'm just gonna go straight rosemary salt. Sorry, starting Gilbert. It's rosemary salt day. Nice little seasoning.
[09:16] Nice high heat pan here. Been over the heat for about three, four minutes. I'm gonna add a little neutral oil. That's avocado. Could use another one. Once I see that, start to ripple. Like you can see there on camera. We'll go ahead and lay in our steak.
[09:30] And after two minutes, we'll go ahead and flip and repeat that same process on the other side. Another few minutes on the other side. And I'm gonna take this out to rest for now. It's not done, by the way. But I love the on the heat off the heat method.
[09:44] So I'm allowing that temperature to sort of equalize. And after about three minutes of resting, I'm gonna add a little bit of cold unsalted butter to this pan, although it doesn't need to be cold. And we're gonna wait for it to foam. And we're gonna finish with a quick butter base
[09:56] to bring it up to temp. Very important when you're basing. You wait for this foamyness, right? A lot of people do it too early or too late when it's burned. You're really waiting to see this. And you wanna keep the heat low now. Drop our steak back in.
[10:09] And then we can just do a quick base to finish. It's very important if you don't see that butter foaming, it's not ready. But also, you don't wanna burn it. So just keep that heat like a touch over low. It should be plenty of heat left in the pan. And then melt it and make it foamy and everything.
[10:22] There we have it, just about a minute of basting. And we can get this out for one final two minute rest. All right, my friends, here we go. Now check the sauce. Look at that. So what I'm gonna do is essentially puddle it,
[10:34] which I really love doing, actually. Just makes it look really clean. And you can actually just pick up the plate and just make a sort of perfect circle there, if you will. And then we'll get our steak right in the middle, bang. Now we'll do a little bit of sauce over the steak.
[10:47] And then we'll build this nice little tower of fries. Feel like Gordon Ramsay, just build this little noise. So you hold your hand like a sea shape. And then you can essentially just drop things in there.
[10:59] You gotta really nice tower. That's almost too tall, there I say. But there you have it, my friends. Steak freaks complete. All right, Marcus, here we go. This looks like something you would get at like a French bistro. That sauce is so dark, it's almost like black.
[11:12] You don't have to reduce it that much, but it's like, man, it's gonna be good. Are you sure about this? Low it.
[11:26] Wow, I feel a camel bag with the sauce and just like sip on it throughout the day. The sauce is crazy. But you know, a lot of that has to do with the fact we're using demi-gloss and not beef stock would go so hard. It really does, this is not global.
[11:38] Yeah, I mean, we're just being silent because it's delicious, it really does feel like something you'd get at like a really good, like one Michelin star French bistro. We're like, this is their thing. It's an expensive meal that you can make yourself.