Bon Appétit joins Michelin-starred chef Daniel Boulud in his kitchen at Restaurant Daniel in NYC to prepare a French classic: Steak Au Poivre. One of New York’s best chefs, Boulud rarely gets to showcase his take on home cooking in his restaurants, but today he’s teaching a masterclass on his perfect version of a relaxed Sunday lunch.
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00:00I am Daniel Boulu from Restaurant Daniel in New York City and I'm making my
00:10favorite steak au poivre. Restaurant Daniel has always been the restaurant I
00:18dream of. We're gonna be making today a coute de boeuf au poivre. Au poivre means
00:23with pepper. We do a steak au poivre sauce where we have shallots and herbs,
00:28butter and flambé with cognac. So here we are starting coute de boeuf mean
00:35bone-in double steak ribeye. So this is a 34 ounce steak. The good thing with the
00:42bone is it's gonna help keep part of the steak a little bit more rare and
00:47anything you cook on the bone is always better. We put a string to hold the meat
00:51tight together. Sometime with the cap you could lose the cap here. So what define
00:57a good steak is often the blend of fat and lean. It's okay if you have nugget of
01:03fat in the middle that's gonna nourish the meat while it's cooking and you can
01:07always remove it when you serve it. The first thing you have to do when you cook
01:12a thick steak like this is to let it tamper a little bit. So you leave it
01:17outside maybe for 20 minutes. Now if you like your steak very rare then don't tamper
01:22it but you don't want to eat it cold either. So that's why you want to be
01:27able to cook it rare and have it warm inside. So the first thing we do is the
01:33seasoning. You salt the outside. This is sea salt. We're using a paper blend that is
01:38made of six paper inside and the six paper are from different continent. There is
01:44some green, there is some black, sometime we have some pink paper. You can use
01:49totally only black paper. I like the fact that many papers have different
01:53fragrance. You can also pre-season your steak but not too long ahead. I mean in a
01:58restaurant you cannot pre-season the steak. You get the odor, you season the
02:01steak, you cook it and it's all fine. So you know there's so many theory about
02:05steak. What I'm gonna do is my theory. So good luck. I wanted to cook my Côte d'Aboe in
02:11my pan, the Daniel Boulu kitchen pan. But if you have a cast iron pan, if you have a
02:17copper pan at home, as long as you can maintain a consistent heat, I have a
02:21little bit of beef fat that is rendered from the trimming of the Côte d'Aboe. The
02:26beef fat has been cooked and also cooked with a little bit of garlic, thyme. So I
02:30use a little bit of beef fat in the pan and a little bit of clarified butter. The
02:35beef fat can take higher temperature and it is good to cook in its own fat. But it
02:40don't matter if it's a pork shop, if it's a beef shop or if it's a veal shop, you
02:45should always keep the trimming and cook with it. I would say medium, medium
02:50high. As long as you see the fat bubbling and crippling and making music, that's a
02:55good sign. There's gonna be a little bit of smoke but you don't want too much.
02:59You lower, you raise, you make sure that you don't burn your steak but you sear it
03:04well. When you cook a steak, when you use a fork, you don't go in the middle and poke
03:09your steak. You always go on the side in a part of the steak that is not the prime
03:14meat but right there, for example, and you can turn it like this. And I'm from Lyon. I
03:21love garlic so I like to put some garlic inside my steak too. So this is only gonna
03:26flavor the fat sometimes. This is just to flavor and if you feel that it's burning,
03:31you take it out. We're gonna give mini sear from one side to the other. I'm
03:36trying to do a constant turning. I won't cook it for five minutes on one side, five
03:41minutes on the other. I'd rather go gradually, gently inside. Even out the
03:46temperature and make sure that both sides of the steak have the same gradual
03:51cooking inside. And you don't want to create a crust that is too well done on the
03:57outside. And it's too uneven between one side and the other. You want the perfect
04:01steak. And also, you know, cooking a codabuf at home, if you put too much heat, it'll
04:07be very smoky. So you really have to be gentle with the steak and be patient with
04:13the steak. And that's why the way I'm cooking here, it takes patience rather than
04:17speed. You see, the music never stops and that's what you want. You don't want smoke,
04:22you just want music. You can feel it by touching how the meat is still very rare
04:28on the inside. Yeah. I think we have been doing it now for almost 10 minutes, but
04:33that's good. That's how you want to do it at home. You want to be gentle, not create
04:38too much splattering also with the fat because that will take you two days to
04:42clean the kitchen. We have a broiler at the steakhouse that goes up to like 1200
04:47degrees or something, but no one has this type of broiler at home. So here I'm giving
04:53you the home version of how to cook you thick steak at home. And if there is any
04:59other chef that do it differently and smartly, follow him too. Now my steak is
05:03medium rare. So I let it rest nicely. You want the steak, the temperature to get
05:08gently into it. So the outside is very hot. The inside is still cold. So now it's
05:14going to be warm by the time I finish my potatoes, paillasson here.
05:20With my steak, I like potato, I like vegetables. Here we're going to have this
05:24pomme d'art fin. I think it's perfect because it goes well with the sauce. It's
05:29tasty, something classic French. So I have potato, I have celery roots, carrots, and my
05:36favorite root vegetable, a truffle to go with it. So as you see, I am turning this into a
05:43small, medium julienne, almost like matchsticks. You have to be very careful with
05:48this tool. It's not recommended to use it if you never use it before. You can use a
05:53food processor that will do the same job, but we like it the old fashioned way here.
05:57I have celery roots, the root vegetable inside. You can do any kind of vegetable as long as
06:03the vegetable will marry well with the potatoes. So these get nicely mixed. If you
06:09don't have truffle, it's okay. I just wanted to show you that during the truffle season,
06:14that's what I like to do to put a little bit of truffle inside. If you don't have
06:19truffle, you can put mushroom in it. Truffle is very particular because it's
06:24basically a mushroom on testosterone. You put a little bit inside and it'll give a
06:28lot. So here I have a little bit of clarified butter. I rather want to use
06:33clarified butter than fresh butter at the start. So again, it's all about keeping the
06:38temperature very high, but you can use oil as well. And this is a simple dish and
06:43you can do it with only potatoes and maybe a little bit of onion. What I like
06:48also inside this, sometimes it's a little bit of shallots. Just potatoes is
06:52delicious. That's the original, just potatoes. And after you put it in the pan,
06:57you start to really compress the top, you compress the side so it become even and
07:04you push on the edge to keep it all together. And the vegetable is going to
07:09start to cook gently. So of course, if you do it just with carrots or celery, it's
07:14going to be hard to stay together. But with the starch of the potatoes, hopefully it will
07:19stay together. And then what I like is to put a little bit of butter like this. I'm
07:24moving lightly like this, just to even out the cooking underneath and make sure that it's
07:31coming out nicely. So you have to make sure that you keep that very much together. And
07:37the steam, while cooking, the steam will start to cook the center and the top. You don't
07:42want smoke, you don't want too much heat, but you want to make sure that you are always
07:47listening to the potatoes frying gently underneath there. So I don't want to add too much fat.
07:53But in order to cook it nicely underneath, I'm putting a little bit of butter here before
07:59I flip it on this part. Are you ready? Because there's only one flip. And if I mess up, don't
08:06blame me, okay? Voila. You see the browning? It has been gentle. It was done with clarified
08:13butter and fresh butter. It's very crusty, but it's very moist below. And by having browned the
08:20potato, perfect. Already half of it is cooked. Now I just need to cook the other half the
08:25same way. And we're going to be perfect. So I'm going to let that finish gently here to
08:30cook. Now we're going to finish the steak and the au poivre sauce. What's important, of
08:37course, is to use the pan you cook the steak with, but you can remove the garlic, the shallots,
08:42the thyme. I had a bear leaf. And basically what I want is all the paper that fell off the beef.
08:50What's left in the pan is a beautiful beef fat with a little bit of butter. What's important in
08:56the pan is what we call the suc, which is the juices of the beef, the element of the bottom of
09:03the pan here. This, that's going to go away when we make the sauce. That's going to go give wonderful
09:08flavors. I'm going to give a quick sear to the beef one more time here, just to warm it up.
09:15It rested and I'm putting the juice that was in the pan here. I'm just giving it a quick warm up
09:21in the pan. And so now some butter inside. Don't forget that in the fat I left of the beef, there's
09:28a lot of flavor with the thyme, the herb, the garlic, the shallots already, but I'm adding extra shallots
09:34to finish the sauce now. I am putting with the shallots also a teaspoon of paper that going to
09:40fortify my sauce au poivre. So teaspoon will make that much. I don't recommend to play with this at
09:47home, but if you don't have cognac, you can put bourbon. Of course, that will be delicious. I have a
09:53French cognac here because that's how I make my sauce au poivre. So you don't want the shallots to burn,
09:58but to color. And of course, if you want to make your steak happy, you just give him a little bit
10:06of cognac flavor on it before you finish the sauce like this. Voila. And what I like is to, when we do
10:14a flambe, voila, is to also give some flambe to the steak as well. We want to burn the alcohol, but we
10:21want to keep the flavor of the cognac. By nature, the cognac, the alcohol will burn for sure. So I am
10:27putting a little bit of beef stock here, which is a sauce that we have as a base here at the
10:32restaurant. If you don't have beef stock at home to make your sauce, if you have your trimming in
10:37the pan and all that, it'll be delicious as well. You can find also demi-glass, which is made with
10:43mostly beef in a freezer of a grocery store. You can find that. So I'm reducing that very well,
10:50almost to what we call glass de viande. Not demi-glass, but glass de viande, which is basically a
10:55beef stock reduced to the max. And then I put cream inside. I like my steak au poivre a little
11:01creamy. You can have it without cream, if you like. So I wouldn't cook it any longer than that.
11:07And then what I like to do, that is absolutely not conventional, but I don't care, is to put a
11:14little bit of mustard inside. So that's the little je ne sais quoi that give a little more extra kicks.
11:20And so if you want your sauce to be a little cleaner, you can strain it as well. And if you feel then
11:27the sauce is a little too shiny and maybe you overcook it a little bit, then the simple thing is to add
11:34a little bit of water in it. That's just nothing wrong cooking with water.
11:42Very good. It has a nice roasted flavor. It's peppery. That mustard give a little bit also of
11:48condiment to it. The shallots, the cognac, all that composed together, make it for a rich and spicy
11:56and creamy and delicious sauce for the Côte d'Aboeuf. So there is different way to cut the Côte d'Aboeuf.
12:04In the steak, there is the bone. There is the things around the bone that you want to keep. It's delicious
12:09because it was well trimmed and perfect. And then you have the eyes here and then you have the ribeye cap.
12:15What I like is that everybody can have a little bit of the eyes and the ribeye cap.
12:19So first, I will cut the bone. I will leave a little bit of meat on the bone because there is
12:25always someone that loves to eat the bone. So I like to detach the eye and keep the ribeye cap.
12:32I like the meat rare in the middle, medium rare around and well seared on the outside, but not
12:38well done on the outside. Just well seared. What's important is that you want that crust to be thin.
12:44And that's why we gently roasted on both sides to really get that beautiful, gentle crust. So we cut
12:52that all the way down. If you don't want to cut it, then you can serve yourself a big slab. It's okay too.
12:58And then the ribeye cap, I like to make sure I cut it in a way that you can enjoy because it's a little
13:04bit more fatty on the outside. And so you can enjoy the whole roasted side of it. And it's a delicacy,
13:11that part as well. It has a different texture than the heart of the steak.
13:16With my steak, I like to have watercress. Why watercress? Because watercress is peppery,
13:27watercress is spicy, and it goes perfect with a steak like that. And of course, the sauce here.
13:35And to finish, I have my flavored beef fat here that I'm going to drizzle a little bit over the steak.
13:42So this step here is just to bring back a little bit of a beefy, flavorful fat on it. And to shine a
13:49little bit the steak with that. And then we finish with the fleur de sel, tiny little snowflakes on top
13:58of salt. Voilà. Cote de boeuf au poivre, paillasson de racine, sauce au poivre. Born in ribeye steak au
14:05poivre with a root truffle potato pie. That is my Sunday's lunch at home. Well, it's not every
14:13day that we do home cooking at Daniel. But my home is right above the kitchen here. You know,
14:19the French, we love our sauce. The sauce can be 50% of the steak. That's how I like it.
14:26The meat and the sauce together is perfect. Tender, tasty. And as you see, the crust here on the sear,
14:37that's where also extra flavor is. The sign of a good steak is when there is a good crust.
14:43Peppery, delicious. So French. When I taste this, it brings me back to my youth. And it's like when I
14:51had my first steak au poivre in France. That's the beauty of food is to take you back places.
14:59I think don't be scared. Just don't set the house on fire when you do the flambe. If you are really
15:05scared to make a steak, then call me. I'll come in your home and make it for you.
15:12I just came back from L.A. to do a Chefs for L.A. charity with the chef in L.A.
15:19there for people in the industry that was hurt by the fires. I liked them. They gave me a French
15:25knife, a real French knife. This is not a steak knife. This is not normally what you cut a steak
15:30with. But I felt, you know, I'll honor them, honor the steak. And it was a wonderful fundraising.
15:36So if anyone watched me cutting a steak with this, forgive me. I was just trying to be
15:42sending a kiss to my friend in L.A.