Steak, inspired by black pepper crab

Last week when we were house-hunting in the Netherlands, we were too tired one day to eat out, so we bought a couple of things from the supermarket for a hotel room-dinner. The few items that we picked out were appallingly bad, echoing the generalisation we’d heard about how apathetic the Dutch can be to food (sorry to any Dutchies reading this!). While we want to remain optimistic and form an opinion only after we’ve settled into the country, it sure as hell was a wakeup call to enjoy the amazing Australian produce/seafood/meat/pastries etc as much as we can before we make the big move.

Beef was one of the first things that came to mind. While we don’t eat beef very often (maybe once or twice per month), the good-quality stuff is accessible and abundant in Australia. I dropped by the butcher’s yesterday and got us a nice slab of T-bone.

If you’ve been reading the past couple of newsletters, a common thread has been my efforts of using up pantry ingredients. Immediately, I think of that box of black peppercorns that I have at the back of my cupboard and how a black pepper crab-inspired cream sauce would go so nicely with the steak.

After the steak was seared and while it was resting, I sweated some onions and garlic in butter:

For the black pepper, I toasted whole peppercorns in a pan and blitzed them up very coarsely (or you could bash them with a pestle and mortar). Add to the pan:

Add cream, oyster sauce and kecap manis. Bring to a simmer and turn off the heat.

Slice your well-rested steak and pour the sauce over. I’ve seen recipes for black pepper crab sauce with curry leaves and red chillies, but with something like a good steak, less is more.

That’s it! Super quick, gratifying and Wex says that it truly reminds him of pepper crab from Singapore, so I’m pleased 😌

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Black pepper sauce for steak, inspired by black pepper crab
Makes enough for 2 steaks