Steak au Poivre

I'm so sorry dear reader, the last  week or so has been pure insanity.  Work has been crazy, and on top of all my responsibilities there I was asked to assist in a Dale Carnegie class that I took last summer.  That class if from 6-9:30 every Thursday night until the end of April which of course eliminates another night per week of cooking.

Last Sunday night I made a classic dish called Steak au Poivre.  This dish is really simple, filet mignon crusted with pepper and served with cream sauce.

 So if you've read this blog for any length of time you know I tend to work through things systematically.  This results in a lot of similar dishes over the course of a couple weeks.  In this case I'm working through the Tender is the Loin episodes of Good Eats.  These are two episodes completely dedicated to the wonderful piece of meat called a beef tenderloin.  In the picture above is a whole tenderloin cryovaced.  It comes this way from the meat packer.  It looks huge and it totaled about 8 pounds or so, but it's also $5/pound cheaper than the cut filet mignon and you get the added fun of chopping it up yourself.

And this is the broken down tenderloin.  In the front is the head roast, this will be used in a recipe next week.  The middle is the actual tenderloin where the steaks would be cut from and the top is the chain meat which will be used in a couple weeks.

And here is everything you need for this dish.  I cut off two steaks from the tenderloin and everything else includes butter, salt, pepper, cream, olive oil and cognac.

I seasoned the steaks with some salt and then crusted them with cracked pepper.

The steaks went into a pan that had the combined olive oil and butter and seared for a few minutes per side.  You can see the awesome carmealztion that I got.

It didn't matter in the final dish, but as a semi pyromaniac this is where the dish went horribly wrong.  The fun part of steak au poive is that once the steaks are cooked you get to light highly flammable alcohol on fire.  In this case cognac.  Well in my attempts to get a cool video of this I the pan get too cold and I couldn't light the booze.  Oh well.  The picture is the start of the sauce. 

Once the cognac had reduced a bit I added some cream and let it reduce for a bit and I put a fresh hit of cognac in.

The final plate.  This dish is an ultimate classic and I love it every time I make it.