Potted beef

Potted beef is a traditional English thing. It's similar to the little pots of fish paste you can buy in the supermarket, but far superior. A bit like a paté actually, but containing no liver.

One of the guys at work was bemoaning the fact that you couldn't easily get it in New Zealand, so I made him some. It's pretty easy.

You start with some beef. Blade steak was on special on Friday, so that's what I got …

… ~600g of it. I chopped it up, removing most of the fat and sinew …

… then put it in the steamed pudding bowl with salt, pepper, nutmeg (I had no mace), a bit of cayenne pepper, a good dollop of anchovy sauce, and 75 g of butter:

The lid went on …

… the bowl went into a pot of boiling water …

 … and it simmered away for about four hours. By that time the meat was falling to bits tender.

The whole lot went into the food processor and got blended to a paste. It goes through a sort of tough matted fibrous stage for a while, but then the fibres get chopped smaller and it becomes spreadable.

I put it in some small ramekins …

… poured strained brown butter over (should have been clarified, but I was in a hurry and I like brown butter) …

… and left it to set:

The layer of fat over the top makes it keep quite well in the fridge.

But it doesn't need to keep for long, because it's delicious and gets eaten pretty quickly. I still have three of the pots, at least one of which I'll be taking in to Darren tomorrow.