10 June 10, 2012
Delish and delightful
The Good Weekend, SUNDAY
A taste of fine tapas delights and second-hand treatment
BIANCA COLEMAN
TASTING ROOM
Where: Buitenverwachting,
Klein Constantia Road,
Constantia
Tel: 021 794 5190
When: Mondays to Fridays
9am-5pm, Saturdays 10am3pm (kitchen noon till close,
Tuesdays to Saturdays)
IN THE famous words of Monty
Python, now for something
completely different. Actually not
entirely, because it still involves
food and wine, but this time not in a
traditional restaurant context.
The actual restaurant at
Buitenverwachting is, not to put too
fine a point on it, seriously
expensive for the average diner. If
you can afford it, however, it is
worth every rand because chef
Edgar Osojnik’s food is sublime,
superb and a whole bunch more
adjectives beginning with S.
But I am an average diner so it’s
good to discover it’s possible to
enjoy the pleasures of
Buitenverwachting’s food and wine
SURPRISE SURPRISE: They’re almost identical.
on a smaller scale at a fairly
reasonable price. In fact, the wine is
so reasonable, it’s free. This doesn’t
mean you can arrive at the new-look
tasting room with its sliding glass
wall which opens up the entire
space onto the pretty courtyard
with its central water feature, and
proceed to get rat-faced for nothing.
That’s just bad form, and what my
mother would call “common” –
somehow always the worst and
most effective insult she could
inflict on someone, especially when
PICTURE: JOHN FORD
combined with a sniff of disdain.
Wine tasting is wine tasting –
there are several available to try,
many of them iconic classics and
award-winners, in appropriate
quantities, and you are welcome to
work your way down through the
list from top to bottom. To enhance
the experience, the tasting room has
for some time offered cheese
platters and Winzer platters – cold
meats with a selection of local
cheeses, grapes, nuts and preserves
– for R75; just the right kind of thing
to nibble with a bit of wine.
The choice has been expanded
with the introduction of a tapas
selection, which changes daily. You
can have five dishes for R129 or
seven for R159, which will include at
least one cold, three warm, and a
dessert. Waiter Justice came over
from the restaurant to tell us what
was on the menu that day, and also
informed us, should we so desire,
we could order “Edgar’s choice”.
I rather liked the idea of being
surprised by what Edgar would
come up with, so Christy made her
selection – peperonata with goat’s
cheese, olive and basil pestos; and
tiramisu. The three warm middle
courses were standard: springbok,
beef fillet and fish. We waited
eagerly to see what I would get.
Service was a little slow – no
fault of Justice’s – because when he
returned with two almost identical
tapas boards (the only difference
being that mine had the honey and
saffron ice cream for dessert –
surprise!), we learnt that Edgar was
far too busy impressing a table of
critics from S Pellegrino, which
judges the top 50 restaurants in the
world every year, to be able to whip
up five original tapas, or to instruct
any of his kitchen staff to do so.
The irony was not lost on me, but at
least it did prove that even though
Justice, and tasting room hostess
Christelle, both remembered me
from previous visits, they had no
inkling I was also there to review
the place.
Although the food was great, and
we both polished off everything in
front of us, it was disappointing not
to have had my expectations met,
and to have been informed only
after the fact.
That aside, it was a pleasant,
leisurely afternoon. Christelle
checked on us frequently to make
sure we were happy, and ask us
which wines we’d like to try next,
and Justice was most apologetic
about the food situation.
Being winter and all, the
restaurant will be closed during
July so the tasting room menu will
not be available next month, but
other things are afoot at the farm.
By spring there will be a coffee shop
and roastery, and a deli.
Our bill came to R258, and we
couldn’t resist each taking home a
bottle of one our favourites, the
Buiten Blanc, for R45 a bottle.
● All Good Weekend Argus
reviews are unannounced and paid
for in full.
Saucing the right ingredients
TONY
JACKMAN
Rib eye steak with
brandy cream sauce
sliced&diced
ONKEYGLAND, au
poivre, Marchand de vin,
Diane, Béarnaise, Café de
Paris ... they’re all classic
sauces for a steak, and all
complement a well-aged steak in
wonderfully different ways.
Marchand de Vin is a red wine
reduction and involves good basic
stocks which are built on. It’s not for
a quick home supper, unless you’ve
made your stock ahead. There are
some good commercial stocks these
days but even the best ones won’t
have the depth of flavour of a toprank chef ’s basic brown stock.
If you have the time to make a
basic demi-glace, first make a
brown stock: Roast bones (beef) for
an hour, then add chopped onions,
celery, carrots and leeks and roast
for a half-hour more. Transfer to a
large pot, add cold water and herbs
and reduce for hours – depending
on the quantity – to get a rich stock.
Then make sauce Espagnole
(brown sauce) – sauté a mirepoix of
chopped onions, celery, carrots,
combine with a little flour and cook
in clarified butter until nutty but
not burnt, to which add brown stock
and tomato purée, then bay leaf,
parsley stems and thyme and
simmer for close to an hour, gently.
Remove herbs, strain.
Then, to make a demi-glace, you
need equal parts of brown stock and
brown sauce, simmered with
thyme, bay leaf and parsley, until
reduced by half, then strained.
As if all that wasn’t enough hard
work, you’ve still got to make your
sauce Marchand de Vin. I know it’s
easier to buy a ready-made sauce at
Pick n Pay, Daisy, but this is the stuff
of the great French sauces and this
amount of effort is a pretty good
illustration of why it’s worth saving
up to go to a seriously fine
restaurant once in a while, and why
chefs at that level make such
1 x 300g rib eye steak a person
2 cloves garlic, crushed
2 Tbs fresh rosemary needles,
very finely chopped
500g portabellini mushrooms
3 Tbs brandy
250ml (1 cup) dry white wine
100 ml fresh cream
Salt and pepper to taste
Butter for frying
M
QUICK AND EASY: Rib eye steak with brandy cream sauce.
PICTURE: TONY JACKMAN
exquisite sauces. This is also why a
sauce is the best way to assess a
chef ’s skills. If you’re served a so-so
sauce in a restaurant that claims to
offer fine cuisine, or charges high
prices, you may be spending your
hard-earned dosh in the wrong
restaurants.
For a Marchand de Vin, the
classic French red wine sauce, red
wine is reduced with shallots (you
can substitute onions, but the
flavour is harsher), then added to a
goodly quantity of demi-glace,
salted and simmered until you have
a fine sauce, strained and spooned
on to your steak.
Bordelaise, another red wine
classic, is made by reducing demiglace with bone marrow, red wine,
shallots and butter. Diane,
meanwhile, is not so much a sauce
as a preparation for a filet mignon, a
cut of beef tenderloin from the
thinner end of the fillet. The pan
juices in which you’ve cooked your
steak are reduced quickly with
shallots, garlic, mustard,
Worcestershire sauce, mushrooms,
brandy and then cream, and
because your steak is already
cooked you have to work quickly, so
have your ingredients ready. In posh
restaurants, when Diane was still in
fashion, the steak with its sauce
poured over would be flambéed with
brandy at the table.
For another classic, the glorious
Béarnaise, the starting point is not a
demi-glace or its derivatives, but
another “mother” sauce,
Hollandaise. Egg yolks and clarified
butter are emulsified (and can
quickly curdle in which event
you’ve lost the battle) with shallot,
peppercorns, tarragon, chervil,
whine wine and white wine vinegar,
with tarragon being the prime
flavour if you’ve got it right. It’s
spooned on a piping hot steak to
seep into it to become a marvel of
fine cuisine.
Perhaps the king of
preparations for a French-style
steak is a slice of Café de Paris
butter placed on top of a steak, to
insinuate itself into it as it melts.
It’s made with a long list of herbs,
clarified butter, anchovy fillets,
mustard, capers, shallots, garlic,
Madeira (or sherry), brandy, spices,
lemon, even orange, blended until
very fine, chilled and rolled into a
tube so that slices can be cut off.
Which brings us to a steak sauce
which once was commonplace in
any South Afrcan restaurant
serving steak, whether a family
steakhouse or a posh grill room –
monkeygland, which never has had
any part of a monkey in it.
Monkeygland is a local classic
and should be brought out of
mothballs and celebrated. It suits
our national palate, which is not
generally as refined as the French
palate – we like strong flavours, and
monkeygland has them in spades.
It’s made with onion, garlic,
tomatoes, tomato sauce, chutney,
mustard, Worcestershire sauce, red
wine, brown sugar and Tabasco,
and it is not strained as its chunky
consistency is desired. How South
African is that? Everything in the
kitchen cupboard goes in.
Having said all of the above, the
recipe that follows is going to seem
extraordinarily easy, because it
involves no basic stocks, no demigace, and can be made within two
minutes of your steak being cooked.
Why do I sense a thousand home
chefs punching their fists in the air?
This is my brandy cream sauce
for steak, any steak, and it’s made
simply by deglazing the pan in
which you have fried your steak
with brandy, then dry white wine,
reducing this and adding cream. I
fried rib eye steaks in rosemary and
garlic butter the other day and
served them with brandy cream
sauce. I used an iron griddle, which
remains piping hot and is a
wonderful tool for cooking a steak.
Simmer finely chopped garlic in
butter with rosemary for the
flavours to develop. Fry the steaks
over a fairly high heat in this butter,
and do not be tempted to turn them
until you judge (with your eye,
Daisy) that the juices have started to
bleed through the top of the steak.
Then turn and cook rare or medium
rare. Wrap steak in foil and keep
warm while you make the sauce.
Deglaze the pan with white wine
and pour into a saucepan, through a
sieve. Do this again, to get as much
flavour off the griddle as you can.
Deglaze with brandy and pour this
into the saucepan, then do the same
with cream. Reduce sauce briskly,
lower heat and simmer until the
sauce is of a suitable consistency.
Pour over the steak, with
mushrooms alongside. Cook
portabellini mushrooms in butter
and rosemary with white wine.