Sirloin steak - more to know than you might think

"The City boy or snob's steak"

Thus says the Guardian of sirloin steak in an article on all the different kinds of steak that exist and who tends to like each one.

The article goes on to say:

"Steaks fall into two categories. They either have great flavour or they have tenderness; it is rare for both qualities to go together."

Well, having read a fair bit about sirloin steak now, I reckon that it might be the nearest to having it all - or maybe that's just wishful thinking and what you actually have is neither = flavour or tenderness that is. I prefer to go with it having it all.

This post derives from a lucky dip that I didn't use at the time I chose it, although I did have it sitting on my desk waiting for a suitable occasion - which is now because coincidence has also raised its head.

The book I chose was one of those Penguin Lantern Classics on Gary Mehigan. I'm not really sure why I bought it - it was cheap in Aldi I think. Gary Mehigan is a chef of some renown with successful restaurants behind him I believe and also a judge on MasterChef - whence comes his fame really. Skimming this little book I am not that impressed. Well, in the sense of there being interesting new things to try. However the recipes for simple things like this 'Perfect sirloin steak with capsicum butter' are pretty detailed and instructive. So I shouldn't deride him. And I'm certainly not very good at cooking steak. Maybe it's too thin, maybe I cook it too long - my husband prefers his more well done than I. We never ever had steak at home when I was a child and so my first experience of steak was in France, where it is cooked very rare of course. And so this is how I have learnt to like steak. My husband prefers it medium rare. Tricky to get it right.

Anyway going back to coincidence. First of all Aldi had a super special on sirloin steak in the piece, and so I bought some, sliced it thickly and put it in the freezer for another time. They also had a similar special on fillet, so I bought some of that but kept that whole. Doubtless neither are top quality - they couldn't be at the price I paid but never mind. Normally I do not lash out on anything more expensive than rump, which, although tasty, is not tender. I gather real top quality steak has been 'hung' for up to 55 days - which sounds a bit risky to me. I doubt that any meat I buy either in the supermarket or at the market has been hung. Then - second coincidence the next recipe/item I read in Nigel Slater's Kitchen Diaries III is on sirloin steak. Well really he was going on about the fresh garlic - which you can't get here - but it was a recipe for sirloin steak with garlic and eggplant. Three sirloin steak things in a row - an obvious choice for a post.

So what is sirloin steak? Well for starters it depends where you live - here or America basically. It also depends on who you read. Below is a picture I got from the Teys website. Teys being one of the major beef wholesalers in Australia. It was actually a pretty good description they gave.

As you can see it comes from the rear end of the animal and has no bone. If it does it's a T-bone. Sirloin and Porterhouse seem to be exactly the same thing though. The other names they talked about I have never come across and so assume they are American. I also saw somewhere that the French call it faux-filet (false fillet) which confuses me because to me a faux-filet is an inferior cut and most of the sites that talked about sirloin seemed to think it was one of the better cuts. The name by the way comes from old French 'sur loinge' which means on the loin.

As for cooking it. Well you can do no better than the reliable Felicity Cloake who has looked into it and describes all the various ways you can tackle it. She seems to plump for the Alain Ducasse method in the end. The main point seems to be that most chefs think it is best fried, although my lucky dip recipe was for a barbecue grill - no doubt one of those very expensive inside barbecue grills. I had one once, but rarely used it - it made such a mess. Then you either serve it with a sauce, a flavoured butter, or au naturale - with chips say I. I'm fasting today so no steak for me today - maybe tomorrow. Though I see that if I have a mere 100g of steak (that's a very small steak) I'm below 300 calories.

"A good steak is, I think, one of the purest carnivorous pleasures available. A hearty roast dinner has its charms, of course, as does a slow-cooked, gelatinous stew, but neither is so absolutely, almost primitively meaty as a simple steak – which is one of the reasons it pops up so often, in my experience, in people's fantasy final meals." Felicity Cloake

And we don't cook it at home much do we? Well I don't. We think it's expensive and we also think it's difficult to cook. Well maybe, maybe not. And as Felicity Cloake points out if you save it for eating out, then it will be expensive!