Hi! I’m Divya Gugnani, and I’m Caroline Alexa McBride, and welcome to Café Boulud.

I heard the chef has a new spin on French classics.

That’s right. He even divides up the menu into four quadrants. But today, we’re all about the beef. So let’s go behind the burner, and meet the chef.

Divya: I’m here with executive chef Gavin Kaysen at Café Boulud. Gavin, we are having meat today.

Gavin: Lots of meat and good meat.

Divya: Okay, what are we eating?

Gavin: So we’re going to have short ribs, this is a Brandt Beef short rib. It’s kind of a duo, it’s a play off of the short rib and then we have a Hanger steak. So the whole concept of the dish is to have something that’s peasant, which is the short rib, and something that’s now more mainstream, which is the Hanger steak.

Divya: What kind of meat do you like?

Gavin: We use, the company will use is actually a farm in Southern California, It’s called Brandt Beef. And he raises true, all natural, hormone free cattle. This is the whole product, in it’s raw state. And what we do is we buy them with the four bones, it’s called the four bone and short rib. And then we marinate it in red wine, cork wine, and a bunch of aromatics, onions, garlic, thyme, etc. What we do after it’s marinated is we braise it so, we sear it, then we add all of those aromatics that have been in the marinade, and then we save the red wine and we use that, as well. And then we deglaze it, we just let it cook. And it cooks for like 8 hours.

Divya: It comes back in another life. Okay.

Gavin: And then when it’s cooks for 8 hours, we press it, we put the short ribs down on a sheet tray or cookie pan, and then we put a piece of parchment paper on top and we press it with some weights. Because we want to extract all the excess fat out of the short rib, because there’s just so much inside of the short rib itself. That we don’t want anything kind of like left over to the side. And then we portion these we get these perfect little squares. What we do is, when we go to pick up the dish in services, this little guide sits in here, and as you can see, very juicy. The next thing that we’re going to do is we have to hang your steak. And like I said, I mean the reason we chose this was more or less, because it’s a cut of meat that people recognize, but it’s also it has great texture in the dish because it’s not the fillet that kind of melts in your mouth. What melts in your mouth is the short rib.

Divya: Hannah’s smoking hot.

Gavin: Smoking hot. Always important to have a smoking hot pan because, first you have to seal in the juices, but secondly what you want to do is you want to get that crust. That’s the beauty of the steak it’s the crust. So we’ll start it out, You see, you know you start to get that crust, that’s really important. Next step, what’s better with steak than cream spinach.

Divya: Of course, classics.

Gavin: Right. So, in this case what we did is we blanched the spinach, ahead of time. And then we just…hot water…Yes like, actually, like 30 seconds.

Divya: So just in hot water, a minute, two minutes? Okay.

Gavin: Really quick, take it out, shock it in ice water, and then we squeeze it so all the moisture is gone.

Divya: You get all the excess water out of there. Okay.

Gavin: Then we take other spinach we blanch this for like 2 minutes, and as you can see, this is the cream spinach, without spinach. So opposed to just using the cream, we try to use the green part of the spinach. I think we call it the super green spinach or something like that, so as you can see, we start the pan slowly, with this

Divya: Is the pan hot?

Gavin: It’s warm, it’s not hot because we don’t want to lose…

Divya: Okay. You don’t want to burn, you don’t want to turn it brown? You don’t want to lose the green color.

Gavin: Right. We don’t want to lose the green color. We are going to then add the some of the spinach and the beauty of this part of the cream spinach is that it holds together so well. If you want to, I don’t know, if you want to do cornel, if you want to put it in a mold, if you want to just have it be flat, you can do whatever you want, because it’s that cream binds it together.

Divya: What’s a cornel?

Gavin: All right, so a cornel is when you take two spoons like this and you start spinach off and then you basically kind of making it look like a football. So then it’s perfect, you know.

Divya: There you go. What a nice presentation.

Gavin: So here’s the Hanger steak, we added some butter. You can always have a little bit more. And this is what we call the el jose. So you just sit here and you baste.

Divya: And the el jose is beautiful for the flavor because the butter penetrates the meat, what’s more amazing about it is it gives it a gorgeous shine.

Gavin: Absolutely, and you know at this point you could do anything. If you want to flavor it with roasted garlic put that in there, or rosemary, and thyme, any flavoring that you want. You throw it in there at this point, and that’s exactly what you’re going to get.

This looks amazing and it smells even better. What are we eating?

Gavin: Absolutely. This is the Brandt Beef Duo. So we have the braised short rib here, the seared hangar steak, and then the cream spinach. The short rib just kind of falls you know, I mean it’s kind of pulling like that, that’s nice. It’s the way it should be.

Yes, but when you put it in your mouth, it’s so succulent. Actually melting. It is unbelievable, and the Hanger steak is really juicy and tender, it’s very succulent and have such an aromatic scent, as well.

Brent beef, Hangar steak, braised short rib it’s delicious, thank you.

Excellent.

Gavin: Cheers. Thank you.

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