It’s that time of year when comfort foods such as hearty soups, stews and roast chicken tend to dominate my dinner menus. These comfort foods generally harken back to a nostalgic time, are easy to prepare, and are usually as good or even better reheated the next day. For most of us, so much of what is considered comfort food is based on mom’s cooking— that is if your mom was a good cook. I was lucky enough to have a mom who was an excellent cook; however, that didn’t preclude me from having my fair share of what were the newly introduced Swanson TV Dinners in the 1950s while in my preteen years.
My mother was a sheltered only child brought up by gentle, quiet parents in a small, rural town and had never been disciplined much as a child as she simply didn’t need to be. Consequently, meting out discipline was a somewhat foreign concept to her. Her upbringing certainly didn’t prepare her for disciplining three boys who could have easily been adopted from a tribe of Visigoths. In my preteen years, the dinner table brought my older brother and me into dangerously close proximity with tests of boundaries and occasional violent clashes occurring.
On top of this, I was a very picky eater in a family that wasn’t, creating even more stress. After a while, my mom decided that family dinners on a nightly basis were too stressful. Her solution, when she couldn’t deal with my brother’s and my shenanigans, was to have us go to our neutral corners, and she’d heat separate TV dinners for us. Since shenanigans were a way of life for us, eating dinner in our neutral corners was not uncommon.
This is not to say I didn’t enjoy wonderful meals made by her, especially as I grew into my teens, when I became far less picky about food and my relationship with my brother calmed down and matured. Where my mom’s cooking really shined was when she gave dinner parties. She served 1960s classics like Beef Wellington done with a whole beef tenderloin. As the money became tighter after my dad left his job in New York, one of the dishes she made for dinner parties was a whole beef eye round braised with Knorr Swiss onion soup mix. I thought it was delicious as the meat was fork tender and there was virtually no beef fat around the steaks, which I still don’t like and my mom loved.
A whole beef eye round takes about five hours to braise. She would braise it the day before to give the beef a chance to cool and relax thoroughly so it would slice cleanly. She would then reheat the slices in the braising liquid, remove them to a platter, thicken the braising liquid and pour the resulting sauce over the beef slices. As a working chef, I adapted her preparation sans Knorr Swiss onion soup mix. When cooking at home for Lois and me now that my professional chef days are long over, I’ve been using steaks cut from the beef eye round. My preparation of these steaks requires about 30 minutes of active prep; they are ready to serve after about 2 ½ – 3 hours in the oven, but can be reheated later without affecting quality.
The eye round is found in the hindquarters of a cow between the bottom round and the top round. Because the eye round is a muscle that is worked a great deal in the rear leg, it’s a very lean muscle with imperceptible amounts of marbling, those white flecks of intramuscular fat seen most often in quality sirloin and ribeye steaks which add juiciness and tenderness to the steaks. The eye round is the leanest and therefore healthiest cut of beef in terms of fat content, with approximately 7 grams of fat per 6-ounce serving compared to approximately 23 grams of fat in a typical ribeye steak of the same size. Eye round’s leanness makes throwing its steaks on the grill a not particularly good idea, unless you really enjoy chewing. The best way to cook eye round is in a braising liquid, low and slow as my mom did.
Eye round steaks can appear somewhat like a fully trimmed filet mignon, but the two steaks are considerably different. Filet mignon is cut from the tenderloin located beneath the ribs next to the backbone, so it’s worked comparatively very little, allowing it to live up to its name as the tenderest cut of the cow. Another advantage of eye round steaks is that they’re much less expensive than filet mignon, usually about one third the cost, making them much more affordable for everyday use.
In my Google recipe searches for eye round steaks, I found a recipe similar to mine, which claims to have been President Gerald Ford’s favorite. I beg your pardon, President Ford, for choosing mine instead.
Braised eye round steaks with onions and mushrooms
Serves 4
Ingredients:
4 one-inch eye round steaks approximately 6 oz each
6 Tb. olive oil, separated
I large onion, sliced
6 oz. of Cremini mushrooms, thinly sliced
1 cup full-bodied red wine such as a Côtes du Rhône
1 cup beef broth
1 Tb. tomato paste
1 Tb. fresh thyme or 1 tsp dried
Salt and pepper to taste
2 Tb. room temperature butter (optional)
Method:
This recipe is all about building flavors. Preheat the oven to 325 degrees F. After drying the steaks with paper towels, start by searing the steaks in a Dutch oven or heavy-duty pan with a cover with 4 tablespoons of olive oil for about 2 minutes per side over medium high heat, creating a brown crust on both sides of the steaks. That brown crust is the product of a set of chemical reactions known as Maillard reaction. The Maillard reaction creates an umami taste, which is the one of our five tastes that’s hard to define, almost ethereal, but can be described as a meaty, savory deliciousness which deepens flavor, and literally translates to “deliciousness” from Japanese. Other foods beyond meats which are high in umami include tomatoes, soy sauce, fish sauces, green tea, mushrooms, and aged cheeses (Parmigiano-Reggiano being one of the best examples).
After searing, remove the steaks, turn the burner down to medium, add 2 more tablespoons of olive oil and sauté the onions until they begin to brown and soften (the onions will pick up some of the color from the fond, the brown bits, on the bottom of the pan). Too much caramelization of the onions will make the sauce too sweet. At this point, add thinly sliced Cremini mushrooms, which are rich in umami flavors as well, and sauté until they lose their rawness. Add the cup of full-bodied red wine and allow it to reduce, concentrating its flavor and burning off the wine’s alcohol. As the wine reduces, scrape up the fond on the bottom of the pan which will have been loosened by the reducing wine. Reduce the wine by half; this provides body through its tannins while adding the flavor of the essence of the wine.
The next addition is a cup of beef broth for, you guessed it, a beefier flavor. One tablespoon of tomato paste is added for yet more umami flavor (there’s a lot of “deliciousness” in this dish!) and more body. Thyme is added as a floral note to lighten the sauce and provide complexity. The steaks are then added back to the pan or to the Dutch oven and cooked tightly covered, low, and slow in a 325 degrees F oven for between 2 ½ to 3 hours or until the steaks slide off when picked up with a fork. Yummy!
Remove the meat from the pan and then thicken the braising liquid into a sauce in either of two ways. I usually whisk in a couple of tablespoons or so of room temperature butter to the simmering liquid to both thicken and enrich the sauce. After all Julia Child famously said, “With enough butter, anything is good!”. If low fat is your goal, the sauce can be thickened with one tablespoons of cornstarch (corn flour for my Irish and English friends) dissolved in a half cup of cold water and whisked in slowly until the sauce reaches its desired consistency. Leaving the braising liquid as is or reducing it further is also fine if that’s your preference. All that is left to be done is to adjust the salt and pepper and spoon the umami rich sauce over the steaks. This dish reheats beautifully, but the thickened sauce may need a bit more beef broth or water after it has sat in the refrigerator.
