Passport & Plate - Australian steak tartare with nigella seed cracker
Australia | Thursday, March 5, 2015 | 5 photos
Ingredients
Serves 2
45 minutes (includes bread baking)
200gms eye filet steak
¼ teaspoon nigella seeds
¼ teaspoon celery seeds
10 saltbush leaves
1 tablespoon small capers
1 teaspoon macadamia oil
Quail eggs
Bay leaves to serve
Olive oil and Nigella seed crackers
1.5 cups of plain flour
1 teaspoon sea salt flakes
3 tablespoons olive oil
1/2 cup warm water
1 tablespoon nigella seeds
How to prepare this recipeDice your eye filet as fine as you can, I make my dish to a rough chop but if you have a mincer, this is good too. Finely chop thyme, saltbush leaves, celery seeds and capers and stir through with oil and nigella seeds.
Crack egg and separate white from yolk. Make an indent into the tartare and gently slide egg yolk into dent.
Preheat oven to 200C and line a baking tray with baking paper.
In a large bowl add flour, salt, and nigella seeds. Mix well. With a spoon, make a well in the centre of the flour and slowly pour in olive oil. Time to get your hands in – start brining all the ingredients together and knead whilst adding warm water, a little at a time. Continue kneading until you have a lovely smooth ball of dough. Divide mixture into 12 small balls and set aside whilst you make your tartare.
With a rolling pin, roll out dough until you have very thin flat breads – almost like a fine pizza base. Prick them and sprinkle with some sea salt flakes, then place in the oven for approximately 15 minutes. Leave to cool then serve with Australian Steak Tartare.
If you love tartare, you will adore this recipe. If you are dubious about tartare, now is your time to try. Ensure that you buy exceptional beef, sustainable, grass fed is best. It is expensive, but a little goes a long way. All Australian ingredients can be purchased from suppliers who all offer worldwide shipping.
The story behind this recipeI often ask people to define Australian cuisine – rarely do they shoot back a quick answer because we’re still a country looking to define our cuisine, define a solid pattern that isn’t entrenched in British heritage. What we can embrace is an incredible culture of indigenous flora, used by our Aboriginal people for millennia and more recently through our world class produce. From dusty ochre deserts to the fertile emerald hills rolling down to kiss our coast; we have some extraordinarily diverse produce that defines our plate in Australia – but it's so more.
To travel to a foreign piece of terre and experience another way of life makes you wise, compassionate and humble – but to come home; to what feels like our very own special sun, stand on the butter-coloured sand at dusk with the sea licking your ankles and tear off the wrapper from a frosty ice-cream, sit under a gum tree stoking a fire that’s crying out for plump yabbies dressed with nothing but lemon and salt bush – this defines Australian cuisine to me.
Australian cuisine cannot be pinpointed to a single dish or solitary ingredient. It’s an experience; it’s knowing your rugged farmer and the back-breaking work he toils through to put dinner on your plate. It's running your fingers through golden ribbons of grape vines that bless almost every corner of our land. It's respecting the sacred flora we have been blessed with, completely unique to our land; we know so little about our own food yet we have many incredible people who can teach us the power of these magical plants if we just stop and listen.
This is my recipe for Steak Tartare: sustainable Australian beef, native pepper berry, nigella seeds, salt bush. It is quintessentially me – a soulful treat to prepare for my friends or myself. It uses some of our best ingredients mixed with tartare classics: fresh beef and aromatic spices, both indigenous and traditional. You can eat this beef or you can experience this beef. It represents my unique Australia.
