If we can cook it, you can cook it!

Stovetop Sirloin Steak with Soy Citrus Aioli and Celery Root and Potatoes Anna

Stovetop Sirloin Steak with Soy Citrus Aioli and Celery Root and Potatoes Anna
Spread the love

Our charcoal grill has been in the garage for several weeks so we were very pleased to discover this method for cooking a perfect steak right on top of the stove. Along with the instructions on how to pull off this feat, we also found the recipe for a Soy Citrus marinade that is later cooked and incorporated into mayonnaise to make a very satisfying aioli to serve with the steak. We paired this with a simple Celery Root and Potatoes Anna that we cooked in the oven and our stand-by haricots verts.


We found the original recipes for the steak and aioli in Ruth Reichl’s new “Gourmet Today” cookbook. We’re still distraught over the loss of the magazine and the new cookbook did nothing to ease our pain. It’s just full of all the things we’ll miss about Gourmet. It opened your mind to trying new flavor combinations, going out on a limb but always with the understanding that Ruth herself was standing under the tree and wouldn’t let you fall. Of course, because I tend to ‘montefy’ a lot of what I cook, this recipe is a riff on Ruth, starting with the steak itself and then the aioli which we even changed the name of.


The original recipe called for London broil. We are all about thrift and London broil on the grill is a summer fixture. But when we got to the butcher’s counter, the price difference between sirloin and London broil was just $1.00 a lb. There was just no contest. We went with the sirloin.

The aioli was originally called Soy Citrus mayonnaise. Now I don’t know about you but putting mayonnaise on a steak is somehow off-putting to me. An aioli simply sounds better. And on the subject of thrift, the Soy Citrus mixture is first used as a marinade for the meat. In the original, once you’d finished marinating, you used two tablespoons of the liquid, then threw the rest away.
To me, this was almost unconscionable. Especially since the greatest marinade on earth doesn’t penetrate but rather flavors the exterior of the meat. So all this liquid, and there’s quite a bit of it, gets tossed. Instead, I decided to boil the entire marinade with its garlic and scallions and distill it down to an essence before nabbing two tablespoons-full.

Potatoes Anna are a wonderful crunchy, buttery way to serve potatoes. I’d been to the Famer’s Market that’s held in a tiny park about two blocks from our apartment and there found some wonderful fresh celery root, its leaves still attached so it smelled as fresh as it looked.


Pairing slices of celery root with the Yukon gold potatoes yields an additional flavor and crispness to the dish. I make it in individual gratin dishes but you can also used a cast iron skillet and create a “Potato pie” version that is equally appealing. Here are the recipes:

 



Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.