Porcini Onions for Steak

Ann loves steak. Ed does not love it. What to do?

When I say that I do not love steak, it does not mean that I do not like the flavor of it, that I have some moral objection to it, or that I will not eat it. To the contrary: I like the flavor of steak; I am OK that we raise these animals for food; and, I certainly will eat steak, but I prefer pork or lamb or duck.

Strip Steaks with Porcini Onions and Beurre Rouge

My not loving steak has to do with a few things, I believe, if I am to dig down in my mind. First, as a retired professional chef, I have cooked many thousands and thousands of steaks. Perhaps familiarity breeds contempt. Perhaps also, it annoyed me that so many people ordered steak rather than the more creative dishes on the menu. Ultimately, we stopped serving steak altogether at the restaurant, moving more to a seven-course tasting format that had no room for honking slabs of beef.

Also, braising is my favorite style of cooking. There is something incredible that happens when you cook a tough protein slowly for hours and hours that elevates that protein to food nirvana status. I love the fork tender nature of long-cooked beef and for me, that texture wins out each time over steak.

More importantly though, I think, is that my palate loves flavor and big, bold flavor at that. And while I appreciate the umami-laden flavor of a finely raised, aged, and cooked steak, there are a gazillion other foods that would appeal more to my palate.

Finally, I grew up without money. Beef in general and steak in particular were luxuries that never graced our table. Historically, the fiscally conservative part of me had always found that steak was priced out of my budget. It was more important to save money for my kid's college education than it was to eat steak.

But fast forward to the present day in which I do the grocery shopping for our house. My doing the shopping really started during COVID when Ann was confined to the house for fear of infection and has continued ever since. Prior to that, I was running a restaurant and Ann did the food shopping. I was never home during meal times, however.

Truth also be told, Ann does not like my style of shopping which is to make an exact list of what I want in the order that it appears on the store's shelves, to get in the store and make a beeline from one needed ingredient to the next, and to get out as efficiently as possible. I am certain that this stems from the restaurant days when I had almost zero time to make weekly forays to buy certain things at retail that were not available from our farmers and foragers or not convenient to order from distributors.

In contrast, it seems to me that shopping for Ann is more closely akin to entertainment. It seems to amuse her to bounce all over the store looking at everything quite apparently at random. Given that I find little joy in the chore of shopping, we chafe at each other's shopping style. But I digress.

Because I do the shopping and the bulk of the weekly menu planning, beef really isn't ever on my shopping radar, which has caused Ann to become increasingly more vocal about the lack of beef in our diet. I believe that she would eat steak several nights a week if she had her druthers.

Knowing that I am not the sole arbiter of our diet, I have been making a conscious effort of late to bring home beef from the store at least a couple times a month. To wit, I made ossobuco last week and this week, I brought home some decent looking strip steaks.

We were sitting on the sofa, both knowing that steak was on the night's menu and sipping a rare bottle of Cab (generally, too heavy for us and we prefer lighter grapes such as Nebbiolo, Pinot Noir, and Sangiovese). Suddenly, Ann mentioned somewhat wistfully and seemingly out of nowhere, "I'd really love some mushrooms with the onions for the steak."

We had already discussed onions for the steak and I was going to quasi-caramelize some to have with the beef. Mushrooms were a new wrinkle and one that I was almost unprepared for.

I do not like and cannot really abide the ubiquitous common mushrooms in both their color forms: white mushrooms (champignons de Paris) and the brown portobello/cremini form. My dislike is mostly textural; unless these mushrooms are seared really hard, I find them off-puttingly rubbery. And there is also the flavor that I cannot tolerate; even the smell of these mushrooms makes me gag a bit.

Interestingly and paradoxically enough, I do really like a lot of wild mushrooms as well as cultivated shiitake. Kings among the wild mushrooms for me are porcini, which I mainly love in their dried state as drying really concentrates and improves their flavor. So, I always keep a canister of wickedly expensive dried porcini in the pantry.

To sate Ann's desire for mushrooms, I grabbed the remaining handful of porcini from the pantry and put them to rehydrate in a bowl of water. And to keep dinner simple, I decided to chop those porcini and add them and their rehydrating liquid to a couple of sliced yellow onions that had been sweating and nearing caramelization on the range for the past hour.

The outcome, once the porcini liquid was reduced to nothing, was an incredible mushroom and onion umami bomb for our steaks. Now having discovered this, I want to keep it in my culinary arsenal and that means keeping it top of mind, hence this post.

Over the years, we had done many onion-based condiments for steak at the restaurant, all much more complex than simple mix of porcini and onions. For example, we used to cook down an incredible onion and bacon jam with stout. I loved it as a condiment on its own, but something always nagged at me about the smoky bacon flavor with steak. I love bacon on my cheeseburger, but I always found that the bacony jam clashed a bit with our fantastic steaks. I think I have silenced that little nagging inner voice (chefs are highly self-critical) forever with this simple mushroom and onion condiment.