master meals, week 7: jonathan waxman's steak tartare and potatoes with melted raclette

waxman's tartare and potatoes

We've fallen a bit behind on our Master Meals series. We made this quite awhile ago, after loading and reloading the google book copy of A Great American Cook until we found a Jonathan Waxman recipe that we both liked. Nathan is crazy about steak tartare, and I was willing to give it a shot.

As it required no cooking, the tartare was pretty easy to make. It did, however require a whole lot of chopping. First, the meat, which I sliced into ⅛ inch strips and attempted to dice. Then we quartered a lime and chopped up half a red onion, a couple of shallots, 4 cloves of garlic, a jalapeno chile, a serrano chile, a tomato and a half cup of parsley. Like I said, a lot of chopping. Then we mixed the meat with salt, pepper, a few shakes of tabasco sauce and the juice of a lemon. The other ingredients we piled on a plate, and added them in as we saw fit at the table.


tartare mix-ins

Somehow, this didn't quite come together. It wasn't bad, but I didn't enjoy it all that much either. I think that the steak wasn't chopped small enough. I did the best I could with a knife, but I think having it coarsely ground would have worked better. Nathan also thinks we should have mixed in some egg yolk. That probably would have been good. The biggest problem, in my opinion, is evident in the picture below. You can see that the pile of onions and shallots and such was almost as big as the pile of meat, and I didn't even do the full three recommended shallots. It was pretty much all we could taste after we mixed it all together, and I kept on tasting it all night through to the next day's lunch. Decidedly unpleasant.


a salad, tartare and all the fixins

The potatoes, on the other hand, were great. We boiled them for 20 minutes, and then sliced them real thin. After tossing them olive oil and salt and pepper, we crisped them under the broiler with half a pound of shredded raclette cheese and cooked until it got nice and bubbly, which only took two or three minutes. Raclette tastes pretty nasty cold, but it melts into total deliciousness. I would definitely make potatoes like this again, and I'd love to find another raclette recipe.


raclette roasted potatoes