Pan-Seared Filet Mignon with Merlot Sauce (Page 428)

• Date: Thursday, May 22, 2008 -- 9pm
• Location: Chicago, IL
• Kitchen: Vigleik and Shihchi's Apartment
• Fellow Chef: Vigleik
• Dining Companion: Shihchi
• Recipe Rating: A-
  

Despite my deep love of beef, I still have several steak recipes left in The Book. Vigleik and Shihchi chose this one for dinner when I was staying with them last week, and it did not disappoint! The steaks themselves were prepared very simply: pan-seared then oven-finished. We started with excellent pieces of filet mignon, and this preparation served them well. The meat was juicy and delicious. The merlot sauce was also excellent. The first step in this sauce was making a red wine vinegar caramel. This was added to a reduction of red wine and veal stock. In summary: completely delicious! My one and only complaint about this dish is that the sauce was very thin. The recipe gave guidelines for how long the sauce would need to reduce. I planned the meal around that time line. The sauce didn't thicken as I had hoped though, so I continued to boil and reduce for much, much longer than indicated in The Book. Eventually I had to serve it (before the steaks had rested too long) but it was still much thinner than I would have liked. That said, the flavor was excellent. The thin sauce ran all over my plate, but I sopped it up with some crusty bread and was very, very happy! Vigleik and Shihchi agreed: Yum!

Here is the recipe for the sauce. The steaks are prepared as in this recipe, although the recipe in The Book doesn't have any of the vegetables with it.

Welcome Wall Street Journal readers! If you are new to my blog, coming at it from the Wall Street Journal article, I hope you enjoy it! If you have been reading along for a while and have no idea what I am talking about, check out the article here. That's right, The Gourmet Project was in today's Wall Street Journal! Exciting, no?

So for those of you who are new here, let me catch you up. So far I have cooked and blogged about 740 of the 1293 recipes in the Gourmet Cookbook. If you click on the Project Index link on the right sidebar you can get all sorts of statistics, see my projected completion date (currently March 17, 2010), and do fun things like sort all the recipes by the grade they received, etc... I try to average about one recipe per day, so I post here most days! I also tend to ramble about the various other aspects of my life -- I am 28 years old, a mathematician by profession, currently a post-doc at Indiana University, which means that aside from cooking I do research in mathematics and teach calculus to undergraduates! I am currently living in Boston for the summer, doing research, cooking, training for a half-marathon, and enjoying lovely summer weather!

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