Want to cook to impress? Try this!

Spices!!!!!

Make the world of difference in your meat cooking?

Throughout my cooking journey, I have always been fascinated by the availability and the diversity of both ground and whole spices so readily available.

What attracts me to them are the huge variety available from all over the world. With such a variety at our disposal comes an equal amount of flavours waiting for us to tantalize our guests palates in our cooking!

This is a great opportunity for you, the home chef, to experiment with these spices, add a bit of one with another, together with another to create your own unique and memorable flavours!

Here’s what I love to do with spices and this is what you can do as well – especially if you have played around to create your own unique blends:

Spice up your pan – fried steaks

1. Once your steak is cooked, remove and put on a plate to rest.
2. Slowly reduce (on a mid – high heat) the pan juices. (also add back any juices coming from where the steaks are resting) so that you have a darker coloured and more flavourful liquid in the fry pan. On a high heat add some butter and let sizzle to a slightly brown colour. Turn off the heat before adding some crushed garlic as well as some extra spices. This is the great opportunity to ass in really interesting and divers ground spices. Whisk or stir thoroughly.
3. Carefully pour over the steaks.

This is an easy way to create something quick that adds enormous instant flavour to the steak.

You can go further again with this! Do you like mushrooms?

1. Before you have cooked the steak, chop some mushrooms, pan fry the mushrooms in oil and season to taste. Remove once cooked. Do exactly as you did with the butter and garlic in the fry pan and add the mushrooms!

By all means there is that option NOT to use butter for this technique. If you have enough in your pan to reduce down, then feel free to do the above technique without adding butter.

Spice up your grilled steaks

1. Before the grilling process, make sure you have a simple pastry brush. Melt some butter in the microwave for 10 – 15 seconds. Have some crushed garlic on hand and add this into the melted butter. Feel free to add more seasoning as well as some interesting flavoured ground spices to the melted butter as well.
2. Once the meat is cooked and about to be removed from the grill plate, dip the pastry brush into the melted butter mix and coat the steaks on both sides. Remove the steaks to rest.

These types of flavourings for pan fried and grilled steaks, especially the interesting ground spices, are easy, instant and delicious!

Go ahead! Visit your nearest spice merchant. I love Herbies spices – they are experts and have an enormous range from all over the world including Australia.

 Start experimenting and using spices today!