Adam Liaw (Source: baomoi.com)

Chi: Welcome to another episode of VOV24/7’s Food Delight. As usual, our show will highlight a special recipe and provide useful cooking tips. On today’s show, we have Adam Liaw, a cook, TV presenter and author best known as the winner of Master Chef Australia 2010.

Adam: Hi, my name’s Adam Liaw.

Chi: During Adam Liaw’s trip to ASEAN countries, including Vietnam in June, he presented some dishes to promote Australian cuisine. He shared his tips of making pepper steak spaghetti, that we will bring you in today’s show.

Chi: Steak and cutlets in particular are common dishes in Western cuisine. But, it’s not easy to cook a perfect steak. Apart from some basic rules, such as choosing the right meat and minding the temperature, each cook has his or her own way to make a perfect steak.

Adam: Cooking steak to me is very simple. You need a heavy frying pan. You need to get that frying pan quite hot. Just season the steak with salt, and pepper if you like. And then fry the steak. It doesn’t matter how many times you want to flip it. If you use a high-quality heavy pan, you will have nice crust outside your steak.

Chi: The first secret I’ve learned is that we need a very hot and heavy frying pan to sear the beef. You don’t need too many ingredients, just some salt and pepper to keep the natural flavor of steak. But the way you marinate the meat can also affect the  success of your steak.

Adam: If you add salt to the steak, the best time to do it is any time more than 40 minutes or less than 10 minutes out. I usually salt the steak just before going into the frying pan. I salt one side of the steak, fry that side and salt the other side  because salt will draw the moisture out of meat. So if you salt the meat inside of 20 minutes beforehand, the salt will draw the moisture out the meat. It will make outside of the meat wet. If the outside of the meat is wet, it’s actually steaming rather than frying.

Chi: When making a steak, remember to distinguish between frying and steaming. So, please remember this tip to assure that you are not steaming your steak.

Adam: When it is done to your liking, you rest it for half the amount of time you cooked it. If you cooked the steak for about 8 minutes, you rest it for around 4 minutes. That ensures that the steak retains its moisture when you cut it.

(Source: australianbeef.com.au)

Chi: Through Adam’s instruction, we’ve learned some great tips to successfully make a steak: a hot and heavy frying pan, time to marinate the steak and letting it rest for a while to retain the moisture.

For spaghetti, bring a large pot of salted water to a boil and cook the pasta until al dente.

With the steak and spaghetti are ready, the final part of the dish is the sauce. Adam will tell us more.

Adam: For the black pepper spaghetti dish, we have a cream based sauce, with a bit of wine and stock into the pan in which the steak was fried, and cream to add richness to the sauce. That’s it, very very simple, some onion, garlic and fry, just after the steak was fried in a little butter there, then deglazing with the stock and wine, and then the cream at the end before the pasta goes in. It’s better to finish the spaghetti in the frying pan with the sauce. The pasta is always finished in the pan, it allows the pasta to absorb the flavor of the sauce rather than mixing them separately.

Chi: Normally, when I cook spaghetti, I boil the it first, then make the sauce and finally, mix them together. In Adam’s recipe, the pasta is mixed in the pan. In this way, the spaghetti will better absorb the sauce. Pepper steak spaghetti is quite a hearty dish with a rich creamy sauce. Why not try a new version of spaghetti with Adam Liaw’s recipe. Join us again on our next show for more new recipes. Good bye until next time.