This is a dish that my father and I used to eat
in Kuching,
Sarawak in the 1960s. Sarawak is a
significant producer of pepper, so it seems appropriate. The important thing is the sauce;
normally you'd eat it with grilled fillet steak or rump steak:
I've found it difficult to get consistent thickness with this sauce. In the past I have
tended to reduce it, for no particularly good reason. On 28 September 2014 I didn't, and the
sauce was far too thin, so I reduced the original 50 ml of water to an absolute minimum.
That still wasn't enough. I reduced the original 30 ml of cognac to 5 ml, but on 23 January 2016 I finally got it so
thick that I was able to increase that quantity to 10 g.
Ingredients
For two steaks:
quantity
ingredient
step
7 g
black pepper corns
1
3 g
stock powder
2
little
water
2
60 g
sour cream
3
10 g
cognac
4
Preparation
Coarsely crush the pepper. I use a hand-driven Italian grain mill for this purpose, set
to 2 on the scale:
Crushing it under a Chinese chopper works, but it's slow business,
and you'll need about 50% more pepper for the same flavour. Most blenders make the
resulting pepper too fine.
Dissolve the stock powder in just enough hot water to dissolve it. The result might dry
up; that's OK.
Add the cream and stir well until mixed. Warm if necessary.
Just before serving, heat up. Add the pepper and cognac, mix well. Pour over the
steaks.
