Cooking abroad: Steak with coffee sauce

Today I’m going to teach you how to cook a dish very popular in Portuguese cervejarias like Lusitânia and Portugália.

It consists of a steak cooked with some coffee based sauce. Usually it is made with the prime cuts of the cow, but, for the purpose of making it more accessible, I used some not as good cuts and some other changes to the normal recipe.

Ingredients:

5 steaks;

3 garlic cloves;

Salt;

Pepper;

Oregano;

1 espresso or around 50ml of instant coffee;

2.5 soup spoons of butter;

80ml of cream;

40ml of red wine;

Olive oil

Cooking

Season the steaks with salt, pepper and oregano. Slice the garlic into very thin slices.

Heat up the frying pan and add some olive oil in order to fry the steaks. Fry the steaks until they are almost medium rare, and, at the same time, prepare the coffee.

Afterwards, remove the steaks from the frying pan and use it to fry the garlic, butter and coffee in a soft heat. When the mix begins to turn light brown you can slightly increase the heat and start to slowly add the cream and wine.

Put the steaks back into the sauce; taste the sauce and add more garlic, wine, cream or coffee to your liking.

Once you are happy with the result, they are ready to be served. For this, I made some very quick and simple garlic bread, but this recipe goes very well with rice.

Tomas Ramalhete