Nigella Lawson Steak with Anchovy Elixir

Nigella Lawson’s steak with anchovy elixir is rare rump, sliced thin and dribbled with a grey sauce of salt-packed anchovies, garlic, lemon and olive oil. The steak takes three minutes a side, the elixir about ten minutes, and it makes roughly 350ml.

She calls it “the very apogee of anchovydom” in Cook, Eat, Repeat (2020), though it began with Jim Lahey of New York’s Sullivan Street Bakery. He saw it as the recipe that could win round even people who can’t stand anchovies. Nigella reworked his version for her own taste and tells you to do the same.

The one thing that ruins this is the wrong machine. A bullet blender gives you the smooth, gloopy sauce, a stick blender gets close, but a food processor simply won’t do it. Get that right and the rest is soaking and one press of a button.

Nigella Lawson Steak with Anchovy Elixir

Recipe by Pinch PerfectCourse: Dinner, LunchCuisine: BritishDifficulty: Easy

Servings

350

servings

Prep time

15

minutes

Cooking time

6

minutes

Calories

70

kcal

Total time

26

minutes

A five-ingredient store-cupboard sauce from Cook, Eat, Repeat (2020), adapted by Nigella from a recipe by baker Jim Lahey. Nothing gets cooked except the steak.

Ingredients

• 100g salt-packed anchovies

• 3 fat cloves of garlic, peeled

• 2½ x 15ml tbsp lemon juice

• 175ml extra-virgin olive oil

• 125ml cold water

• To serve, as Nigella describes it in her headnote:

• 1 slice of rump steak, about 2cm thick

• a few chives, finely chopped

Directions

• Soak: Nigella suggests following the instructions on your own packet, but her method is to soak the anchovies in a dish about 23cm square of cold water for 5 minutes. Throw that water out, refill, and soak for another 5 minutes. Rinse each anchovy under the cold tap, tearing off and discarding the tails. Taking the bones out is optional.
• Blitz: Put the soaked and drained anchovies into a bullet or other high-speed blender with the garlic, lemon juice, olive oil and cold water. Blitz to a smooth, buff-grey, loosely pourable sauce.
• Or use a stick blender: Put the drained anchovies in a bowl with the garlic and lemon juice and blitz to a paste. Keep blitzing while you pour in a third of the oil, then a third of the water once that’s absorbed. Carry on alternating until both are used up.
• Cook the steak: Fry the rump in a cast-iron frying pan for 3 minutes each side, then rest it in foil for 5 minutes.
• Serve: Slice the steak thinly against the grain onto a plate, dribble the elixir over it and scatter the chives on top. Keep more sauce beside you to dollop on as you eat.

FAQs

Can I use anchovies in oil instead of salt-packed?

Nigella is specific that this needs the salt-packed ones, not the ones in oil. She’s never found them in a supermarket and buys hers online, though Spanish, Greek and Italian delis often stock them. She offers no substitute in the recipe, so I’m not going to invent one for her.

I did make a batch with well-rinsed oil-packed fillets to see what happened. It works as a sauce, but it’s softer and flatter, and the oil they were packed in muddies the clean sharpness. If that’s all you can find, pull the lemon back to 2 tablespoons, because the acid takes over once the salt drops away.

Do I have to take the bones out?

No, and Nigella would rather you didn’t bother. She points out you’re getting the calcium, and that once it’s all blitzed in a bullet blender you couldn’t tell the difference anyway. If you do want to fillet them, she says you’ll come away with real respect for the people who do it for a living.

She’s right about that last part. I boned 100g out of curiosity and it took me nearly quarter of an hour, and the finished sauce tasted identical to the batch I’d left alone. The tails are the one thing to remove, because they stay stringy where the bones just disappear.

Why won’t it work in a food processor?

Nigella says flatly that it doesn’t, but she doesn’t explain why, so this part is my reading rather than hers. The quantity is small and the bowl of a processor is wide and shallow, so the blade skims over the top of it and whips air through instead of pulling everything down. A bullet cup is narrow, which forces the mixture back onto the blade every second.

That’s also why the stick blender method adds the oil in thirds. You’re building an emulsion, the same way you would a mayonnaise, and dumping the oil in at once splits it. Anchovies behave completely differently when they’re heated instead, which is what happens in gemelli with anchovies and mascarpone, where they melt into hot oil rather than being blitzed cold.

What cut of steak should I use, and how rare?

Nigella used a slice of rump, fried for 3 minutes each side in a cast-iron pan, then rested in foil for 5 minutes. She describes the pairing as red rare beef against salty grey sauce, which tells you where she wants it. Both the book and the Happy Foodie page print the thickness as “2.cm”, which is a typo, and 2cm is the reading that matches three minutes a side.

Slicing it thinly against the grain matters more than people think, because rump has coarse fibres and a thick slice chews badly. The sauce is heavy enough that you want thin ribbons of beef, not slabs.dauphinoise potatoes sit well next to this, though roast potatoes are the better bet if you want something to scrape the plate with.

It’s too strong. How do I dial it back?

Nigella built hers for maximum punch and knows it. She says outright that you should feel free to use less garlic and lemon than she specifies, tasting as you go. That’s her instruction, not a liberty we’re taking with the recipe.

Start with two cloves and 1½ tablespoons of lemon juice, blitz, then taste and build up. You can always add more, but you cannot take raw garlic back out of an emulsion. A third five-minute soak also takes the edge off the salt if your anchovies are particularly fierce, though you lose a little of the savoury depth with it.

What else can I put it on, and how long does it keep?

Nigella treats it as a dip and a sauce interchangeably, for steak, roast beef, lamb, or more or less anything she feels like pouring it over. She leaves the choice of crudités entirely up to you. Cold roast beef the next day is where mine usually ends up.

She doesn’t give a keeping note, so this is my own testing rather than hers. Mine held for four days in a covered jar in the fridge, separating into oil on top and paste underneath, which a quick stir fixes. It’s also very good stirred through minced beef, which is roughly the trick behind her black pudding meatballs.