Roast sirloin

With the holiday season approaching, we decided we wanted a joint of beef for New Year's Day. We were thinking about rib because that's a bit of a favourite but finally settled on dry aged sirloin. We bought it, plonked it in the fridge and waited for the day to arrive.

I say waited, we were eating the other stuff I've posted about but you get what I mean.


New Year's Eve came and we popped into town to buy some shoes because my boots had a hole in that Timpsons wanted £45 to fix. Six shops later, shoes in hand, my girlfriend started the plan unraveling. "Do you want to take me to the pub for a drink?".

Skip forward and she can't remember the journey home and I didn't get up 'til the afternoon. I've no idea what we ended up eating. Oh well, it was still the new year, just a day further in than we planned. By the time we sank our gnashers into it, it was probably 6 weeks aged.

Vital statistics : 57 degrees for 4 hours

There's two things to note in the next picture.

Firstly, the bag's way too big for the food. A-bloody-gain. To be honest, I tried making a bag but the beef wouldn't fit so I cut down a larger pre-made bag but cut it too short. In the end I just went with a large bag. Sod it.

The other thing to note is I've triple sealed it. This was because it wasn't a cheap piece of meat so I triple sealed it to rule out any chance of failure. Being a bit OCD, the spacing of the seals makes me happy.

A 9.30 cooking start launched us firmly into lunchtime eating territory and straight out of the bath, this is what we got. There's some juices in the bag - we used these in the sauce.

Now for all the previous posts, everything's looked grim straight out of the water bath but this one actually looks quite appetising. Apart from the string bit, obviously.

As ever, the next stage is to give it some colour. I was going to blowtorch it but couldn't be blessed standing out in the cold like a muppet so out came the trusty frying pan. Given my feelings on blowtorches it seemed a warmer and less incendiary option but in hindsight, blowtorching would've been the safer bet as a jet of hot oil's 'compromised' one of my girlfriend's lenses. Hopefully it's not a permanent breach or I'll be buying her a new one. Now that would be an expensive meal.

Just to prove it's beef-like credentials, this picture shows the horn.

Et voila - lunch. At this point my girlfriend was thinking about the damage to her camera while I was readying my excuses if I'd ruined both that and the beef.

And no, I don't own a carving fork.

The next photos show just how juicy it turned out.

I'm only posting the next picture to remind myself what vegetables look like.

I was a bit worried I might have done it a fraction too low but this was perfect I think. No pressure, no thermometers, just plenty juicy and just the right shade of pink. It took something that's easy to ruin and didn't.

I will point something out though. You can see some, shall we say 'juices' in a close-up below.

It certainly wasn't rare because we don't like it that way. I think this is where the knife pushed some of the juices out. To sort this out in future, I'd either remove the slightly tough piece just under the fat or turn it over before carving so it needs less downwards pressure to cut through that small sinewy bit.

To summarise we'd definitely have this again and do it exactly the same way.

One other point I would make and it only applies to a small subsection of readers. If you're thinking of starting a food blog, use a backup camera for any frying shots. It's great to get the best pictures you can but not when it causes £80 of damage for every post. We'll probably use my phone for those shots in future because I hardly use the camera on that so don't mind if it gets ruined. Just remember, we do these things so you don't have to.