Sauce #8 | Thai-Style BBQ Beef

A very good lunch for a bank holiday weekend

Hello, welcome to Sunday Sauce, a weekly recipe newsletter. This week’s newsletter contains a recipe for Thai-style marinated beef rib for the barbecue, and a tamarind nam jim.

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If it weren’t for a relatively prolonged and increasingly maddening bout of insomnia, I might have found myself wondering if yesterday was a dream. Cloudless. Warm. Mellow. Larks on wings and snails on thorns and all that jazz. Perfect, really.

Rosie and Nora had stayed the night at my sister’s, so I let Thom fester in front of the television eating toast while I tried and failed to catch up on sleep. We walked the dog, lost the dog, found the dog, lost the dog again. Ate more toast. I stared into a moderately empty fridge, gormlessly wondering what to cook for our friends Rachel and Chris and their two children, who were turning up for lunch. Inspiration is harder to come by when you’re ticking over on four hours of broken sleep a night.

A local shepherd, when not counting sheep, moonlights as a beef farmer, by which I mean she rears one cow each year and sells the extraordinarily good meat at an extraordinarily generous price. I defrosted a large piece of the latest beast’s rib-eye, along with the other sai oua from last week, and some chicken thighs for the kids. With a little more foresight I would have marinated the beef overnight but life can occasionally be too short. Either way, this is a pretty straightforward operation and is a rewarding, striking, and most importantly delicious high-days-and-holidays kind of a lunch for a bank holiday weekend. Chris said it was the best lunch he’d ever had and I wouldn’t dream of contradicting him.

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Serves 4-6

for the beef
3 fresh makrut lime leaves, finely sliced
2 large garlic cloves, peeled and finely chopped
2 birdseye chillies (or more if you like), thinly sliced
1 tsp palm/caster sugar
3 tbsp fish sauce
white pepper
1.4kg (or thereabouts) beef rib eye - ours was off the bone but on the bone is a bonus

for the tamarind nam jim - courtesy of Kay Plunkett-Hogge
3 tbsp fish sauce
3 tbsp fresh lime juice
2 tbsp tamarind paste
2 tbsp finely chopped shallot
1 tsp roasted rice powder (method below)
1/2 tsp sugar
1 tsp chilli powder
1 tbsp chopped coriander

to serve - at least, this is what we had
sticky rice
fresh cucumber
asparagus
lime wedges
crispy chilli crunch
fresh Thai basil, coriander, mint
sai oua

• whisk together all the marinade ingredients and rub over the beef. Marinate for at least an hour, preferably overnight.

• if barbecuing, light the coals and find yourself a cold drink. When ready to cook - they should be white - carefully distribute so you have half the barbecue or so piled with very hot coals, and the other half relatively clear of coals. This gives you a couple of cooking zones which means you’re not going to scorch the meat once the fat starts to render.

• scrape the marinade off the meat as best you can (to avoid a burnt garlic) but hang onto it.

• start the cooking process on the hot side of the barbecue, turning the meat every 30 seconds or so. Keep it moving until it’s got good colour all over it. If at any point the fat ignites the coals and the meat is getting singed, shift it over to the cooler side of the barbecue. Once you’ve achieved a good crust, move it over to the cool side and cook for a further 20-30 minutes, turning every couple of minutes. Aim for a core temperature of 45c. A meat thermometer is a good help if you have one.

• rest in a warm place back in the marinade for 20-30 minutes (though longer is fine) while you finish preparing lunch.

• for the nam jim, mix all the ingredients. That’s it. (To make roasted rice powder you just toast a handful of rice in a dry frying pan over a medium-high heat until brown, then pound in a pestle and mortar.)

• carve the beef tenderly and serve with all the other deliciousness you’ve assembled.