TGIFOOD

BEEF UP

What’s cooking today: Roast tomahawk steak

What’s cooking today: Roast tomahawk steak
Tony Jackman’s roast tomahawk steak, served on a blue Mervyn Gers Ceramics platter. (Photo: Tony Jackman)

A tomahawk steak is a rib-eye with its bone on, which is Frenched (trimmed in the French butchering style) in the way of a rack of lamb. It’s well suited to oven roasting.

Although this tomahawk steak is destined for roasting in the oven, it needs to be well browned in a pan on the stove top first. But first allocate a few hours for the steak to marinate in a rub in the fridge.

A steak needs good salting, and there’s little better for any steak than the perfect combination of rosemary and garlic, and of course black pepper is the steak’s other best friend. So I combined all of these elements by first making a rub of coarse salt, lots of black pepper, crushed dried garlic and finely chopped fresh rosemary needles.

Then, to make it just perfect, bring on the butter…

Ingredients

1 x 950 g tomahawk steak

1 Tbsp rosemary needles, finely chopped

1 Tbsp coarse salt

1 Tbsp crushed dried garlic

2 tsp black pepper

4 Tbsp butter

1 Tbsp olive oil

Method

The tomahawk steak was huge and really thick, so in truth it would have done for two people. Yes, it weighed 952 g. About a quarter of that weight is bone anyway. Probably more. But I was feeling generous. (To myself.)

Trim the part of the bone that is sticking out so that more bone is exposed and remove every bit of sinew that you can from it. (I cut away a small part of the meat at that bone end and kept it to pop into the pan later for a sneaky nibble while the steak was browning. It’s okay, nobody saw me.)

Mix together the rosemary needles, coarse salt, crushed dried garlic and black pepper and pack it on the steak, all over, and put it in the fridge, uncovered, for a few hours.

Take the steak out of the fridge an hour before cooking it.

Preheat the oven to 200℃.

Melt butter with a little olive oil in a heavy skillet over a moderately high heat and brown the steak on all sides.

Transfer the browned steak onto a wire rack over an oven pan and roast it in the preheated oven for 20 minutes. If you’re the meat thermometer sort, you’re looking for an internal temperature of 54-57℃ if it’s medium rare that you want.

Rest the steak for 10 to 15 minutes. Carve the steak off the bone and serve with sautéed courgettes and golden potato scallops shallow fried in butter. DM/TGIFood

Tony Jackman is Galliova Food Champion 2021. His book, foodSTUFF, is available in the DM Shop. Buy it here

Mervyn Gers Ceramics supplies dinnerware for the styling of some TGIFood shoots. For more information, click here.

Follow Tony Jackman on Instagram @tony_jackman_cooks. Share your versions of his recipes with him on Instagram and he’ll see them and respond.

SUBSCRIBE to TGIFood here. Also visit the TGIFood platform, a repository of all of our food writing.

Gallery

Comments - Please in order to comment.

Please peer review 3 community comments before your comment can be posted

Caryn Dolley Bundle

The Caryn Dolley Fan Bundle

Get Caryn Dolley's Clash of the Cartels, an unprecedented look at how global cartels move to and through South Africa, and To The Wolves, which showcases how South African gangs have infiltrated SAPS, for the discounted bundle price of R350, only at the Daily Maverick Shop.