Interesting. I’ve never had it with allspice. Mixed peppercorns yes (black, white, and pink — which is not an actual Piper genus peppercorn), and I usually just use some Kampot or Tellicherry black peppercorns. I would be curious to see what some allspice in there tastes like, as I do love allspice.
I voted Oscar simply because I love crab and asparagus. But after reading the thread, I would lean to Au Poivre too, because that gravy is also awesome and less effort to prepare. I’m getting lazy in my old age.
I’ll be making a ginger garlic chicken stir fry because that’s what I have on hand.
Aspenglow, that sauce sounds magical!
Thanks! You win the thread. That does sound easy & delicious.
Except for the fact it contains mustard. I’ve got to work up a suitable substitute for that one inedible ingredient. If anyone has suggestions I’m all ears.
Thanks. 
It’s a funny thing, I generally am opposed to mustard in sauces, too. But this is a tiny bit and it doesn’t “mustard up” the sauce at all. It adds a sconch of flavor that’s nearly unidentifiable but ups its game.
If I were leaving it out, though, I’d probably go with a pinch of rosemary.
However you handle it, I hope you enjoy the sauce!
I hope you enjoy it as much as I do!
In another recipe thread someone posted the first known recipe for Beef Stroganoff, which has no mushrooms but does have mustard and allspice. I made it and I was really pleasantly surprised with how well the allspice paired with the beef. I’ve since added allspice to other beef-based dishes with great results. I’ll report back on how the Au Poivre was with the addition of allspice corns.
I also generally do not like mustard, but followed it in a recipe, and found it did not actually taste like mustard. Perhaps it helped that it was mustard powder.
Why don’t you each order a different one, and then share?
I’d go with the Oscar, because I’m not a big fan of so much pepper…if It were a cheap cut of meat, maybe, but if it’s a good flavorful cut why do I want to blow out my taste buds on boring pepper? And I have a sentimental memory of Veal Oscar. That combination of flavors just does it for me.
Interesting, a Russian friend of my Grandmother’s taught me a way different way - cheat by buying the thin sliced beef known as minute steaks, lay them out on a baking sheet, top with paper thin sliced onion, cracked pepper and sprinkle with vodka, leave on a shelf in the fridge [our out in the garage during the winter where it is refrig temp] for 4-8 hours, Butter and beef fat in a heavy skillet, dump all the ingredients from the baking sheet in and fry up, when thoroughly cooked, dump in a cup of stock, let simmer for a few minutes [mainly while making a butter flour paste] add the lump of beurre manie and stir in well, let cook gently and when the sauce has thickened, plate on wide egg noodles or spaetzel if I am lazy about it, and dollop on sour cream.
Because they are cooking them at home =)
Clearly, the only real solution is to have both, on consecutive evenings, and rate them according to experience.
Well, I would say first because pepper is not boring. One of my favorite pasta dishes (which seems to have become perhaps trendy in the last five years) is cacio e pepe, which is basically just pasta flavored with butter, pepper, and Parmesan and/or pecorino. It is delightful. These sorts of dishes are exactly the ones to showcase stuff like Kampot, Malabar, Tellicherry, Sarawak, etc. peppercorns.
I would also say that traditionally, steak au poivre is made with filet, which, while tender, is not a particularly flavorful cut as far as beef goes, so the pepper sauce goes well with it for that reason. (Of course, you can always justify the opposite: filet is delicate so why flavor it aggressively or why not use a strongly flavored cut of beef like ribeye which can stand up to a strongly flavored sauce. Personally, I agree with the conventional wisdom on this.)
Sounds good! I might try this sometime. Why the vodka? I’m guessing it acts like a solvent or marinade, transferring the flavors of the onion and cracked pepper into the meat.
De gustibus… I just am a little bored with black pepper.
Yeah, but there’s pepper as an afterthought and pepper at center stage like au poivre and cacio e pepe. There’s not really that many dishes where pepper is just that up front. The only other one I could think of is this black pepper beef dish a (now defuct) Sichuanese place used to do around here. The chef Frenchified it with a bit of butter, and that mix of butter, oyster sauce, copious amounts of black pepper, garlic, and ginger just made it sing. I think for me it’s butter/dairy + black pepper that makes all three of these dishes incredible.
For a while it seemed like very third dish I was served had cracked black pepper. I just burned out on it. Literally!
Ah. I don’t dine out all that much – at least not at places where you’d put cracked black pepper on something – so, yeah, I can definitely see getting burnt out on the flavor if you’re encountering it everywhere. The same happened with me and bacon about ten years or so back where everything was bacon this and bacon that. I’ll cook with bacon in a few dishes these days, but I will never get bacon on any kind of sandwich, for instance, except for a BLT. And no bacon crumbles. No bacon jam. No chocolate covered bacon.
LOL. You get me!
Thanks, i tried this
Well, i didn’t have any beef broth, nor Dijon mustard. So i used duck broth, some mustard powder, and a splash of lemon juice.
I think it would have been better with beef broth. But we enjoyed it. Happy New Year
Happy New Year to you, too!
I agree, it would be better with beef broth. My take on the recipe is that it’s an effort to recreate the flavor profile of French onion soup. Duck broth wouldn’t lend itself well to that, I wouldn’t think.
I hope you cut the mustard addition down to about a quarter teaspoon. The dry measure would be too much, IMHO.
But kudos to you for being more adventurous than me! And I’m glad you enjoyed it all the same.
Now, @solost – how did your Steak au Poivre come out? Did you make the “right” choice? 