Beans to Serve With Steak: 10-Minute BBQ Beans
Turn cooked beans into quick BBQ beans in about 10 minutes with ketchup, maple syrup, vinegar, mustard, soy sauce, paprika, black pepper, and butter.
Easy Mushroom Sauce for Steak with Cream and Onion Jam
A good steak doesn't need a sauce.
But that's different from saying it isn't better with one.
The other night I grilled a New York strip to medium-rare and had some mushrooms in the refrigerator.
I browned them hard, added a little Worcestershire, garlic, cream, and a spoonful of Wozz onion jam, then let everything cook down slowly.
A few minutes later, I had a rich mushroom sauce that tasted like I'd put a lot more effort into it than I had.
That's my favorite kind of cooking.
If you need an easy mushroom sauce for steak, this one doesn't require stock, flour, a roux, or a half-hour reduction.
Easy Mushroom Sauce for Steak
For a couple of steaks, you'll need roughly:
- 8 ounces sliced mushrooms
- Salt
- Freshly cracked black pepper
- A splash of Worcestershire sauce
- 1 clove fresh garlic, minced
- A splash of heavy cream
- A spoonful of Wozz onion jam
The quantities aren't particularly important here.
The technique is.
Brown the Mushrooms Before You Salt Them
Get your pan hot and add the sliced mushrooms.
Then leave them alone long enough to actually brown.
Don't salt them yet.
Salt pulls moisture from the mushrooms, and moisture is the enemy of browning. If you season them immediately, they can start steaming in their own liquid before you've developed much color.
Brown first.
Salt second.
Once the mushrooms have good color, season them with salt and plenty of freshly cracked black pepper.
Add a little Worcestershire sauce and fresh garlic.
You don't need much Worcestershire. You're looking for that savory background note, not enough to make the whole sauce taste like Worcestershire.
Then add a splash of heavy cream and a spoonful of onion jam.
Turn the heat down.
Let everything gently cook until the cream reduces and the sauce gets thick enough to cling to the mushrooms.
That's it.
The Onion Jam Is the Shortcut
The onion jam is what makes this ridiculously easy.
Ordinarily, if you wanted that deep sweet-savory onion flavor in a steak sauce, you might spend half an hour slowly caramelizing onions.
I'm not doing that on a weeknight while there's a steak on the grill.
A spoonful of onion jam gets you most of the way there immediately.
It brings sweetness, acidity, cooked onion flavor, and complexity all at once.
Combined with the mushrooms, Worcestershire, garlic, and cream, it makes a sauce that tastes much more developed than the few minutes it took to make.
Spoon It Over a Properly Grilled Steak
I made this for a New York strip cooked over a very hot open grill with salt, freshly cracked black pepper, and Italian seasoning.
That's already one of my favorite ways to cook steak.
You can find the full method in my grilled New York strip recipe.
I also made quick BBQ beans from cooked Pink Eye Beans on the side.
The whole dinner came together almost accidentally: steak on the grill, beans already cooked, mushrooms already in the refrigerator.
But that's usually how the best weeknight meals happen.
You don't need to start from zero.
You just need to know how to make what's already there become dinner.
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