Do you remember when there used to be a little jar of fat lurking at the back of everyone’s fridge? The habit of accumulating the fat left in the pan after roasting a joint of beef has all but disappeared, but we think it’s deserving of a revival. If you pour the fatty residue into a glass Kilner jar, you’ll see that there’s a top layer of white fat and a lower layer of dark and delicious meat juices. The white fat is good for cooking, the meaty juices delicious on toast. In this recipe we fry bread in the white fat and serve it with a piquant, anchovy-flavoured mince that takes us way back.
Ingredients
- 1 tablespoon extra virgin olive or Irish rapeseed oil
- 1 small onion, finely chopped
- 400g minced beef
- 4 anchovies, finely chopped
- 2 tablespoons plain flour
- 150ml beef stock
- 2 tablespoons Worcestershire sauce
- flaky sea salt
- freshly ground black pepper
- 4 slices sourdough bread
- 4 tablespoons beef dripping (white part)
Serves 4
To Cook
Heat the oil in a frying pan and saute the onion until soft and starting to brown. Add the minced beef and the anchovies and stir until all trace of pinkness has disappeared from the meat.
Sprinkle with the flour and add the stock. Simmer over a low heat for about 20 minutes until it has reached a thick, sauce-like consistency. Ad the Worcestershire sauc and season to taste.
Heat the dripping in a frying pan and fry the bread until golden. Serve with the mince.
Dripping Toast
Dripping toast hardly needs a recipe – just toast a slice of good white bread (sourdough is particularly tasty) and spread with the jelly-like meat juices and sediment that accumulate at the bottom of a jar of dripping. Sprinkle with flaky sea salt.
With almost 56,000 people receive their Leaving Cert results this week, multi-award winning James Whelan Butchers, through its Butcher Academy, is launching a new three-year Butcher Apprenticeship, which includes for the first time in Ireland, a collaboration with France’s leading Butcher Academy, the world renowned “Chambres de Métiers et de l’Artisanat”.
Visitors to the Avoca Stores in Rathcoole and Kilmacanogue will be aware of this award-winning butcher as both shop feature James Whelan Butcher shops on site and many food lovers will also be aware of the original founding butchers shop in Clonmel, Co. Tipperary. James Whelan was also the first Irish butchers to open an online shop, back in the early 2000s.
Following the successful launch of our butcher shops in Avoca Handweavers Rathcoole and Kilmacanogue, Dunnes Stores Cornelscourt and Rathmines in Dublin, we are delighted to announce that we are now bringing our craft butchery excellence and expertise to Dunnes Stores at the Pavilions Shopping Centre in Swords, Co Dublin. Our new butcher shop will open it’s doors to the public in early November. We are very excited to be part of what promises to be a really exciting artisan food market with Dunnes Stores. James Whelan Butchers along with Sheridan Cheese Mongers, Baxter & Green and Cafe Sol will bring great excitement to the retail landscape of North County Dublin.
2016 was also fantastic for our team where we saw the first four graduates from the JWB Butcher academy. This was a very proud day for the business and I would like to congratulate Noel Sheehan, Noel Galvin, John McDonald, James Conmy and we look forward to many more qualifications in the years to come. We have created 25 new positions in James Whelan Butchers in 2016 and if this is your first Christmas with us I hope you’re enjoying the experience and settling in.
