Recipes

The wok-beef secret hiding in your steak pack

Here's a trick worth knowing: great stir-fry beef isn't about buying the most expensive steak — it's about slicing the one you have properly. Thin, across the grain, into a ripping-hot wok, and the BBQ steak turns out strips with more flavour than fillet at three times the price. Add a packet of hokkien noodles, an onion and a capsicum from the crisper, and a sauce that's mostly the oyster sauce jar doing the work. Twenty minutes, one wok, dinner for four.

Catalonia's oldest trick: everything charred tastes better dragged through romesco

Every late winter, Catalonia throws festivals for charred spring onions — whole towns eating them straight off the fire, dunked in a smoky capsicum-and-almond sauce called romesco. That sauce is the discovery here. It's a blender job — charred capsicum, toasted almonds, bread, garlic, smoked paprika, good oil — and it makes a seared steak taste like it came off a grill house pass. The BBQ steak brings the beefy backbone, the spring onions char in the same pan, and the whole plate costs twenty minutes of actual work.

Sweet char against smoky steak — the barbecue doing what it was built for

Pineapple changes on a hot grill. The sugars caramelise, the sharpness mellows, and a few charred slices chopped through red onion, chilli and lime become the kind of salsa that makes people go quiet at the table. Underneath it sits a smoked-paprika-marinated BBQ steak — the cut literally named for this job — grilled hard, rested properly and sliced across the grain. It's a plate that tastes like summer even in the middle of July, and nothing about it is difficult.

Because Australians know their way around a barbecue — and great beef makes it legendary

The BBQ steak in your share is a generous, well-suited-to-high-heat cut. Grass-fed beef responds a little differently to high heat than grain-fed — the lower overall fat content means a marinade helps enormously, and the cook time should be slightly shorter than you might expect.