French Restaurant Ben’s Cottage Pie

Galvin at Windows’ Senior Sous Chef Ben Hobson shares his Cottage Pie’s recipe.

Ingredients

500g minced beef
3 medium potatoes
2 carrots
2 cloves of garlic
1/2 onion
1 bay leaf
Dried herbs
100 ml red wine
1 tbsp spoon tomato paste
Splash of oil
Salt
Pepper
Oxo beef stock cube (1 or 2 depends on personal strength)
Splash Worcestershire sauce
50g frozen peas
1 table spoon (not too full) Korean soybean paste (optional)
1 table spoon(not too full) Korean Chilli paste (optional)

Method

Peel the potatoes and cut into three, place in cold water and add salt, cover and bring to a simmer. It will take 20 minutes to cook the potatoes for mash.

Meanwhile, peel and dice the carrots, onion & chop garlic. Keep them on the side.

Place a large pan on the stove, add a splash of oil and wait until it gets fairly hot and start to colour the beef mince. Once all the meat is seared, remove from the pan and drain the fat off put to the side.

In the same pan, sweat the onion, garlic & carrot. Add drained beef fat if there need more fat to sweat vegetables. After 5 minutes, add the red wine, dried herbs, bay leaf and reduce by half. Add the meat back into pan with 1 litre boiling water and oxo cube, and stir well to dissolve it properly. Bring it up to boil and turn down the heat to simmer. Add tomato paste as well as soybean paste and chilli paste – these are Korean fermented sauce base, it gives a body, depth and umami to your stew.