Binging with Babish Steak Eggs and Gravy from Twister

You slaughter your own cows, Meg, nice. Potatoes? Better grab some while you can. Meg's Gravy is famous. It's practically a food group. Hey, what's up, guys? Welcome back to Binging with Babish, where this week I'm delighted to be taking a look at the steak, eggs, and gravy from my first PG-13 movie, Twister, particularly Meg's Famous Gravy, for which we're gonna need a pretty epic beef stock. So I've got about three pounds of oxtails here, which are loaded with delicious meat and marrow and connective tissue. I'm also gonna add a large Spanish onion, roughly chopped into pieces. A few ribs of celery. Ain't a stew without celery. And a couple carrots, roughly chopped, not even peeled. We're tossing all those in a bowl, hitting them with a little kosher salt, three to four tablespoons of tomato paste, which is both gonna deepen flavor and color, and a drop of vegetable oil. We're tossing everybody together until everybody is well-coated in the tomato paste. And then we're dumping everybody out onto a rimmed baking sheet so we can roast them off in a 425-degree Fahrenheit oven for anywhere from 30 minutes to one hour. We want everybody to have picked up some nice color and to smell the way you imagine Nick Offerman smells, just marvelously meaty. Now, you could simmer this on the stovetop to make stock, but I'm going to expedite the process in a pressure cooker along with some fresh herbs, parsley and thyme, and a whole head's worth of garlic, the cloves cut in half. Then I'm pouring some boiling water on our roasting pan, scraping up all the good stuff off the bottom of the pan so we don't waste any of that delicious flavor, and topping the whole thing up with water. Then we're cooking this guy under high pressure for two hours, which is going to extract as much flavor as possible from our ingredients and make your kitchen smell the way you imagine Nick Offerman's house would smell if he invited Steven Ranella and the Brawny Man over for dinner. Strain that out into a large stock pot, make sure that you have extracted all the beefy juices from the solids, and then we're going to defat this thing, which you can either do with a ladle like this, or you can fridge it overnight and scoop off the hardened fat with a spoon. Once defatted, I'm gonna place this over medium heat, bring it to a simmer, and reduce it by about 50%, almost like we're making a demi-glass. We're gonna know we've done our job correctly if we fridge the resultant broth, and it looks like this, jiggly and jellified from all the dissolved gelatin we got out of the meat. Next up, to keep this breakfast light and healthy, it is served with mashed potatoes, which looked pretty fluffy and white to me, so I have about three pounds of russets here that I'm peeling and cutting into about one-inch cubes, dumping into cold water and rinsing, which is gonna remove excess starch, preventing the potatoes from discoloring and improving their texture. They're headed into cold, heavily salted water that we're gonna bring up to a simmer and cook for 12 to 15 minutes until completely tender. Then we're draining, putting them back in the pot, and placing them over low heat, where we're gonna cook and stir them for about two minutes. Meanwhile, on a separate burner, we've got half a cup of heavy cream and a quarter cup of butter, which we're gonna gently heat until melted before pouring into the potatoes, killing the heat, and mash them all together. Make sure you season early because if you overwork the potatoes, they're gonna get gummy. Once you've got them nice and smooth, make sure you taste for seasoning, and if they're good to go, it's time to cover them up and keep them warm while we get our gravy going. Once again, to max out meaty flavor, I wanna use meaty fats in our roux. And having slaughtered her own cows, I figure Meg has access to something like this, beef suet, a saturated fat found around the animal's kidneys that has a nice, high smoke point. To render out the fat from the solids, I'm just gonna heat it over medium-low heat until it melts out, then strain it into my intended gravy-making vessel. Now, you don't have to use suet. You could use beef tallow or bacon fat. Why don't we add some bacon fat? This gravy is, after all, supposed to be like its own food group. In a separate pan, I'm just melting the stock so that it is ladle-able, then I'm heating the fat over medium heat until shimmering, and then adding an equal amount of all-purpose flour, about four tablespoons worth, whisking and cooking that for about three minutes until it's nice and blonde, and then slowly ladling in the hot stock, whisking constantly and making sure that it's fully incorporated before adding another ladleful, which is gonna help prevent us ending up with a lumpy gravy. Once we've added about four cups of stock, we're gonna cook this guy for maybe 10 minutes until it's nice and thick. Season generously with kosher salt and freshly ground pepper, and then to both darken the color and deepen the flavor, I'm gonna add something that I think my mom would've added, a little splash of Gravy Master, a caramelized sugar and spice mixture that takes this gravy from homemade to down-home. Mix everybody together, cook it a little longer if you want it a little thicker, and as always, give it a taste, not just for seasoning, but because you can really eat this stuff by the spoonful. Next and last, we are contending with our steak and eggs. I have a ribeye here, which I'm gonna blast with heat in a cast iron pan until we get a lovely crust on both sides. Then once the crust is formed, we're gonna lower the heat so we can finish cooking the steak through, and this is when we add our eggs, which were inexplicably added to the pan when the steak was still raw in the movie. I assume this was just a food-styling oversight. We're taking the steak off before the eggs finish cooking so it has an opportunity to rest for a little bit, removing the eggs once they've reached a state of sunny-side-up doneness, and plating with a proud, pillowy pile of potatoes, which we are, of course, gonna make into our very own active gravy volcano. And there you have it, the breakfast of choice for lovable, scruffy, misfit storm chasers, their uptight fiancés, and Rochester native, may he rest in peace, Philip Seymour Hoffman. And even though I had literally just eaten lunch, I entered it into the as-clean-a-plate-as-possible club.