Evening Telegraph (First Edition)
Weighing up merits
Is prime cut covered in gold worth £150 price?
WHEN I first spotted the 24-carat gold steak on social media I couldn’t quite comprehend why a local chef would be interested in serving up something so... unusual.
I’ve never tried gold leafcoated tomahawk steak, and after a quick message to multiple WhatsApp groups, neither had my friends or family.
What would it taste like? Would it actually add to the experience? And more importantly, would it be worth the £149.95 price tag?
Dean Banks, the Fife chef behind luxury food box firm Haar at Home, is well-known on the Scottish hospitality scene.
He runs two successful restaurant operations, one in St Andrews the other in Edinburgh, and has just opened up his second venue in the capital, wine bar and seafood restaurant DULSE, in the former L’Escargot Blanc site.
The MasterChef: The Professionals 2018 finalist from Arbroath has now introduced the new luxury box to give his customers the chance to indulge in a dish that went viral thanks to international butcher and restaurateur Nusret Gökçe, who is also known as Salt Bae.
On the Haar at Home web page for the box, Dean talks about how gold leaf tomahawk steak can cost up to £1,500 in some restaurants. So his price tag of £149.50 for the meat, two sides, and two desserts is classed as a more affordable way of enjoying such an experience.
The kit included: 1kg tomahawk steak; multiple sheets of gold leaf; seaweed roasted potatoes; green beans with crispy shallots and soy lime dressing; truffle jus; two dark chocolate fondants with dulce de leche and creme fraiche, and blackthorn sea salt (to season).
Trying the box out for myself, the first thing I noticed was how big the piece of beef was.
At 1kg, it seemed there was going to be a lot of eating.
My boyfriend and I decanted everything and read the instructions which we got via a QR code that we’d scanned with our phones.
We seasoned the steak with the supplied sea salt and massaged it into the beef. The seaweed roasted potatoes were placed on a baking tray and popped into the oven and I placed the green beans in a pot ready just to add boiling water four minutes before everything else was ready.
Once a frying pan was sizzling hot with a splash of oil the steak was seared both sides and placed into the oven for a certain amount of time for our desired cook.
The gold leaf didn’t really come into the mix until everything was more or less ready to plate. After resting for around five minutes wrapped in tinfoil, we disrobed the steak and carefully placed the gold leaf on top of one side of it.
We thought we had enough to do the whole thing, but with gold leaf being quite tricky to work with we found we ended up focusing on just one side and avoided the bone.
Had we had more gold leaf I would have tried to dress the bone and the other side of the steak, but we didn’t manage with what we had.
It certainly was an experience and we had a laugh, albeit the gold leaf providing a bit of a stress and fiddle at times.
The food itself was delicious, and while the steak was good, I did feel at times it was quite fatty and so we didn’t end up with as much meat as envisioned.
All of the sides, including the green beans which I’d tossed in the soy lime dressing and topped with crispy shallots, were excellent, and the truffle jus, which we poured over our steak, was incredible.
A special mention for the warm chocolate fondant which was incredibly moreish.
Is it worth the money?
While I thought the experience of adding the gold leaf was fun, I did think it detracted from everything else and was a bit more of a bit more faff than anything.
Gold leaf isn’t something I have