After Pauline Hanson made a steak dinner for Barnaby Joyce at Parliament House, we put her left-field grilling technique to the test to see if it’s genius or a culinary mis-steak.
The sandwich press is a versatile bit of engineering. Besides a ham-and-cheese, it can reheat pizza, fry an egg and facilitate a quesadilla.
But whacking highly marbled wagyu on a sandwich press is not something I had considered until Pauline Hanson’s dinner with Barnaby Joyce last night. As part of her campaign to court Joyce’s defection from the Coalition backbench to One Nation, Hanson cooked three steaks on a sandwich press in her Parliament House office.
Initial thoughts around the Good Food desk this morning ran the gamut from “gross” to “unhinged”, but as a person not averse to boiling instant noodles in an electric hotel kettle, I thought the steak-press method warranted testing. Perhaps Hanson was onto something? Joyce’s hunk of beef seemed to have a pretty enviable crust. Also, I hadn’t packed lunch.
After spending more time analysing a 24-second video of Hanson cooking office steaks than any person with a full-time job should, I had some observations.
- The steaks were from 2GR, Gina Rinehart’s cattle company. (You didn’t expect Hanson was going to have some regeneratively farmed grass-fed hippie cow stinking up her kitchenette did you?) They looked extremely well marbled and were – by my best guess – striploins. 2GR wagyu striploins on the bone retail for $145 a kilogram.
- In one incredible scene, a steak hits the sandwich press unseasoned, straight out of the vacuum pack.
- The Queensland senator flips meat with a fork.
I cooked two 250-gram steaks with decent (but not Rinehart-level marbling) on a Sydney Morning Herald office sandwich press. One was seasoned with Saxa after grilling, a la One Nation (see photo above); the other spangled with Olsson’s sea salt before hitting the press for the best chance at a decent crust and edible lunch.
What I will say is that Parliament House must supply staff with more intense sandwich presses than the owners of this masthead, or Hanson has modified her own Breville (or whatever the brand is – photographs to hand can’t confirm). Our Nero brand press just couldn’t reach and maintain the heat required for a decent crust and cook on the steak. There was a lot more stewing than sizzle.
With a thin minute steak, maybe you could get a decent result, but those 2GR full-blood wagyu tranches were big boys. Our office Nero would have taken at least 30 minutes to cook one through. The 250-gram steaks were removed from the grill after 12 minutes, when they threatened to overcook, but retained a shade of pink-brown-grey somewhere between devon on the turn and Kuato the mutant from Total Recall.
But: If the hotplate were hotter, I would worry about setting off the smoke alarms. How in the heck did Hanson get that dark (and unsalted, no less) steak crust on her office sandwich press? I’m not calling shenanigans, here. Just asking questions about appliance brands and cooking times.
Texture-wise, our Nero sandwich press steaks were fine, except for the hunks of fat that hadn’t properly rendered. The pre-seasoned one tasted OK-ish, as salted beef cooked over heat tends to do, but it was hardly the keto-diet office hack I was hoping for. Good Food only recommends cooking steak on a sandwich press if there are no other heating options, but you’re probably better off just ordering delivery.
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