Two things I noticed which I feel compelled to tell you about - firstly, tinned haggis is far more readily available than it is south of the border. Unsurprising you might think, but I would have expected the Scots to eschew the tinned variety in favour of the real thing. As it was, just about every supermarket or convenience shop I went into had at least one brand on its shelves. Secondly, I don't think I have ever seen so many branches of Greggs the Bakers in one place. There seemed to be one on every other road I walked down, and sometimes more than one, much like the Starbucks, Costas and Pret a Mangers that line and litter the streets of London. Look at this map of their locations from Greggs' website - the centre of Glasgow is a veritable sea of G's.
But what do Greggs have to do with tins? Well, nothing really. I can't actually remember the last time I went into one, but seeing so many of them did take me back to my sixth form days, when we no longer had to eat from the school canteen but were allowed to go out to the high street for lunch. The local Greggs was a favourite haunt, and their famous 'steak bakes' a particular treat. While I had no great urge to try one again, it reminded me that I had a tin of Marks and Spencer Chunky Steak in my stash, and a roll of puff pastry in the freezer that needed using...Would it be possible to create my own steak bake in a homage to the good old days at school (and the many thousands of them that must be being made and purchased daily in Glasgow)? It had to be tried on my return home.
This being M&S of course, this is not just a tin of Chunky Steak. It's a tin of "Carefully selected tender chunks of British beef in a rich gravy made with stock". Then you open it up, and realise that no, it's just a tin of chunky steak. Doesn't look massively promising at this stage.
Still, the steak is indeed chunky, with a good meaty texture, and only slightly chewy when I do my customary taste straight from the tin before any further heating/cooking/general faffing about.
As it's only a small tin, I use the whole thing, dumping it out onto one side of a piece of the ready-made JusRol pastry which has been in my freezer almost as long as the tin has been languishing on my shelf.
Unfortunately I took the puff pastry out of the freezer a little earlier than necessary, so it has gone rather softer than is ideal. Folding it over to seal up the 'bake' is therefore somewhat tricky, and a bit of patching up is needed, making the end result look...well, like a bit of a mess frankly. A misteak bake, if you like. The grainy-looking bits in the picture are sort-of intentional though - I add a smear of grain mustard to the non-steak side of the pastry before sealing it up, partly in an endeavour to 'pimp up' the traditional Greggs delicacy, and partly as I just ruddy well love mustard. But in the patch-up job, some of the mustard somehow ends up on the outside of the pastry. Oh well, it'll taste good whatever. I give the bake a few diagonal scores with a knife, brush it with milk and pop it in the oven at 180 degrees.
15 minutes later, it comes out of the oven, with some of the gravy starting to bubble out of the bits where my attempts at patching up the pastry haven't really held up very well. It's also ever so slightly burned on top, which I realise was because I rather stupidly turned on the grill as well as the oven, so it's had an extra cooking from above. But it does look considerably more tasty than when it went in to the oven.
One of the great advantages of any kind of pastry or pasty like the steak bake is its portability; they are very much food designed to be eaten on the go, quickly and with minimum mess, whether that be down a mine (as with the original Cornish pasties), on a train (having quickly grabbed one at one of the many stands at railway stations), or wolfed down on the hoof on Barkingside High Road while walking back to school (as with the steak bakes of my youth). My version sadly falls down on this front; what looked like a largely solid mass in the tin has melted down into a great pool of gravy, possibly a little runnier than in Greggs' bakes, which the thin puff pastry wouldn't stand a chance of containing were it not served up on a plate. Try to eat this from a paper bag while in a rush to get somewhere and you'll end up with gravy all over you, and pitying looks from passers-by.
That said though, the gravy is pretty damn tasty, so an excess of it is no bad thing when eating it in the comfort and solitude of your own kitchen, with the aid of a plate, knife and fork. A spoon wouldn't go amiss either. Maybe even a straw (which would definitely get you some strange looks out in public). Anyway, the beef stock provides a real meatiness to the gravy, with extra richness coming from the tomato puree in the ingredients. The grain mustard adds a nice contrast in flavour as well as an extra texture as you crunch mustard seeds between your teeth. I'm sure Greggs wouldn't ever dream of adding mustard to their famous steak bakes, but in my opnion they should - it's a winner here.
There are still a good amount of chunky steak pieces, which warmed through retain their bite but are thankfully no longer chewy, and the pastry, although thin, is nice and crisp. I quite like the slightly charred taste the burnt patches bring to it, though I doubt a bake looking like this would pass muster to be sold in a Greggs shop.
So, perhaps not the most successful attempt ever at recreating their classic recipe. I suppose Marks' tinned steak was made more with a traditional top-crust pie in mind, rather than the 'pastry pocket' of the steak bake, but I made a bit of a pigs' ear of that side of things too. Taste-wise though, it ticks all the boxes - you can't really go too far wrong with a dish that combines meat, gravy and pastry, which I suppose is why Greggs' steak bake is so popular - and, by extension, why there are so many places to buy one should you find yourself in Scotland's largest city any time soon.
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