Roast Beef, Late Summer Salad & Buttermilk Dressing - As Served At The Slow Food Feast, Ludlow Food Festival 2025
Main Course
Feeds 4-6
Cook Time: 1 Hour
Difficulty: Medium
Another dish I served at The Slow Food Feast at Ludlow Food Festival 2025. All the dishes were served in a feasting and sharing style on the tables.
I was very fortunate to have Great Berwick Organics donate some of their wonderful topside for this dish. Topside is a really great choice of beef - a good balance of cost, flavour and texture. This salad would work with any cuts though. Just make sure you buy as good quality as you can.
Cook the beef from room temperature - take it out of the fridge at least 1.5 hours before cooking.
A 1kg joint of topside will give you plenty of left over beef for sandwiches and fridge snacks for the days after you’ve cooked it.
The salad was made up from some wonderful vegetables from Havenhill’s Field and Kitchen. Their tomatoes are outrageously good. They donated these as they were slightly over ripe - perfect for a salad, so juicy and so sweet! They also offered some ‘almost bolted’ fennel and some extra runner beans they have spare.
You can build this salad with whatever is around you. Just think about crunch and freshness! I purposely undercooked the runner beans to leave them with plenty of texture.
This dish is really made by the buttermilk dressing. Using surplus buttermilk from making some butter with fresh free range farm eggs and the beautifully vibrant Bennett & Dunn rapeseed oil it created a bright dressing that helped make all the colours on this dish pop and tied the whole show together wonderfully well.
You can make the dressing in advance, it will last a few days in your fridge.
I like to serve the beef at room temperature or just above - you can cook it in advance, just take it out of the fridge in plenty of time before serving to bring it up to temperature.
I plated this dish up originally in a Hungry Guy style pile - all neat and lovely looking with the beef on the bottom and the salad in the centre of the plate over it. Someone I worked with plated it up with the beef on the side and I much prefer this way. It allows the diner to assemble each mouthful however they choose and there’s something really special about leaving that decision up to the guest!
INGREDIENTS:
For The Beef:
2 Tbsp Cold Pressed Rapeseed Oil
1kg (ish) Topside Beef Joint
Salt & Pepper
For The Summer Salad:
1 Medium Fennel
5-6 Runner Beans, trimmed, de-stringed and cut into 3cm pieces
2-3 Spring Onions, thinly sliced
2 Tomatoes
Pinch Salt & Pepper
For The Dressing:
2 Free Range Egg Yolks
1/2 Tsp English Mustard
150ml Buttermilk
1/2 Lemon, Juice
1/2 Garlic Clove, Peeled
1/2 Tbsp Apple Cider Vinegar
200ml Cold Pressed Rapeseed Oil
Pinch of Salt
METHOD:
Pre-heat the oven to 180C.
Generously rub the beef with rapeseed oil and season liberally with salt and pepper.
Place on a wire rack in a roasting tray and roast until the core temperature reaches around 45C for a nice medium cook.
If you haven’t got a temperature probe, you can weigh the joint and using the exact weight, cook it to the exact time at 21 minutes per 500g.
Remove from the oven and rest for at least 30 minutes, ideally 45-60 minutes.
While the beef is cooking, make the dressing.
Add the egg yolks, buttermilk, mustard, vinegar, salt and garlic to a food processor and blitz until smooth and combined.
Slowly drizzle the oil into the food processor in a very slow but steady stream to create an emulsified dressing. Season with some lemon juice before tasting and adjusting with a pinch of salt if needed. Set aside.
For the salad, bring a pan of salted water to the boil, add the runner beans and boil for 2-3 minutes until barely softened.
Drain and refresh in ice cold water. Once completely cold, drain and set aside.
Roughly chop the tomatoes into chunks, season with salt and pepper and set aside.
When you are almost ready to serve, pick and retain the fronds off the top of the fennel and set aside to garnish the dish. Shave the fennel and add to a bowl with the spring onion and the cooled runner bean pieces.
Slice the beef and arrange on the plate with tomatoes.
Dress the fennel, spring onions and runner beans generously with the buttermilk dressing before adding to the plate.
Finish with a pinch of salt over the beef and dress the plate with some extra buttermilk dressing and garnish with the fennel fronds.
