I’d been thinking about making this pudding for quite a number of months. In fact, I’ve been thinking of making a Beef & Oyster Pie of some variety after having a rather good one at Mark Hix’s gaff, in July ’08. The problem with making it was not only a bit of an aversion to shucking oysters by myself, but also finding a dinner guest(s) willing enough to eat oysters.

My opportunity came when I invited several of my fellow food bloggers to dinner. I thought there’s no way that an oyster will go uneaten in their presence!

I took the recipe for the filling from a Rick Stein recipe, but made a couple of changes, not least of which was turning the pie into a pudding. My recipe for the huge pudding I made is as below, but it’s easily scaled down if you want to cook a much smaller one.

Steak, Oyster & Stout Suet Pudding (Serves 10-12):

For the filling:

1.4kg braising steak, cut into 1-2 inch chunks

Few Tbps vegetable/groundnut oil

Some butter, about 25g - ish

1-2 Tbps plain flour

450g button mushrooms

4 onions, thinly sliced

400ml stout

500ml beef stock

1 Tbps sugar (I used golden caster sugar)

5 sprigs thyme

Few bay leaves

4 Tbps Worcestershire sauce

18 size 4 oysters

For the suet pastry:

500g self-raising flour

250g beef suet

salt & pepper

350ml cold water

Season the steak and then brown in the oil. Unless you have a huge pan, you’ll probably need to do this in several batches. Using the same pan, melt half the butter and cook the button mushrooms, whole, for a few minutes. Set these aside with the browned beef, then, still using the same pan, add a bit more oil and the rest of the butter, before adding the onions & sugar. Cook on a low heat for about 20 mins, stirring occasionally, until the onions are mostly brown.

Stir the flour into the onions, then add the stock & stout and bring to the boil, before adding the beef, mushrooms, worcestershire sauce, thyme & bay leaves. Cover, reduce the heat to low and cook for 1.5 to 2 hours, until the beef is very tender.

Whilst the beef is cooking, you can shuck the oysters and make the pastry. There are a number of sites giving instructions on how to shuck an oyster, including a few video clips, so I’d advise watching them if you haven’t done it before. It’s not as scary as it looks, but it’s a lot easier with an oyster knife than with a flathead screwdriver! It’s also fairly messy. After shucking reserve the juice, as well as the oyster itself, as both are going in the pie.

Anyway, mix the suet and flour in a big bowl, seasoning along the way. Add the cold water, bit by bit, stirring with a palate knife or metal spoon, until you get a soft dough. This should take 5 -10 minutes. Roll the dough into a ball, cut a quarter off and put to the side, for the lid. Roll the remains of the dough into a ball, again, and then roll on a lightly floured surface into a big circle of about 0.5cm thick.

Line a well greased (with butter) pyrex pudding basin, I used a 24cm/3l sized one, with the pastry. There will be folds in the pastry, as I don’t know what shape you need to roll out pastry to in order to fit a pudding basin perfectly. That’s something I didn’t learn in my Civil Engineering degree. Anyway, trim the pastry about 1cm below the lip of the bowl.

Once the beef is cooked, add the oysters plus juice and mix in, gently. Using a slotted spoon,  carefully fill the pastry lined pyrex bowl with the beef & mushrooms. Then add the liquid to the bowl, about 2 thirds of the way to the top of the meat.

Roll out the remaining pastry into a circle, again about 0.5cm thick, and as big as the top of the bowl. Fit the lid onto the top of the meat and join to the pastry already in the bowl by pinching it together with your fingers.

Cover the bowl with two layers of foil, tying in place with some string if you have any (I didn’t).

Place a plate into the biggest, deepest pan you have, before placing the bowl onto the plate. Pour some boiled water into the pan, about halfway up the side of the bowl. Put a lid on the pan, which is hopefully big enough and deep enough to have the lid still fit properly, despite the size of the bowl. I don’t have a pan big enough to do this, so put more foil over the top of the bowl and around the lip of the pan to ensure the steam could do it’s job on the pudding.

Cook for an hour, ensuring the water doesn’t boil dry in the process. To extract the pudding, first get the bowl out of the pan and remove all the foil. Then put the plate you are going to serve it on, on top of the bowl. Hold together and flip over. If you greased the bowl well enough, the pudding should easily come out.

Serve with some kind of mash & peas, if you are so inclined, but it’s pretty good on it’s own, just as it is!