If you ask someone to name the Big Five game, they’ll probably tell you: lion, leopard, elephant, rhino and and hippo. But they’d be wrong. Through some horrific injustice some idiot decided that buffalo deserved to be in there instead of hippos. Buffalo! Glorified African cows! Can you believe that? Buffalo wouldn’t even deserve to get into the big five game of Scotland, let alone Africa…

…hang on…

Highland Cow Deer Horse …stoats …

Alright, it’d get on there. But only just.

Anyway, buffalo, they’re rubbish. They’re basically just cows. They’re clearly going to taste like cow, but let’s find out anyway:

Blind Taste Test

Stu – “Is it buffalo?”, I said, looking at the plate. “It looks a lot like beef…” I continued, taking a bite, before adding “and tastes a lot like beef.”

“No.” grimaced Suze.

Cue me listing a dozen or so other animals, from giraffe to kudu… before Suze eventually admitted it was buffalo.

So… buffalo tastes a lot like beef. Maybe leaner … and therefore less tasty, but with a slight sweetness that you don’t get from beef… but, yeah… basically beef.

The Recipe – Buffalo Steaks with Blue Cheese and a Bourbon Glaze – Serves 2

Suze – The thinking behind this recipe was pretty straightforward. Buffalo makes me think of the US, and so does bourbon. Job done. The fact that Stu associates buffalo with Africa didn’t put him off the scent, however! The internets indicate that people (Americans) can get pretty wound up about a bourbon glaze – what should and shouldn’t be included etc – but I think this one tasted pretty good. Let us know if you agree!

Ingredients

2 buffalo steaks

80ml (1/3 cup) bourbon

80g (1/3 cup) soft dark brown sugar

a tablespoon of dijon mustard

Juice of half a lime

splash of Worcestershire sauce

tabasco sauce or cayenne pepper to taste

blue cheese to serve

Method

Mix together the brown sugar, bourbon, mustard, lime juice, Worcestershire sauce and tabasco or cayenne together until the sugar dissolves. Put the above together with the steaks in a tupperware box or plastic bag and shake so that the meat is thoroughly coated. Refrigerate for at least 2 hours, overnight if you like. Shake it every now and then. When you’re ready to begin, take the meat out of the fridge for about 40 mins so it can come up to room temperature. Pre-heat and oil a grill pan. Pop the steaks on, and cook to your liking. We had ours pretty rare. Meanwhile, pop some of the leftover glaze into a saucepan and heat to thicken it up. Serve with the warmed glaze poured over and some blue cheese crumbled on top. We also had a green salad and some panko-dusted sweet potato fries with ours.

The Verdict

This was a bit of an anticlimax, wasn’t it? The thing that’s basically a cow tastes a lot like cow. A tad leaner, a tad sweeter… probably not as good, but basically a cow.

Well, that got rounded up a bit faster than usual… what now? Anyone got any cow jokes? (Suze Edit – How do you know which cow is going on holiday? It’s the one with a wee-calf!)

I knew a guy who was scared of cows. He saw eating beef as part of his ongoing war on cows. I wonder if he’d be scared of buffalo? It’d be a marginally less tasty war for him…