There’s a particular kind of quiet anxiety that belongs to the British living room, and it has a name: the buffering wheel. You’ve queued up the thing you’ve been meaning to catch up on for three weeks, and now the little circle is spinning, patiently, the way a kettle is patient right before it commits. You don’t touch it. You’ve learned better. Touching it is how you make it worse.
The wheel belongs to BBC iPlayer, the service that turned up — after four years of trials, rebrandings and the BBC Trust’s slow, ceremonial approval — on 27 July 2007, which is to say it was delayed so thoroughly that by the time it arrived, a fair few of the people it was built for had already given up and gone back to watching whatever was on. It’s funded by the licence fee, which means it costs you nothing you can see and everything you can’t, in the way of a bill that arrives whether you’ve used the thing or not.
What gets under the skin, though, is the window. Everything on iPlayer is on a 30-day catch-up timer — you have thirty days to watch the programme, and then it’s gone, quietly, the way a pub garden closes in November. Since October 2014, when the BBC stretched the window out from seven days to thirty, it’s been a kind of national clock: thirty days to catch up, thirty days to remember, and then the content is no longer available, and you have to accept that some things you simply will not get round to.
A steak-and-ale pie runs on exactly the same logic. You’ve got a window. You make it while the ingredients are still on the shelf, you eat it while it’s still worth eating, and after a while the pastry goes soft, the gravy goes a shade sad, and the whole thing becomes “this content is no longer available.” Both reward the people who don’t wait until the last day.
Ingredients
- 600g beef shin or chuck, cut into bite-size cubes — the shin is the patient cut, the one that takes its time, like the buffering wheel
- 2 tbsp olive oil or beef dripping
- 1 large onion, roughly chopped
- 2 garlic cloves, crushed
- 300ml dark ale — a proper brown or bitter, not the thin stuff
- 150ml beef stock
- 1 tbsp tomato purée
- 1 tbsp plain flour
- 2 sheets ready-rolled shortcrust pastry (or one sheet plus a case, for a full-screen top)
- For the glaze: 1 egg, beaten, with 1 tsp Marmite and a splash of ale stirred in
- Salt and black pepper
- To serve: mash — the only correct accompaniment, because the gravy is the point
Method
- Heat the oil or dripping in a big heavy pan until it’s just about to spit — the “just about to boil” stage, the moment before the kettle commits. Add the beef and get it a proper sear on all sides. Don’t rush this; the shin is the cut that rewards patience, and nobody ever made a good pie by rushing the browning. It should look the way a loading bar looks at 99% — almost there, and you can feel it.
- Tip the beef out and set it aside. In the same pan, tip in the onion and let it go soft and sweet for about ten minutes. This is the part that takes the longest and the part everyone skips, then wonders why their pie tastes like it’s stuck on a two-second buffering loop. Soft onions are the difference between a pie that plays smoothly and one that keeps dropping out.
- Add the garlic for the last minute, then return the beef to the pan with all its juices. Sprinkle over the flour and the tomato purée and stir for a minute, just to take the edge off the rawness — it’s the little splash of stock you add when a pan dries out, except here the flour is doing the work.
- Pour in the ale and the beef stock, give it a good stir, and bring it up to a simmer. Then turn the heat down to the lowest setting that still counts as on. This is the buffering wheel in the oven: it’s doing its thing, quietly, and the only correct thing to do is to go away and not touch it. An hour and a half to two hours, until the beef is falling apart and the liquid has gone dark and thick. If it dries out, a splash more stock. If it looks like it’s about to walk off, a lid on.
- While that’s going, make the glaze: beat the egg with the teaspoon of Marmite and a splash of ale until it’s the colour of a very dark biscuit. Set it aside. You’ll want it before the pie does.
- When the beef is done, tip it into a pie dish with all the gravy. You’re looking for the consistency of a loading screen — thick enough to coat the back of a spoon, not so thick it’s gone solid. Taste it. It should be dark, malty, a little savoury and quietly confident, the way a programme looks on the “Now Playing” screen in the second before it starts.
- Lay the pastry over the top. If you’re doing a full top, crimp the edges and make a few little slits for the steam to get out — the steam is the buffering, and if you don’t let it out it finds a way, usually through the pastry in the one place you didn’t want it to. Brush the top with the Marmite-ale glaze. It’ll come out a shade darker than a normal pastry top, which is the point: a proper iPlayer pie should look like it’s a few episodes deep.
- Bake at 200°C (fan 180°C) for about 35 to 40 minutes, until the pastry is a deep, even golden and the gravy is bubbling through the slits. The bubbling is the signal that it’s finished buffering and you can finally press play.
- Leave it for ten minutes before you cut it. Ten minutes is the minimum “this content is no longer available” buffer — the gravy needs to set up a little, or it’ll pour out the moment the knife goes in, which is the pie equivalent of the stream dropping out at the worst possible moment.
- Serve with mash and, if you like, a little extra gravy on the side, because the gravy is the point and the pastry is just the packaging.
Veggie variant: swap the shin for about 400g finely chopped button mushrooms and a tin of drained red or white lentils (about 200g). Sear the mushrooms hard first so they’ve got some colour, and use vegetable stock instead of beef. The ale, the Marmite-ale glaze and the pastry are all unchanged — a vegetarian pie that still looks like it’s a few episodes deep.
The pie keeps for about three months in the freezer, which is rather more than the 30-day window and rather less than the time you’ll spend thinking about it. Eat it while it’s still on the timer, because the thing about both iPlayer and a steak-and-ale pie is that the window does close, eventually, and the only people who get to the good bit are the ones who didn’t wait until the last day.
