Friday Recipe — The Return!
It’s been too long, so let’s get back to basics with an all-American classic.
The Perfect Steak & Salad
Go see your favorite butcher and tell her you need a one-pounder of God’s own cut: The ribeye.
This first step is vital. 24 hours before you grill this beauty, pat it dry with paper towels, season it liberally with kosher salt and coarse-ground pepper. Place uncovered on a plate in the fridge. Go to bed. In the morning, give it a flip. An hour before grilling time, remove it and let it come to room temperature.
Why so important? You’ll be doing a mini-dry age on the beef, reducing the moisture in the outer surface. That will make it sear in less time, allowing you to move it to the indirect heat sooner. I picked this trick up from Michael Symon, and it’s brilliant.
Also, even smart people have this idea that you should leave the beef in the fridge until the last minute, to reduce your chances of accidentally overcooking it. No, no, no! Cold beef cools off your cooking surface, resulting in a second-rate sear. And it’s all about the sear.
You’ll also need a salad.
Yes to all of the above except the cut. I’ve spoken with him and I can assure you that God does NOT eat the ribeye. God eats the strip (pick your favorite geography.. New York Kansas City wherever). If he’s really hungry he’ll eat a porterhouse.
I definitely recommend “Eat What You Want And Die Like A Man” by Steve H. Graham. Besides being an hysterically funny cookbook, it’s full of lard-oozing, artery-clogging recipes (of which i’ve tried several myself), and includes a chapter on beef aging that’s alone worth the book price. Steve uses a propane grill and cooks it at core meltdown temperature, by the way.
Overall a classic of the form, but I’m wondering if there’s a technological end-run to improve it. Had the first run of ribeye in my $90 homebrew sous-vide machine yesterday. 130 degrees for 10 hours, leaving it perfectly medium-rare from the center to within a hairs-breadth of the surface. I admittedly do need work on searing and crusting with that method, 60 seconds on a smoking stove-top griddle left the exterior good, but flavorless. OTOH, the wife liked it, saying it tasted like steak rather than smoke.
Oh my, that looks wonderful!
But so much violence in the preparation of the salad – “roughly torn,” “cut in half,” “chopped,” “smashed.” I guess that’s just the tastiest kind of creative destruction!
A BBQ grill is at a few hundred hundred degrees, the difference between room temp and fridge temp is maybe 15. I doubt that the cooling effects of the beef being a bit colder are relevant.
Still, sounds tasty.
Unless your cooking surface is catk iron (mine isn’t — yet) it makes a huge difference. The skinny little grates that ship with your typical gas or even charcoal grill simply don’t hold much heat.
Ah, that explains it. I’m used to professional-level equipment, including cast-iron grates.
What’s nice about the pro-level stuff is that the radiants weigh a good 10 pounds each.
Most of your directions sound fine, but my experience tells me to extend the time per side to 2 or 2 1/2 minutes, depending on preferred done-nesss. Then again, I don’t use indirect heat at work. From the grill to the plate, that’s me.
“You’ll also need a salad.”
What the hell is a ‘salad’? Is it made of steak?
While God does indeed prefer rib-eye steaks. You had better be going to heaven. The coldest depths of hell are reserved for people who season steaks. Thanks for the tip on searing.
While I appreciate the traditional seasoning, I’ve gone to hickory salt and green chile powder to season my steaks. There’s no other way to do it.
Looks perfect, sounds delicious.
Might just be me, but aren’t a few key steps missing?
- Night before: Pat dry, salt, pepper, place uncovered in fridge
- HAVE A COCKTAIL
- Next day: Hour before grilling, remove from fridge
- HAVE A COCKTAIL
Your right on for steaks up to about 1.5″ thick. Thicker than that and you run into the problem of having too much gray between the outer sear and the pink middle. I nice trick I learned from Cooks Illustrated for thick steaks:
Heavily season with kosher salt. I skip the pepper. Preheat the oven to 275 and put your 1.75″ steak on a rack in the oven for 20 minutes. This will get the interior to about 95 degrees as well as dry the exterior. Thicker steaks will take longer. Proceed to sear on a blistering hot grill and rest. The indirect period will not be necessary.
And there is a added bonus. Connective tissue in steaks is broken down by the enzymes cathepsins. These enzymes stop working at about 122 degrees. These enzymes are given more time to do their work by slowly bring the steak up to 95 degrees and then finishing with a blistering sear.
Unnecessary? Give it a try and you decide. What’s the worst that can happen?
Strip vs. Saratoga Ribeye? I think some more comparisons are in order….
Here they pan sear to finish, but I prefer a charcoal grill
http://www.cooksillustrated.com/recipes/article.asp?docid=918
I’ve used this method but with my gas grill. Set it to hold about 250 to warm the steaks (thick cut supermarket steaks about 6 min a side). Then take the steaks off and fire up the gas to get it as hot as possible before searing for about 2-3 min on a side. This warming method has the benefit that by warming the steaks for different lengths of time, you can take them all off cook to different doneness at the same time.
Yes, gas is not for smokey flavor but in the dead of winter it certainly appeals for convenience. By warming the steaks as above, you do render more fat which can flare up during the sear but the sear time is so short it isn’t a huge threat and the flame does achieve the smoke and temp for better flavoring.
My goal now that it is warming is to preheat the steaks on the low temp grill, then use Alton Brown’s chimney starter broiler to sear the steaks at the proper 1000 degrees in 90 seconds a side. It seems like it would be the best of both worlds.
On caveat, the dry aging works with well-marbled steaks or by the nature of the cut Ribeye. A Choice strip or tenderloin comes out way to mellow for my tastes. Seems the fat benefits most from the aging. Heavily salting the fat strip also seems to aid in flavor, no idea why, I assume it aids in rendering and migration.
Oh great. I give up red meat to eat healthier and he comes up with this. I just might have to backslide a bit this summer. A little ribeyed-rebellion is headed my way.
By coincidence, last Friday I (not Catholic) decided to cook a nice steak as well. My wife and I stopped at the local hoity toity market on the way home from Atlas Shrugged. She got some red snapper. I picked up a tenderloin steak (a.k.a. filet mignon). I only know one good way to cook a cut o’ meat like this: au poivre, rare, with a cognac sauce. Verdict: It sucked. For what should be a carefully selected and trimmed piece of meat from the tenderloin, this thing was surprisingly tough and gristly. (Usually I can serve one of these things with a butter knife instead of a steak knife.) And as a bonus, I got sick a few hours later and was laid up for the remainder of the weekend. I don’t think I’ll be buying red meat from that hoity toity market again. Ah, well; at least Mrs. Apostic got a nice piece of fish out of the deal.