I don't get going to steakhouses. As long as you're set up for it, steak is one of the easiest foods to make spectacular. Good steak really boils down to one thing: the quality of the meat. Everything else you do to it will either BRING OUT the quality of the steak, or generally make it worse, you can't really make bad meat good. In Canada, and especially in Alberta, you can get pretty good meat at Costco, and I'll do a post on our relationship with Costco in a bit, but we're kind of getting ahead of ourselves. Get a good grill, get a good cut and master your technique. I'm being kind of reductive here, because there are ways to get around a bad cut, but I'm a bit of a snob when it comes to steak.
Your grill is the first step. Size of grill doesn't matter, but the higher the BTUs, the better, generally speaking. You want to maillard reaction the shit out of that. As a very general rule, the things that
cause cancer are the things that taste good, and the charring of the meat is what creates the best flavour compounds. Science! Aside from "more power", you also want to have ceramic coated cast iron grills, NOT stainless! Stainless is for suckers, by which I mean, they don't retain heat as well. If you don't or can't or won't have a grill, then a heavy bottomed pan is an acceptable alternative, with a good oven and a really good oven mitt. The heavy bottom is important, cast iron is good, but if you're not going cast iron, make sure it's oven safe.
Tenderloin - This is the "filet" of the cow. It is also the most expensive cut. If you're eating this, you're doing it with your pinkies up. As the name would suggest, it's the most tender meat, and as such, is highly prized. I hate it. It's not as well marbled as the ribs (see below), which is why Filet Mignon is wrapped in bacon prior to cooking. Don't get me wrong, this is a good piece of meat, I'm just a savage who doesn't appreciate the finer things in life.
Rib Steak - This is a steak cut from the rib primal (one of the eight basic beef cuts in butchering), this is basically sliced off of prime rib roast, but with the bone on. When you order this at a restaurant, they know that you know your shit. This is my favourite steak, bar none. Having the bone on will impart slightly more flavour, and have the second most palatable gristle on a side of beef (important for those of you concerned about your joint health), but will also make it slightly harder to guage doneness, as the bone will conduct heat, so tread cautiously. Pick a well marbled piece (which isn't hard to do, because this cut is among the most heavily marbled on the cow), and you're good to go. This is also known as "cowboy steak" as back in the old west, it was what was served on the trail, because the bone made for a convenient handle (this may be apochryphal), but most rib steaks have the bone trimmed down though. Some restaurants will serve an obscenely large cut of this steak with full bone (or two) called a Tomahawk steak, usually for two people. In my opinion, this is unnecessary. Just order two smaller steaks.
Rib Eye - This is pretty much the same as the rib steak, except that it doesn't have the bone or the bone-adjacent meat. Easier to cook than rib steak, and smaller at the same thickness, this is an excellent compromise to budget, space, and common sense. This is what we make at home. Going to Costco and buying a whole boneless rib primal will run you about $150-160 these days. Pop that bad boy in the deep freeze for about 3 hours, then use a bread knife to cut it into between 18-22 1-inch steaks. Pop them into freezer bags (marinade optional) and you've got yourself steak dinners for a fraction of the price of The Keg. Hell, Gotham in downtown Vancouver charges that much for their Tomahawk, and it's a la carte (I found out the hard way that that means no sides). Yeesh. Ellen and I usually bag two at a time, and split one for lunch and another for dinner. Economical, delicious and it really makes the co-workers jealous.
Striploin - AKA the New York Steak. You know it, and you love it. This one is the most "steaky" looking steak. A good balance between tenderness and flavour, this one is probably the most well known, and the easiest steak to make well. Generally well marbled, and reasonably tender. This is the kind of steak commonly used for steak sandwiches (the kind where its a whole steak on a piece of garlic bread), and peppersteak. This one has a fat cap, lined with that gristle I was talking about before. Unlike tougher gristles, the piece that comes with a striploin is adjacent to the fat, which means that you're not getting a crazy large gob of it somewhere in the middle of the meat. If you're the type to cut the fat off your steak, don't order this cut. And stop reading my blog. You're a horrible person.
Sirloin - Of the cuts listed so far, top sirloin and sirloin tip are the two most inexpensive. They can also be the most flavourful, but also is the least tender. I wouldn't ever eat a sirloin that was more than medium rare. This is the cut of choice for "steak dishes" like surf and turf or Steak Oscar. The quality of the meat IS good enough to stand on it's own, but if you're going to drown a steak in hollandaise, this is the one you want to do it with.
Flank or Skirt steak - These are the most inherently flavourful cuts, but this is because they are from
the hardest working, and therefore "toughest" cuts of beef. You don't want to eat this as a steak, rather, you should be cutting this thinly across the grain, marinating for long periods, and stirfrying it quickly over high heat. If you must cut it at the table, then it's low and slow braising, and probably served with a chimichurri of some kind (I prefer using lime juice rather than wine vinegar). But that's not really my wheelhouse.
(SIDE NOTE: T-bone steaks are a special case. They are a bone in cut of meat that include a tenderloin and a striploin portion, and are largely for macho-men and fence sitters. I don't think too highly of T-bones, because you should really decide what you want from a steak and focus on that. Also, the bone adds complexity in the cooking phase that I don't really want to have to deal with. In the US, extra thick T-bones are known as Porterhouse Steaks, which are essentially a whole cow on a plate and if you order one of these monstrosities, you are either a remorseless eating machine or you're overcompensating for something. The name can be confusing to people in certain Commonwealth countries where a "Porterhouse" is a colloquial name for striploins.)
Wow. That's a lot of meat. Once you've decided on your cut, you can optionally decide to marinade. Good marinades will have something to enhance the flavour of the meat, like rosemary, mustard or galangal (my favourite). Also, alcohol can help to break down muscle fibres (red wine, beer or even hard liquors), and garlic is always good for everything. Salt and pepper are key. Salt will help pull moisture from the meat during the cooking process, and pepper is a natural tenderizer. Add anything else you like your meat to taste like. I've arranged the list of steaks above in order of tenderness, so tenderloins will require much less "marination" than skirts or flanks. You can get away with marinating a Rib steak for an hour (if at all), but a flank steak should spend at least a day submerged.
After you've decided if marinating is right for you, it's important to remember that steak should be at room temperature before you cook it. If it's colder than room temperature, you will find it's really difficult to get the steak a nice even medium rare. Take it out of the fridge about an hour before cooking and you'll be golden.
From here there are the two main methods of cooking steak, as I mentioned above: grilling or sear-and-broil.
Grilling is just what it sounds like. Cooking over an open flame or charcoal. Charcoal is finicky, but will impart more of those delicious maillard flavour compounds. In either case, the principle is the same, get the grill screaming hot, then flop the steak down. Flip it once halfway through, and you're pretty much done. Cooking times will vary depending on how thick the cut is, how you like your steak and how hot your grill is. For a 1-inch steak at room temperature, follow this chart: Blue: 1 min a side Rare: 2 mins a side Med-Rare: 4 mins a side Medium: 6 mins a side Med-well: 8 mins a side Well done: who cares? If you're cooking it this long, you don't really like food, do you? Halfway into each sides' cooking time, you can give the steak just less than a quarter turn, and this will give it the nice diamond shaped cross hatching you see in Keg commercials. Excellent if you're trying to impress someone, AND serving the steak whole. Pull it off the grill, onto a warm plate and LET IT REST for 5-8 mins (under tented foil, if you wanna get really Jamie Oliver) before you serve. If you cut into it right away, it'll leak it's juices, and you'll have wasted a good piece of steak and about two hours of my typing. Let it rest.
Sear-And-Broil is just what it sounds like. Set your oven to broil, and put your cast iron pan in it to heat. Did I mention to get a good oven mitt? Pat the meat dry and brush off any bits of spice or garlic and brush with a thin layer of oil with a high smoke point. I use Grapeseed, but canola, sunflower or veggie oil will do. Olive oil is the worst, and leaves a shitty taste when it burns. Once the oven is at full temp, turn your largest burner to high heat, and take the pan out of the oven and onto the burner. Sear your steak for about a minute per side and throw it back into the oven. The broiling times are the same as the cooking times, but without flipping, so for medium-rare, you'll want to leave it in for 8 mins. Again, once you take it out of the pan, you should tent it with foil on a warm plate and let it rest.
Keep in mind that you don't have to have one whole steak per person... if amount of food or cost is an issue, after the meat has rested, you can slice it before plating, and dish it out that way. This allows you to present it however you'd like and gives more room for sides and creativity with plating. Keep in mind that most steaks are at least 6oz, and Health Canada Dietary Guidelines say that you should be eating only 2-3 servings of meat, at 4oz a piece. Splitting an 8oz steak is perfectly reasonable, and you should really be eating more veggies than a giant hunk of red meat anyway. However, food culture being what it is in North America, everyone usually gets their own, cooked to order. And there's nothing wrong with that now and again, is there?
Typically, steak pairs best with mushrooms, but I know a lot of you are sissies who "don't like the texture" so you can serve whatever veg you like. I prefer fries to mashed with steak, but then again, fries are pretty much my favourite food, so what does that say about me? Furthermore, what does it say about you that you're reading a food post from a guy whose favourite food is fried potatoes?
Addendum: I saw an intriguing video on the internet that advocated an inversion of the traditional sear-and-broil method as detailed above. In this bake-and-sear method, you bake the steak at low temp (225F) for as long as it takes to get the steak up to an internal temperature of 145F (med-rare), between 45-60 mins. After it comes out of the oven, let it rest for 5-8 mins, then sear it at high heat on the cooktop on a pre-heated pan for a minute a side. This method is definitely unconventional but it offers a few benefits over the traditional sear-and-broil method: 1) the pre-resting means that the steak is ready to serve immediately 2) baking the meat first means that it will be less moist on the surface, allowing more charring to happen when it's seared 3) because the baking is done at low temperatures, the meat will be more even temperatured throughout, so that there will be more pink medium rare goodness and not the concentric rings of varying layers of doneness as in traditional cooking. Also, because it's not dependent on cast iron pans, you can do a lot of steak at once in a good convection oven, and I think that it's possible to finish them on a grill rather than a cooktop, again for mass, but also to get those nice grill marks that you see on TV. So I guess I'll try that the next time I do steak and I'll let you know.
Finally, if any of you have your own steak secrets or pairings, I'd love to hear them in the comments. In fact, I'd love to hear your comments on any post I do. Hint, hint!
