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I like this post, if only for the recipe for a Ginger-Soy Marinade for steak. Haven’t tried it, but you can be sure I will.

I’m sort of confused about the blog this is from though. It’s the Top Chef’s Recipe blog, but it doesn’t really seem to be related to the Bravo TV show of the same name.

No, I don’t mean a battle where the combatants use steak for weapons, as cool as that would be.

Rather, I’m referring to what sounds like an exhaustive study of steak preparation technique, carried out by a lovely and compelling food blogger named Helen. She and her S.O. Jason face off against each other, against rib-eyes and NY Strips, and hanger steaks, and against Alton Brown, trying to come up with the most reliable method for preparing a Great Steak. This whole saga runs two long posts at Beyond Salmon: The battle of the steaks (and the sexes), and Perfect steak at last.

It’s great writing! Very entertaining, and also quite admirably methodical. But what struck me most was the method Helen arrived at. See her goal was to develop a formula, so that, as infrequently as she prepared Great Steak, it would always turn out Perfect. And by perfect she means seared and slightly crusted on the very outside, and evenly tender and juicy on the inside. It’s tricky! The bistro method gets it close, and Helen starts here too: Quick sear at very high heat, and then finish in the oven.

But here’s the amazing part: she rests the steak for ten minutes … before finishing it in the oven at a very low heat for 12 to 15 minutes!!

I’m gonna try it. Even though I think it’s still a matter of much variation to get a steak perfect, there’s something really interesting to me about her strategy of temperature and minimizing “heat disturbance”.

Armida Cooks!: Dry-Rubbed Skirt Steak

This looks terrific! She’s done a nice photograph of the steak, and I think this might induce me to try a Batali recipe too. The dry rub (that always sounds a tad suggestive to me!) is made with ground porcini mushrooms! Yowza!

Now to find a skirt steak for sale in this dumb burgh.

Not a Chef? » Blog Archive » Emeril’s Mushroom Steaks

This place just popped up on my steak radar screen today. It looks like one of those in-between food blogs. By ‘in between’ I mean, “it’s got the promise of tons of recipes, and a pretty neat layout.”

The Emeril Mushroom Steak recipe looks pretty straight-up and reasonable. I dunno if I can find black trumpets anywhere, but they’re evocative aren’t they?

Not a Chef?’s Steak category looks pretty good. I’ll keep an eye out and check back later because they promise Millions of Recipes!! FUN Stuff!

Previously, on SteakFeed …

We described our wish to compare a bistro-style steak recipe to an actual bistro steak, prepared according to the same method. Nobody from Boston signed up to eat at Hamersley’s, and that’s probably because we didn’t offer them a comp, or dangle a crisp fifty for the tab.

Anyway, since then I’ve ruined two pairs of lovely rib steaks, trying to pull off the the sear-roasted ribby recipe in the book. Okay not actually “ruined” … but my results have been on the sketchy side, especially presentationally.

The first shot was overcooked, even for The Lady, who tends toward the more done end of Medium. My steaks were thinner than those Hamersley described, so my timing was borked. I should know better, but the method here is new to me, with the brief hot pan-sear and slower oven-finish combo.

The second shot, I got the thicker bone-in rib-eye steak, and paid a LOT more attention to the timing and feel of the meat. It would have been perfect, except for one thing: since ribbyes were the bone-in type, and not well trimmed, ignoramus that I was that night, I ended up with my steaks really nicely Medium, but warped or cupped by the constriction of the thick fat band around the edges. Rookie mistake, I know! It didn’t even occur to me to score the fatty edges until the big puddle of melted thyme-garlic butter started to form in the ever-deepening well formed by each steak.

Gordon doesn’t mention it in his book, and it’s not talked about in this crib of the same recipe by Food TV. However, I’ve learned it in the best way: as basic steak handling behavior, from experience.

Anyways, I doubt The Lady will humor me again for a while with this recipe, even though I still have the Hamersley book… Maybe I can fake her out by making a different bistro rib steak…

My new mantra: With a sharp knife, make small incisions, about 1 1/2 inches apart in the fat around the outside of each steak.

Or, Grilled Steak With Spicy Shallot Sauce Recipe — ThaiTable.com.
[This is not a Thai cuisine web page, so I’ll skip the wordplay here].

We love Thai food, and we’re just getting on a bit of a roll making it at home. This recipe is not hard hard at all, and you really get maximum wow-factor because it’s VERY Thai tasting. You just need to make sure you have a few key ingredients at hand. Like fish sauce (nam pla, which you can get for a buck at any Asian market).

We made this on Saturday, and it was superfantastic! It really reminded me of a Chimichurri from Peru we did a while back. Same basic idea: perfectly grilled and sliced steak, ladled with something piquant and sour and green. YUM!

You’re really just making a condiment here, and putting it to use on an amazingly cooked piece of meat. That’s the beauty. Shallots or onion, very finely chopped, mint/basil/cilantro coarsely chopped, fish sauce, lime juice, and fiery red chilli (fresh or dried). It should be a loose sauce/salsa texture, less pourable than spoonable.

We put the steak and the sauce over rice for a dinner, with some pea pods on the side. Next time, I’ll try it as a salad, when cucumbers and tomatoes are good. Look at the Google Image Search for Nua Yang for ideas. [Trick: whenever I want to figure out a new dish or method I G.I.S. it! It helps immensely.]

Your steaks could be marinated too, with tamarind and stuff, like this Waterfall Beef Salad. But really, if you know how to get your steak perfect, who needs marinade?

Try it!! It’s really impressive.

 Sweetheart Steaks : a tragic gimmick

I am just discovering that there’s this weird old “supper club” Valentine’s Day tradition called the Sweetheart Steak. Lots of times these would be served with a couple lobster tails.

Lobel’s Butcher Shop offers this description:

“[the] goal [to] your honey’s heart, Lobel’s Sweetheart Packages—featuring our Sweetheart Steaks—are the diamond lane to your destination.

A Sweetheart Steak is a 20-ounce Boneless Strip Steak or Boneless Rib Steak butterflied into the shape of a heart.

I can’t quite figure out why you’d want to jam yourselves full of so much richness and protein on V-day, unless it’s a plot to get us feeling bloated and unsexy so we relax our romantic expetations.

As a matter of fact, now I’m thinking about it, champagne does the same thing. And creme brulee. It’s a conspiracy! All the rich “romantic” dinners you’re supposed to fill up on, leaving you feeling too fat to f*ck! Shocking! Simply SHOCKING!!

Anyway here are a couple different takes on the Sweetheart steak.

First we have Baking Betties’ Sweetheart Steaks:

This is a really old-school looking ultra-marinade recipe that must have come from a Betty Crocker or some other Better Homes type of cookbook of yore.

The picture looks nice, and I’m guessing this would be something you’d do if you had some really fat thick rib-eyes around, and your Sweetheart really doesn’t like the actual taste of steak.

Any steak recipe that starts out by saying “In a small saucepan, combine the first 15 ingredients” is too complicated for me.

Bitch bitch bitch! I know. It’s like a barbecue sauce or something. It’s probably really yummy. But why isn’t it heart shaped??

And then there’s this monstrosity:
Sweetheart Steak With Mushroom Bordelaise Net Carbs 11 from Carb-less.com. Just zoom in on that sucker and try to keep down your lunch.

Yay!!

The Boring Old Broiler Turns Out to Be a Superstar - New York Times

You can’t beat oldschool, in my book. And here we have a superstar New York Times food guy named MARK BITTMAN to tell us all about the least appreciated standard amurrikun kitchen device, the broiler, and why we should be using it all the time.

I remember very clearly my parents always always always making stuff under the broiler. And then me having to clean out the damn gross broiler pan by scraping heaping slabs of stinky grease out with a spatula. Eeesh.

The best thing about MARK BITTMAN’s article, in my view, is the revelation that the broiler pan of yore is officially an off-limits nuisance nowadays. And that officially, since we are talking Newspaper of Record here, it’s way cooler to use a skillet or grill pan under the broiler.

HA! I already knew that. :-P

I’m totally gonna try more broiling of steak now. And some scallops too! Because my Lodge grill pan is officially starting to give us emphysema in our apartment.

My friend Jeff makes the most amazing tenderloin. I’ll ask him for his recipe so I can post it here. I’d probably never make it though. I don’t have enough money to feed my friends that sort of food and I’ve got Jeff to make it for me.

What I do know so far is that he buys a whole tenderloin from a proper butcher, who preps it for him–removing the silverskin and the like. He lets it come to room temperature before grilling and while it’s hanging out, he slathers it in garlic. It takes forever to make but the wait is worth it.

Last time we had it, we did twice baked potatoes, creamed spinach and I made a chocolate with orange chocolate icing layer cake for dessert.

If I can get him to share the recipe, I’ll put it here.

maRLinda cooking up a storm…or not

I really love this site, it’s fresh and new and I just found it. I think I’m going to have to go through and figure out good recipes from here. It totally seems like there are going to be good recipes.

And the photography too, see?

I just can’t quite figure it out, the names, the kind of cooking, it just looks really yummy and fun.

If Tia says Yum Yum…Daddy sure want’s more! And I do want more… I just can’t come up with that name of that Cast Iron pots, those painted orange in Enamel…remember? (Le Creuset, my dear) Oh well..Let mommy Tia edit this later on…She knows where the pics are!

Sadly the recipes linked in the photos are passworded. Wonder why?

Meatgasm (<ahem> whippersnappers!) suggests extremely no-frills Bachelor steak preparation.

My comment: if you’re unwilling to at least use a timer, and have a fully thawed room-temperature steak, you deserve what you end up with, and will want a bottle of HP sauce on hand.

If anybody out there has ever dined on steak at a certain Hamersley’s Bistro in Boston, drop me a line. I’m getting ready to fry up some steak, bistro-style, from Hamersley’s luscious cookbook Bistro Cooking At Home and I’d like to compare notes or something.

I think it’d be fun to do a side-by-side review of a dish prepaired at a restaurant, with the same or similar dish prepaired from that restaurant’s chef’s cookbook. I’d probably pick the Sear-roasted Rib Steak With Garlic Butter (for simplicity of steak) or the Grilled Flank Steak With Coffee and Black Pepper Marinade (cause I love flank steak, and coffee and pepper, wow!)

The Bacon Guys have done this book from a bacon perspective… I think it’s time for the steak perspective.

It’s called FoodCandy Friendster for Foodies - Lance Paul Martin’s Grilled Flat-Iron Steak with Coffee and Black Pepper Marinade (and Ethical Dilemma) in Boston Dreams and Michelin Stars, and that’s got to be almost the longest steak-recipe blog-post title ever.

Sounds delicious. I’m printing it out for home.

We always have coffee and pretty much all these other ingredients on hand. And I love love love the flat-iron, duh. Nice Work Lance Paul Martin!

This comes from a relatively new “foodie” web thing called FoodCandy which I joined sometime after starting SteakFeed. I’ts neat but I rarely have time to look at it. I only found this today because they sent me a reminder that they hadn’t seen me log in in a really long time and so I went to search them for ’steak’.

Not Ketchup

The Big Kahuna of food blogs, Slashfood ran a couple steak-related items recently. Maybe they ran more but in my extreme blog catch-up cycle, I only did a simple keyword search of their RSS feed. [I’m deleting tens of thousands of blog items as we speak].

In an item about one of my favorite wine labels, Ravenswood, they point us to a nifty little recipe and recommendation from SFGate.com’s wine section: Grilled skirt steak befriends Central Coast Cabernets

The recipe is a Marinated Skirt Steak & Onion Wraps. Mmmmmmmm … skirt!

And then, I’m hoping to earn my Morton’s Merit Badge and Comp Steak dinner pretty soon by continually mentioning their stuff, so here we go again: If you want your steak to turn out just like the Morton people make it, you should have a look at their book, Morton’s Steak Bible. Slashfood says:

Morton’s Steak Bible shares some, if not all, of their knowledge of cooking red meat, as well as how to prepare just about all of their most popular steakhouse sides and desserts.

By following their guides, you may never overcook (or undercook) another steak again.

I kind of doubt that last bit, but you could at least pretend to run a clone of the Standard American Steakhouse in your apartment.

My mom has spent quite a few years in South America, doing administrative work for a group of bible translation experts. So, lately she’s just back from Peru, and I wished she would have been able to send me some Peruvian recipes, or cookbooks, or secret ingredients. Maybe she forgot.

SueZ, who is actually my sister, went to visit Mom in Lima, but I don’t think she ate steak in Peru. It didn’t sound like it. It sounded like she and her travelling friend were more concerned with getting a beer. I’ll give her the chance to explain, and maybe she did eat steak. Who knows?

So anyway, with Mom away in Peru, my tastes started to wonder what does steak taste like in Peru? I watched Bourdain eat guinea pigs, tried searching Amazon for cookbooks, and just sort of wandered around the internet trying to put together something.

There’s tons of Argentina info. But Peru is kind of the undiscovered country of cuisine. I’m betting it won’t be for long.

I predict: Peruvian is the new Spanish.

Anyway, this is supposed to have a recipe…
(more…)

This is yummy if you’re in a world with out a proper grill or even a proper grill pan.
Of course, I’m a sucker for balsamic on pretty much anything.

Rib-Eye Steak au Poivre with Balsamic Reduction