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”.

This is so great. Imagine the following story, if you will:

So, it’s 3PM and you’re sitting in front of your favorite coffee shop, talking to a friend about his new web page. Next thing you know, you’re standing next to a homeless guy who’s stumbled up.

“Hey buddy,” he whispers, “I’ve got about sixty pounds of T-bones in this backpack.” WHAT!?

He’s offered you the whole thing for thirty bucks. What a deal! But you’ve only got a twenty on ya.

Most of your bastard friends had wandered off at this point, as this fella seemed “sketchy”. And even the couple that stayed wouldn’t lend you the cash! But you just couldn’t let this go by. So you bought one of his steaks for three bucks. It’s a T-bone, probably cost around eight bucks in the store, and it will taste great with the salad you’re going to make.

Now, the thing is your friends are all saying, “What are you doing!? I wouldn’t eat that!” Which you don’t get. It’s sealed, dated today, he kept them on ice, (yes, in his bag,) and it’ll be cooked. What’s the big deal, bitch?

I’ll tell you what the big deal is, bitch! You’re not armed with the latest amazing bacteriological detection technology, the SensorFresh Q, because it’s only 2001 and it hasn’t even been invented yet!!!

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.

Okay kids, there’s three things you gotta remember.

1. Wash your hands
2. Cook your meat, and
3. Stay the hell out of South Texas

Otherwise, rare worms will eat your brains!

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.

In an informative article, Which steak tastes the best? Mark Schatzker of Slate Magazine proclaims “Marbling, schmarbling.”

I liked reading this piece, because of a few different reasons.

1. the little guy wins [alderspring.com]
2. the happy cows win [nimanranch.com]
3. the happy cows get eaten
4. nobody really knows for sure why or can guarantee good results except for the factory guys, who fare the worst and are most expensive, HA!

In other news, I don’t know, maybe I will buy some twenty-two-buck-a-pound steaks…

I’m going to be breaking this website over the next couple days, because I’m sick of the site layout, and I have a new one i like and so I’m going to put it in place, but it won’t be pretty.

So I thought I’d share a pretty Halloween picture for you all.

Angry Ken
A steak that needs sauce to be eaten, is scarcely a steak at all.

Dirty steaks on a plate

Doesn’t this look and sound delicious?

NPR : Dinner in the Fireplace

I’d try making it, but my tiny apartment-sized Char-Broil Patio Caddie is all seven ways wrong for it. Especially: “burning down the cord wood (maple, oak and ash) to large embers.”

The recipe, as it is, that rounds out the NPR story gives some really funtamental pointers as well, like using a cooling rack instead of putting your finished steak directly on the plate.

I really need to figure out how to get some, because, I’m not sure I want to go through the rest of life never having tasted steak “like a lustful, illicit encounter in a hotel room.”

Maybe in Vegas?