15 MiSTEAKS Most Beginner Cooks Make

welcome back to one dish breakdowns the series where I'm taking one dish at a time and figuring out as many skills and tips and tricks that I can possibly teach you from just cooking one dish and this series came about because I was cooking with my friend Juan who was a beginner cook who really didn't have too many skills in the kitchen and through cooking with him I was realizing how many skills that I take for granted that are just super natural to me but they might not be natural to a lot of you so for episode three I'm back cooking with one and he wanted to learn how to cook a steak dinner super standard stuff but you can learn so many skills in the kitchen just from cooking a basic steak dinner so we're gonna be breaking down everything you need to know about cooking steak we're gonna make a few side dishes and hopefully you're gonna learn a ton along the way so before we get started cooking we got to pick a steak first which is tip number one picking the proper steak which can be very overwhelming because there's a ton of different cuts there's different names for those cuts but basically steaks come from the upper back region of the cow and the reason people love steak so much is because that area on the cow only moves when the cow goes side to side making it very tender compared to the other muscles on the cow that are moving all the time making them tougher so you don't have to cook a steak that long for it to be super delicious and very tender so when it comes to cooking steak at home there's four main cuts that you should know about you've got the sirloin you've got the ribeye you've got the filet and you have the strip steak and they all have their pros and cons it's really a preference thing I would suggest you try them out over time seeing what you like the best for instance the ribeye is delicious because it's super fatty but some people don't like it so fatty whereas the filet is super tender but it's a little harder to cook because it doesn't have that fat to protect you from overcooking your steak so I'm going with the strip steak also called a New York strip steak and the first thing you've got to make sure you do is dry off that steak whatever packaging it comes in a lot of times your steak is gonna be giving off a little moisture and if it's not patted dry you're gonna be boiling your steak and not getting that delicious crust that you want and I chose a strip steak because I like the balance of this steak it's not too fatty but it's not too lean it's right in between you can see all of that marbling in the steak and really that's just fat that's running through the muscle that when it breaks down is going to keep your steak nice and juicy and most strip steaks will have a chunk of fat running down the side and this is different than the marbling that's going through the fat and when I was talking to one he didn't want that fat on the side he didn't like the chewiness of it so that's tip number three don't be scared to trim that extra fat there's no problem with that actually I prefer trimming that fat because that fat isn't going to render down like the interior marbling that fat will probably end up being chewy so you can trim that off and what I'm gonna do is just chop it up into little pieces so we're still gonna use that but you'll see that in a later tip the fourth tip is you want to make sure that you heavily salt your steak because that salt has to carry through the entire steak it's a pretty thick piece and you're not getting any seasoning on the interior of the steak you would have to brine it or let it marinate for days to get it on the inside so make sure you have a good amount of salt so it can carry through and season the entire bite number five is once that steak is salted you want to make sure you leave it out at room temperature for at least 30 minutes before you cook it you can definitely go longer than that and this is where people get a little scared they don't like the idea of leaving meat out at room temperature they think it always has to be refrigerated but if it's not at room temperature if it's coming straight from the coldness of the refrigerator and goes into a hot pan it's gonna lower the temperature of the pan which is not good for getting a nice crust so you want to make sure it's warmed up a bit before it goes into the pan and also by leaving it there with the salt on it you can see it's starting to sweat a bit some of that moisture is being pulled from the top layer of the steak which is great for developing a good crust if we can get some of that moisture out it's really gonna help our crust development in the long term so now that the steak is prepped it's coming to room temperature we can move on to some side dishes and I asked one what do you wanted to make to complete the dinner and he said broccoli he actually said sauteed broccoli which is perfect because that's a classic combination with a steak dinner but I told him that sauteed broccoli probably isn't the best bet because when you're sauteing something you don't have as much surface area so if we were to sauté in a pan you could see you could only get a few florets in there so I told him let's roast the broccoli because when you roast you're doing it on a big baking sheet so you have so much more surface area and when you have more surface area you have more contact on the vegetables which means you can cook more at once you get more browning which ultimately leads to more flavor so we are going with roasted broccoli to prep the broccoli all you have to do is cut off the florets and even pieces and then a bonus tip is you can definitely use the rest of the broccoli a lot of people would throw this away but that is delicious roasted broccoli stems are incredible so what I do is I just take the stem and go around it and just chop up some pieces and these pieces can be a little smaller because they're more dense than the florets so they're gonna take a little longer to cook and you can keep chopping that up until you get to the very end that's where it gets a bit tough and you can just throw that piece out so tip number seven is saving on cleaning by using less dishes so in this case instead of putting the broccoli in a bowl and using it we can go right on to the roasting pan by just adding some olive oil to the pan adding the broccoli and then just mixing that up with your hands until all of the broccoli is well coated with the olive oil because one of the main reasons people don't cook is the cleanup so it's always good to be thinking about how to minimize your cleanup and by using less dishes boom you're saving time so I turn my oven on 450 degrees which is a great roasting temperature you want a nice high heat to roast vegetables properly and I let that preheat for about 10 minutes and right before I threw the broccoli in the oven I actually wrapped up a potato in some tinfoil and just threw that on the tray because want to mention making mashed potatoes and the dish definitely needed something else but mashed potatoes just felt a little too complex for a beginner with all of these other things going on so I figured by just roasting a potato that would be a really simple side dish that that won't overwhelm the entire cooking process now tip number 8 is when your broccoli is roasting you don't want to mess with it every time you open the oven you're losing a ton of heat and we preheated that oven we got it prepared to roast properly so when you keep opening it and messing with the vegetables you're not gonna get a great roast you're not gonna get good color so you just want to let that hang out as long as you have enough oil on the veggies you shouldn't have any issues with burning and if you just keep that there for like 12 minutes those things are going to be crispy so I checked them at about 12 minutes and they looked good but they weren't perfect so that takes us to our next tip which is using your intuition feeling things out in the cooking process so if you open the oven and they just don't look like they should put them back in there let them roast a little longer your oven could be a little less hot than someone else's oven there's a lot of different factors at play so just feel it out don't be so attached to a recipe or you know someone telling you a certain way to do it so now that our broccolis finished roasting I took that out of the oven and but I let the potato hang out in the a little longer it's gonna take a much longer time to cook and now it's time to cook our steak and the question is what hand do we use to cook our steak a lot of people have issues figuring out the right pan to use so the next tip is always use your heaviest hand you want a pan that's nice and thick that's gonna retain a lot of heat that's gonna give you a nice even cook so in my dream world I'm using the cast iron that's my favorite pan for cooking steak inside but using a cast iron properly can be a bit challenging and we'll save that for another video so I'm just going with this heavier nonstick pan that I have so now that we've got our pan picked out what oil do we use well you remember that fat that we cut off earlier we can repurpose that fat we're gonna stay within the the cow family and just use the fat that came off that actual steak and render that down so all you have to do is take those pieces put your pan on a medium heat and just start rendering down at those pieces which is great because one we get a delicious cooking oil that's gonna give you extra flavor on your steak number two it's free it didn't cost you any extra money and number three those little pieces once they're rendered down that is like steak bacon it is so delicious much better than chewing on a fatty piece of steak so once you've rendered down your fat you've got your cooking oil you can always dump some off if it's too much and the next tip is making sure your pan it's properly preheated before the steak goes in you don't want a cold pin you'll never develop a crust if you put your steak into a cold pan so what I like to do with caution of course is just hold my hand over the pan about two inches above the pan and if it's uncomfortable after like two to five seconds that's a good sign that your pan is preheated and your steak is ready to go in the oil so let's talk about cooking your actual steak and there are so many different techniques for cooking steak there's some crazy ones out there you've got the reverse sear you've got the sous-vide you've got flipping at a million times I've tried pretty much everything but I always tend to go back to the same technique which is pretty simple just giving it a really hard sear on both sides developing a nice crust and then finishing it off at a low heat in the oven just to make sure it is cooked through so that's what we're gonna do we're gonna develop that crust just let it sit on one side and really sizzle away and you can check that after a few minutes just to see where your crust is at and right at this point it was pretty good I could tell it was about 30 seconds to a minute away you're just looking for a nice even Brown this throughout the entire crust and then it was time to flip it and give it that brown on the other side so the next tip is taking advantage of convection heat which means keep coming from all sides right now we are cooking with direct heat the steak is touching the hot surface of the pan which is great for developing across but it's not always great for cooking your steak all the way through because if you're just using direct heat it's very easy to overcook your steaks so right when the steak is done I like throwing it in a very low temperature oven like 250 degrees which is just gonna cook the steak through a bit it's going to render out the last of that fat and make sure it's nice and pink on the inside but not red not rare because I like my steaks medium rare once your steak has been in the oven for a few minutes just feel the surface if it has a little bit of give that's a good sign you don't want it to be super firm but you don't want it to be super bouncy somewhere in between should be a good medium-rare and when that's ready you're gonna take the steak out and you need to let it rest a bit because the juices need time to reabsorb to settle a bit in the steak if you cut into it right away they're going to just drip right out and you'll have a dry steak you need that juice [Music] it's pretty ironic that I overcooked the steak just slightly this is more of a medium than a medium-rare like I enjoy my steaks but you know that's that's another tip I would say don't don't be so hard on yourself this stuff happens in the kitchen you're not perfect every time next time you'll get better you won't make the same mistakes for me I'm filming it's it's tough to film and cook and I think I just threw it in the oven for slightly too long maybe the oven had a lot of heat in there from roasting the broccoli because I turned it down from 450 to 250 I think there was a lot of heat still in the oven rather than just putting the oven on 250 so I learned and you know hopefully next time I'll perfect it so when I was cooking with one we had the steak and the broccoli ready but the potato was taking a long time potatoes take an eternity to cook through so we wanted to eat we didn't want the steak to get super cold so we just pulled the potato out and I was feeling the potato and the fork was going in but I could tell that it was still a little hard on the inside so the next tip is calling an audible going off course a little bit because with cooking things are constantly going wrong they're not turning out how you want them to turn out and you need to be able to think on the spot and change things up a bit so for me what I did was I took out the potato and then I sliced it up into little rounds rather than keeping it like a whole roasted potato and then I had all of that delicious steak juice so I took that steak juice and I added in some butter just to really amp it up and this happened to be some garlic butter which was a bonus extra flavor and then I put those pieces right into that butter oil steak mixture and started frying those off and finishing the cooking process and these little fry rounds were so delicious they came out great and it's something that arrested he probably wouldn't have told me to do it came from something going wrong and just being free in the kitchen and freestyling a little bit [Music] [Music] so there you go that as a complete steak dinner right there I hope these tips helped you out for me I think the most important tip is always remembering that things don't don't necessarily work out the way you you imagined them in your head I would say 95 percent of the time I have this idea of the way a dish is going to turn out and it usually doesn't turn out like that and you can't be too attached because cooking is dealing with variables it's constantly changing and you're constantly learning so you can always get better that's part of this journey is just continuing to get in the kitchen and get better become that badass Pro home cook so make sure you check out the other two episodes in this series and get cooking I'll see you next time

Channel: Pro Home Cooks

Views: 1,400,162

Rating: 4.846427 out of 5

Keywords: steak dinner, cooking steak, steak tips, how to cook steak, how to cook a steak dinner, cooking strip steak, new york strip steak, beginners cooking, dont know how to cook, new to cooking, first time cook, learning to cook, cooking perfect steak, how to cook the perfect steak, simple steak dinner, simple dinner ideas, cooking for two, cooking for one, cooking for myself

Id: s1UXW4eWB2Q

Length: 15min 55sec (955 seconds)

Published: Wed Jul 31 2019