POV How to Cook a Steak

hey can't you hear it's late at night but I'm gonna start working on the steak I was at the supermarket earlier today where people were definitely not keeping their distance as much as they should um but there were these nice-looking prime steaks uh so I got one um this is like oh how much this is this is like a pound and a quarter maybe prime rib eye rib eyes my favorite steak so pretty decent marbling not the best but pretty decent marbling but what I really like about this particular steak is that there's a lot of this muscle right here which is the spinalis so this is the loin this is I kind of like if you're looking at your back oh right so good girl so this is the loin back here the muscles that run along either side of the spine yeah you like that right and the Tenderloin would be on these sort of inside of the rib cage if we're looking at a beef this would be the chuck the round back here brisket down here you got a nice brisket chavo cheeks up here beef cheeks are delicious all right let's get back to that steak ribeye steak comes from the loin a t-bone steak is when you cut out when you get a section of both the loin and the tenderloin which are on either side of a rib bone the New York Strip is the same muscle as the ribeye about taken from a little bit further a little bit further back so but what I like about the ribeye is that it has this bit of muscle which is called the spinalis you can it's also called the ribeye cap which is the I think the most flavorful piece of meat on the steer and yeah tonight all I'm doing is taking this out and getting it ready for it tomorrow because I'm gonna gonna cook it tomorrow um you don't really have to do this but when you're salting your steak the one thing you don't want to do is salt it let it sit for like 10 15 minutes or so and then cook it because what happens is when you salt a steak initially the salt is going to start pulling out juices through osmosis and you'll see them started sort of beating up on the surface if your steak is wet on the surface to begin with instead of searing properly instead of that energy going towards browning your meat and searing it you end up spending all that energy evaporating the moisture from it which is not really what you want to do so I'm doing this the night before that gives salt the opportunity to sort of work into the meat and here's the important thing when we put it back in the fridge you don't want to wrap it tightly because you don't want to trap moisture against it um I do is I don't have a rack this size so I'm just gonna uh I'm gonna take these skewers and lamé across here I'm putting the steak on it so it stays elevated oh you might be thinking I used a lot of salt I did but that's how much you want to salt a piece of meat the meat is not seasoned on the interior and so you want to use quite a bit of salt on the exterior so that when you take a bite of it it really sort of seasons it's enough seasoning to season the whole thing I always sort of described the amount of salt you put on the steak as I described it as what like a snow flurry looks like an empty parking lot in New England so that's a useful metaphor for people who could go to empty parking lots in New England and in the winter I'm not sure it's useful for anyone else oh look so you can already start to see the salt pulling up moisture you see it starting to get a little bit wet on the surface I have no idea if you can see that or not I'm gonna try and get you at an angle where you can can you see that well anyhow it's starting to get a little bit wet on the surface and as this sits it's gonna get wetter and wetter and wetter let me just show you hold on oh and I'm gonna do a trick that my friend told me I should think about when doing these videos ready I'm gonna be back in just about and a half minutes so it's been 7 1/2 minutes um so I'm just gonna hold the camera at this time so you can kind of see a little better but so you can see there's that kind of glistening with moisture that's the water that's been drawn out by the salt and if we were to sear this right now and put it in a pan it would take some amount of time probably a minute or two for to boil off all that water to get back to the point where you were with a very dry steak although to be honest with a steak this thick it doesn't really matter that much because it takes so long to cook through anyway that there's plenty of time to develop the good crust but especially with thinner steaks you don't want to do that salt thing you do want to either do it just before cooking or 45 minutes before cooking now the reason I'm putting it on this rack here is because you want the surface of the steak to be dry as possible before before you start cooking it and that's so that you can develop that sear and it also helps sort of make the steak last longer this is a good trick if your steak looks like it's about to go off and it's wrapped up really tightly in plastic in the fridge take it out of that plastic put it on the plate put it on elevated from a place so that air can circulate all around it and it'll actually last quite a bit longer than it would if it as if it were wrapped in plastic and all that moisture is trapped against it so I'm elevating it with these skewers so that the surface can dry out which will let us get a better sear tomorrow so now this is going in the fridge and I will see you in 24 hours it's been 24 hours now since I put this steak in here actually 21 hours I ran out of time today some things came up I'm so I didn't actually get a chance to cook the steak today but that's fine what's nice about this method where you elevate it and leave it uncovered is that it actually extends the shelf life of the steak because the surface starts to dry out there's very little water activity in there which means that there's less of a less stuff for the bacteria to move around in and so you actually slow down the the rotting process so your steaks actually last quite a bit longer when you leave them out open like this I'm gonna let them go for one more day until tomorrow and in fact it's actually going to improve it a little bit you know the longer you let it go the further the salt works its way into it and the more tender it becomes the more able it is to retain moisture and most importantly the surface gets drier and drier and the drier the surface you have the more easily you can sear it so we will come back this to this one again in all right this is now it's been in the fridge now for two days which is totally fine you could stay in there you know for a long time basically until it starts to really dry out and but it's gonna you know it could take like a week or so is fine in there it's been in the fridge now for a couple days you can see how nice and dry the surface is because exactly what you're looking for because that's gonna help it sear I was thinking originally that I was going to do this using the reverse sear method which is um as a method I developed for Cook's Illustrated back in like 2006 or seven essentially with that method you put the steak inside a low temperature oven or on the cooler side of a grill now like 252 and 75 degrees let it come most of the way up to temp through and through and then you sear it in a pan and what that does is it gives you a very nice even edge to edge pinkness throughout and it also sort of tenderizes a little bit because there's some enzymatic action that helps the the meat the muscles actually get more tender throughout that process but I'm not going to do that method for you so I'm just gonna pan sear it butter baste it just because if you like it and because I meant that sometimes takes a little bit too long and we're we're getting ready for the lunch so I'm gonna do this in a copper pan coppers really good for searing and for sauteing because it has coppers very conductive so it gives you a very nice even heat you could also do you know this is a triply stainless skillet with a aluminium layer in the middle this is you probably have one of these at home you could do it in cast iron you can do it in carbon steel doesn't really matter that much as long as the pan is nice and heavy yesterday so I well I like to think of the pan as like a bucket that you're filling up with energy and the stovetop you know it's kind of like a bucket that you're filling up at the tap and the stovetop the burner is the is the tap that's pouring energy into the pan a pan can only hold a certain amount of energy but the the higher the specific heat capacity of the material and the higher the mass of the pan the more energy it's going to be able to hold that's like having a bigger bucket so a nice thick pan is important because you want a lot of energy in that pan and because as soon as you add the meat to it it's going to start hmm its cartons start basically you're pouring that energy off into the meat and that's also one of the reasons why it's super important to let your meat dry out really nicely because it takes a ton of energy to evaporate moisture it takes about five times more energy to evaporate a gram of water than it does to take that same gram of water from zero degrees Celsius all the way to 100 degrees Celsius so to take something out of the not frozen but out of the out of the out of the fridge up to hmm up to boiling takes five times more energy than that to actually evaporate it so having a nice dry surface on your steak is important this is just a little bit of why I used olive oil normally I'd use grapeseed canola or something I don't think I have any right now this is just olive oil and some butter now with a big nice nice big steak like this you actually don't have to get the pan super ripping hot just a mild heat is fine because it's gonna take a long time to cook through anyway and that's gonna be plenty of time for a crust to develop so and let the butter sizzle get the steak in there there you go now a lot of people ask you know what's the best way to cook a steak you know some people will say flip it every now and then some people will say only flip it once some people will say the reverse sear which you know I am generally partial to that just not today there's not really a right answer you know as long as you're starting with a nice piece of meat something with good marbling something with good flavor you're letting it you're letting it develop a nice crust on the outside and you're cooking it to the doneness that you want you know whether you prefer rare or medium rare or well then it doesn't really matter to me you know do it do it the way you like it as long as you get you know those those things right then there's you know a million ways to skin a cat and none of them are none of them are necessarily bad you know it's all it's all just kind of nitpicking at that you know snipping at that point so we're gonna let this guy go um I am gonna flip it regularly though I'm gonna flip it every 15 seconds or so so the reason I do that is because hmm so I'm gonna switch over to tire burner flipping it frequently it can help you cook about I don't know about 30 percent faster the other important thing that I find is that it's much easier to cook one big steak than to cook a couple of thinner steaks and that's just because with a nice big steak like a two-inch thick guy like this or I don't know ancient 3/4 thick like that there's a lot of room for error you know it takes it takes a long time to get the center up to the temperature that you want it and so there's quite a big window between when it's done and when it's overdone whereas with a thinner steak that window is much smaller with the finish thick you also have less time to develop a nice crust on the outside so you kind of have to really really blast it with heat with a thicker stick you can go a little bit more gently and not worry too much about it because basically all you're trying to do is get it to have a nice crust by the time the center is done so with a steak like this will fight that'll probably be like 10-15 minutes most important thing when you're cooking a steak though thermometer meat thermometer this is the thermo pop it's about 30 bucks it's made by a company called thermal works they also make a fancier one called the thermapen which I got here thermapen they both do a fine job this one's a little bit faster a little bit more accurate and has some some features you have some bells and whistles this one's also I think I don't know 100 bucks or 200 bucks whereas this one's like 30 bucks and they both work just fine the one thing you don't want to do is do the whole the whole test where it's like you know some people say if you poke your face so like you you poke a cheek and that's what a medium-rare steak should taste should feel like and you you poke your your forehead and that's like what a well-done steak is but I want you to try this experiment go to anyone in your house right now poke your own cheek and then poke their cheek and tell me if it feels exactly the same because I pretty much guarantee you it won't and so I've always wanted you know it's like do I have a medium-rare cheek or does my wife had a meat have a medium-rare cheek or what whatever so it's not a great way to gauge doneness Pope the Pope test is not a great way to gauge doneness it also varies you know from different different cuts of meat are gonna have different textures when they're done at different times different fat content is gonna affect that so really it's not a great way to tell if your meat is done unless say you're working at a restaurant and you're used to getting this same cut of meat over and over and over and you have practice you know you're doing it 50 times a day then you can start getting good at the poke test but if you're home cook and you're cooking steaks only a couple times a year use a thermometer it's really the only reliable way to tell if your meat is done what you're aiming for with a thermometer by the way is here's how you here's how you take the temperature this means still gonna be very cold because I just started cooking it you can see I have the heat down relatively moderate right now quite quite low actually because I know you know once I start developing that crust I know it's gonna take a while for the inside to come to temperature and I don't want it to burn before that happens so take the thermometer put it in at an angle and you're aiming for the coolest part so right now that is 45 degrees in the center basically fridge cold 44 degrees basically fridge cold but what you're looking for with with as far as temperature goes is 120 degrees Fahrenheit is about rare 125 235 is a medium to medium-rare and like 140 hundred 45 degrees that's more medium well and then anything above that is pretty much well-done and your steak with especially with a steak this thick one that your pan searing like this it's going to continue to rise in temperature as it rests after you're done cooking it so you want to pull it off you know 5 or 10 degrees early when it's your thing to think to note is that I've done a bunch of taste tests before where people a lot of people claim that like rare steak or that they like medium-rare steak and maybe they do but in taste tests that I've done with blindfolds on where people couldn't see the color of the meat frequently people will pick a shade higher a higher temperature than they claim to like so people who said that they like rare steaks would actually prefer the steak that's cooked to medium-rare and people said they'd like medium-rare will let prefer the steaks that's cooked to medium especially with a higher fat steak something that's nicely marbled you know a prime ribeye or if you're able to get your hands on some some good Wagyu like really good while you like 85 walky that's like mostly fat the higher the fat content the higher the temperature I generally like it cooked - because beef fat I don't like it when it's not rendered properly kind of taste waxy so I like the fat to be kind of melting and rendering all throughout so the higher the fat content the higher the temperature you can cook it - without it drying out and the higher I want it to go anyway so that mmm so that the fat can really start to render and kind of you know run across your tongue and give you those juices so I'm I'm just blathering on and on and on I'm gonna probably speed up the next the next section of cooking until I get to the next interesting part I'm just gonna be flipping this every once in a while until then okay what I'm doing right now is I'm basting basically just um taking some of that melted butter and juices rendered beef fat and spooning it back over the top it just helps it well first of all it speeds up the cooking process a little bit but it also helps some even out the Browning so like if you see there's like little you know little valleys and crevices and stuff that don't come into contact with the pan and so when you spoon the hot melted fat back over like that it gets into those little crevices and helps them Brown and gives you much more even browning so you can see what I'm doing is I'm tilting the pan towards me a little bit so that the butter pulls up at the bottom and the rendered juices rendered fat and then I just take a big spoon and just splash it right over if you walk into any sort of Western restaurant professional restaurant that has a saute station you're gonna see cooks doing this to most meats I would do this for fish I would do it for chicken I'll do it for porkchop so I'll do first steak it really helps them get that nice even browning what I have already here is some rosemary and thyme from the garden this is a little chunk of shallot that I'm just going to very roughly chop we all do one clove of garlic to smash you can leave the skin on so all this stuff is basically just gonna go towards flavoring the meat it's not really gonna stay on there got all that steel at look at that color Maryjo looking nice so we're at a hundred degrees a little lower than a hundred degrees very closer so when you're coloring a piece of meat like this a steak especially what I what I aim for is as dark as possible without being black black is burnt and burnt is not good you know of course some people like their steak charred especially if it's coming off the grill you might want some of that charred flavor so I'm gonna put this stuff right on top like that and then you take my spoon that'll let garlic on top and I'm gonna start basting I'm gonna take this guy off it's at about a hundred and five degrees right now put these right over here there's debate in the steak world about whether to rest your meat or not I know that you know Adam Perry Lang who has a restaurant in LA in his cooking steak for a long time sort of a one of the Masters he he doesn't like to rest his meat he he does he doesn't method that he calls scuffed and charred where he kinda takes the knife and kind of scuffs up the surface and then chars it really well either in a grill or on the pan and then serves it sizzling sizzling hot and I think there's a lot to be said for that you know like having a sizzling hot steak hit the table is is really good [Music] the reason why you might want to rest your meat is because if you cut open a steak right after it's been out of the pan the juices are still very sort of runny and you know there's there's a little bit of debate over why they're still running why they're so runny a lot of times you know I've heard that it's because the muscle fibers are tightened and then when you let them cool down they relax and so they don't squeeze out as much moisture then I think in Modernist Cuisine they talk more about the the viscosity of the little jus siz changing as they as they cool down and thicken a little bit over time the point is though that when you when you cut open a piece of steak a piece of meat right after it's been cooked it will tend to the juices will tend to run out a lot faster and then if you let it rest a little while first you'll notice I didn't put pepper under the steak this time it's just salt from the day before or from two days ago so I sometimes pepper my steak before cooking it some people don't because they don't like the flavor of pepper that's been you know charred and a skillet or on the grill I actually kind of liked that flavor sometimes so typically I would pepper my steak today I decided not to just for the hell of it you know what I did forget to do though is get those edges we want to get these if these edges here because I just mean I just need some love too you see the spinalis meth muscle that's gonna be so good nice big chunk of it this pinellas if ever there get this edge here this is a great big steak probably between the three of us we're gonna eat about half of it for lunch and then what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna let the rest of it cool down and for dinner we're gonna make a steak salad or maybe even tomorrow we'll make a steak salad salad out of it I think uh like a Thai style steak salad I really really like cold steak I almost like cold steak better than better than hot steak in fact especially if you have like a nice if you have a very lean steak one without a ton of fat in it or a ton of flavor so you know something like in like a tri-tip or an or a round top round or I round those steaks tend to actually do better cold so I'll sear them let them chill overnight and then the next day slice them thin and use them in a salad whatever that salad maybe you can use make like a miso dressing and do it with cucumbers you could do like a Thai style dressing with which dish sauce and chillies and which is one with you tonight you can even toss it with your Caesar salad if you want some people don't like that after you rest it loses the crispy crust so what I do is I take I kind of get like to get the best of both worlds so I take the pan i reheat all the juices in there actually know what I'm gonna make a pan sauce while we wait just a second I'm gonna get a second pan right here for the juices let's whip this little pot of juices since we have all this nice fond in the pan and it seems a shame not to make a pan sauce so I make a real quick real real quick pan sauce I'll do some some bourbon let's do some bourbon and some little mustard we're gonna deglaze this it's probably gonna catch on fire I'm in fact it's almost definitely gonna catch on fire so look out already take this off the heat ready did not catch on fire that's fine he plays with some bourbon and I throw some mustard in there Gulden's if I had like a whole green mustard I would use that and we got some stock and a little extra butter yeah you can use whatever liquid you want red wine tequila you could also sautee some shallots in there or some garlic I'm just going super simple here alright and then finally a little extra knob of butter do this off heat emulsify that butter in there alright so while that pan sauce is gonna it's gonna come together I'm reheating the the fat from the steak and let's get a nice big plate for this that'll do not that fat to get the kind of smoking hot I'm gonna pepper this up that's suicide but curtain up so that butter should have multiplied in and this will get just a little bit thicker as it reduces um it's also fresh chicken stocks if like a homemade chicken stock so there's gelatin in there so that'll thicken up the sauce as it reduces as well if you don't have a homemade chicken stock you can use store-bought stuff and just bloom a little bit of that Leo a couple teaspoons of gelatin in there while it's cold and then when you add it to your pan like this as it reduces it'll act a lot like a you know like a good homemade or restaurant style stock because that gelatin has viscosity and gives a sort of a richness that helps it emulsify with the butter for with the butter [Music] superhot enough yet [Music] mrs. Lee almost all right so this is the trick hot fat hot pan drippings after the steak is arrested you pour it right back over the top it sizzles it reheats the surface it gets it nice and crispy again and then we're ready to go I'm gonna I'm gonna put the sauce on the bottom of the plate just so that the steak doesn't so we can show off that nice crust on the top this is gonna go there we go there we go look at that that is a pretty good-looking steak let me get my steak knife here how does that look to you looks pretty good to me let's cut off a piece of see how see how we did on the inside actually let me taste start with the spinalis mmm oh I'm sorry family came in so you can see with them with this method where you're cooking it over relatively high heat the whole time you know you're not doing sous-vide you're not doing a reverse sear you do get this gradient so there's a little bit of sort of like well doneness on the outside and then it progressively gets more and more rare as it gets towards the center so if you don't like that you do you can do a reverse sear so follow you know go to go to Serious Eats which is where I have published that method I think or Cook's Illustrated where I originally published that method if you have access to the 2007 June July issue that's where it is or just do it this way if you don't mind having that sort of more traditional Steakhouse look to it this one I took to it ended up at about 130 to 135 degrees which is sort of you know medium-rare medium red a little tending towards medium which is a good good place to aim for me at least when you have a nice fatty rich piece of steak like this if I was if it was a leaner thing like a tenderloin I would aim more towards the 120 120 to 125 rare zone but with a nice rich fatty cut like ribeye this is about perfect for me hmm that is delicious oh yes trouble you get some to sit good girl bye bye

Channel: J. Kenji López-Alt

Views: 1,501,543

Rating: 4.8844218 out of 5

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Id: INiAM1u925E

Length: 30min 34sec (1834 seconds)

Published: Wed Apr 15 2020