Steak Experiments - Cast Iron Skillet vs Stainless Steel Pan

welcome back to another episode of barbecue and bottles so we're gonna be doing two new york strip steaks here and we'll do our typical method you know garlic butter rosemary and we'll see which one yields the better crust so first step is just going to get the burners on here now that those are lit up we're just going to get our pans on the actual grill here just like that and we'll get these warming up now all those pans are warming up we've got rosemary so we'll need that later we've got some homemade clarified butter you can use regular butter but this clarified butter we've got a link down in the description below if you want to make this it's got a higher smoke point of i think it's 480 fahrenheit and now let's just prep a little bit of the garlic so i've got some fresh garlics here i'm just gonna break these apart and get a few cloves i'll add these into the pan now we'll just chop off the ends here and then smash the garlic with a chef's knife and it's just a lot easier to get the actual peel off the garlic once you've smashed it like that i'll take off that green end as well so now for our steaks we're going to be using two beautiful grass-fed new york strip steaks we got these cut about an inch and a quarter thick from our butcher and what we did is we did our typical 48-hour dry run on these so we gave them a generous amount of kosher salt put them onto a cooling rack on top of a cookie tray and slid that into our fridge and we just left them there for 48 hours and you get this beautiful outcome the surface of these steaks is exceptionally dry to the touch and that's what we're looking for because when we get the pan ripping hot we get our avocado oil in there and drop in our steak all of the energy from that cast iron pan or the stainless steel pan should transition into the mired reaction and give us that brown crust that we're looking for so we've got our infrared thermometer and we're just going to check the temperature of these pans we're looking for 450 to 500 we're at just under 450 here and that's a fairly even temperature around the pan on the stainless steel we've got 450 at certain parts we've got 380 at others so it looks like it's a little bit less even of a heat so we're going to load in our avocado oil anyway and we'll see how this goes i'll just get that worked around the pan here nicely so we've got an even coating now let's drop in our steaks just going to press those down to make sure we've got perfect connection between the steak and the pan now for the cast iron skillet all right we're going to put the lid down and we'll let those go for three to four minutes on each side you'll know that the crust is formed when the steak freely releases from the pan if you go to move your steak and it's still stuck on there give it a little bit of extra time for that crust to really form in the mirrored reaction to work its magic so now it's time to turn these and just look at that crust absolutely gorgeous this is off the cast iron now let's check the stainless steel also an absolutely beautiful crust i wasn't expecting it to be that good apparently now we're just going to get some of our clarified butter in here and of course some of our rosemary sprigs all right now we're just gonna baste these steaks got some of that garlic up on there the rosemary as well beautiful let's get the garlic up onto the steak just to make sure it doesn't burn through the rest of this cook slide that back in there now we'll do the same with the cast iron all right now we'll put the lid down and let those go for another two minutes so these steaks just hit an internal temperature of 128 to 130 so we're gonna get them on this side here sear off the fat caps and then we'll let them rest now the fat caps are done let's get these off just beautiful looking steaks now we'll top the garlic here and the rosemary just for another layer of flavor here as these rest [Music] all right now that we've had these resting for 10 minutes we're just going to take the garlic and rosemary off the top here and make way for slicing now this is the steak that was done in the stainless steel pan and this is the one that was done in the cast iron pan now to be honest the appearance here is not that much different now we run this knife over the stake just to see the crust you know you can hear that that's there's a lot of crust that formed on that stainless steel and same with the cast iron i don't know that there's really any difference in the crust here and it's the same on both sides like really really solid crust now we're gonna carve in and see whether we got an even medium rare all the way through the steak one of the things i was a little bit worried about with the stainless steel was just how uneven the heat in the actual pan was now hopefully because we were doing it on the barbecue with the lid closed this ended up almost behaving like searing the steaks in the oven but we'll see and we'll just lay these out check out the internal temps here all the way up the stake it looks like on the cast iron pan we got a pretty good medium rare all the way through now as we look at the stainless steel pan i'm gonna say here this was the steak that we had done to 130 and it looks like it carried over a little bit more than the cast iron steak this one was pulled at 128 but putting the the slight temperature degree difference aside it does look like there was a little less evenness in the cook you can see a lot more pink in these center slices than the two at the edge relative to the cast iron pan in terms of overall evenness and doneness i'm gonna give that to the cast iron pan and frankly that's actually what i would have expected too with a cast iron pan you have the thermal capacity of that pan really absorbs a ton of energy into it as it's heating up on the grill and it just allows for a more even cooking than what we saw with the stainless steel pan so that's a slight difference but now let's try the taste test um oh my gosh wow okay this is hands down my favorite way to prepare a steak you've got that saltiness from the 48 hour dry brine that's evenly seasoned throughout the steak it's not just on the surface you've got the crunch from the crust having rendered the fat cap that's really nice and light and rendered just adds a beautiful flavor profile and of course that homemade clarified butter i can't stress that enough go try it really easy to do smells wonderful still imparts that rich buttery flavor so that's really forward in these and of course you've got the garlic and the rosemary as well so now let's try the taste test on the stainless steel mmm that is so good so the taste test on the stainless steel steak absolutely incredible as well a slightly different level of doneness but still we've got that rich buttery beefy texture got the garlic the rosemary the saltiness this is just perfect overall in this comparison i'm gonna give the the gold medal to the cast iron steak and that's just because of the evenness that it brought to the cook the crusts were almost identical it rendered the fat cap just as well and frankly like if all you've got is a stainless steel pan at home go for it you're going to get a phenomenal outcome albeit it might be a little bit more graded in terms of its doneness than doing it in cast iron so if you like this video give us a like below consider subscribing to the channel for more steak experiments and youtube cooking videos to come thanks for tuning in

Channel: BBQ and Bottles

Views: 1,291,454

Rating: 4.7618318 out of 5

Keywords: BBQ and Bottles, BBQandBottles, Searing a Steak in a Stainless Steel Pan, Searing a steak in Cast iron, Cast iron vs. stainless steel, Cast iron vs stainless steel, cast iron skillet vs stainless steel, cast iron vs steel pan, Cast iron versus stainless steel, Steak Experiment, Steak Experiments, Stainless steel pan, stainless steel pan steak, stainless steel pan steak recipe

Id: O5m2bfZ8AVs

Length: 10min 10sec (610 seconds)

Published: Sat May 09 2020