Combining Methods for Cooking Steaks

After all the work to create the pork masterpiece, my wife declared her desire for steak. I went to Ralphs, which, apparently, had recently stocked some steaks with the label “Manager’s Special.” I picked out a package of T-bones, a package of porterhouse steaks and another package with a single NY strip. In fact, I cleaned out the remaining “Manager’s Specials.” And all for about $20 for the 7 steaks. Not bad, huh?

For many years I have read and reread issues of Cook’s Illustrated magazine. To me, it’s the finest cooking periodical on the news stand. Now they have a sister publication called Cook’s Country. They also have the cooking show on public television called America’s Test Kitchen and a new one with the Cook’s Country theme. I encourage you to catch any of these you can. I look at Cook’s Illustrated (and the others, too) as sort of a consumer’s testing publication, testing recipes, methods, tools, various food items (cheese, bacon, hot dogs, canned tomatoes, etc.) By the time they publish (or air) a recipe, it has been tested and tweaked to be the best it can be. (I recently read an article about Chateaubriand for which $1200 worth of Chateaubriand was purchased and cooked with various ingredients using various cooking methods to make my purchase of a single cut of Chateaubriand (beef tenderloin) worth the investment.)

In recent publications and shows they demonstrated how cooking steaks and pork chops using a combination of oven cooking then finishing with stove top browning produce a moist, tender and flavorful piece of meat. So I decided to give it a try, although I didn’t have a specific recipe or method at hand for steaks.

I started with a mixture of salt, pepper, powdered garlic and onion powder. I sprinkled this on one side of each piece of meat, patted it in and let it sit for a couple of minutes before I turned it over to repeat the process on the opposite side. Then I let these sit for about 25 minutes.

I turned the oven on to 325 degrees. Next I took a rectangular baking sheet on which I could fit a baking rack, and sprayed the rack with olive oil. I placed the steaks on the rack, and slid it into the preheated oven. After 25 minutes, the steaks were still very rare, so I let them stay in the oven for another 10 minutes or so, when the temperature reached about 110 degrees. (I could have left the steaks in the oven another 5 - 10 minutes for a bit more doneness.)

Then I removed the steaks from the oven, and seared them in a hot frying pan with a bit of olive oil to coat the ban. After a few minutes, when one side looked gorgeously caramelized, I turned them over. A few more minutes, and, voila, they were done.

Earlier I mixed together some softened butter, chopped garlic and some thyme, and made a flavored butter. I spread this on each steak as it was sitting for its resting time.

Man oh man! Were these steaks delicious! Moist, tender and flavorful as promised! My niece declared hers was the best steak she’d ever had, but that may have been an exaggeration after coming, as she did, from 4 years in the Navy. But the important thing is...my wife loved it - even if it was beef, beef, beef again!