4 Levels of Steak: Amateur to Food Scientist | Epicurious

Hi, I'm Emily and I'm a level one chef. I'm Julie and I'm now a level two chef. I'm Adriana and I've been a chef for ten years. The last time I cooked

steak

was probably just a couple of weeks ago I cook

steak

once a month. I would do it once a day if it could help. I came up with this recipe because I lived in France and I wanted to combine my love of cooking meat and a bit of the experience I ate in France, so for my steak today I selected a skirt steak, it is available in most stores in edible and cooks fairly quickly.

This is a beautiful sirloin steak, we call it New York strip steak. A lot of people like to cook with the bone I don't know that the bone releases so much flavor and you can tell the difference by far today I'm going to prepare you a dry aged rib eye steak with the bone you want to find a piece of meat that is beautifully marbled I have a lot of veins of fat running through the meat and that's where the flavor is. It's probably about an inch thick of wine. 1/2 inch fillet. You can really get it done with a sear cook.

The perfect perfect, medium-cooked or raw. The steak is a little different than the average steak because it's a little thinner, it's usually not as thick a cut of steak, it can be a little tough but you just cook things through that. The first is the first. For seasoning, I like Montreal steak spices, which you can buy at the grocery store, so what I'm going to do is mix together cilantro and black peppercorns and a few other things, but first I have to grind the cilantro and pepper, so I'm just going to use a pan called Bry seasoning.

I'm going to mix in some salt and girlfriend to create my dough. We'll take a paper towel and dry it. I just don't want anything like blood or water or juices. I'm going to make you one of my favorite marinades. This is the work, it shows two sauces tamari mushroom powder and yuzu anchovy paste, roasted garlic, last but not least a shallot, so I'm just going to take these and put them in. in a small bowl and then I'll add some salt and red pepper flakes. What I'm going to do next is paint my B with a little bit of olive oil just for flavor and it will also help the mixture stick quickly. very soft because I respect the meat, so now I'm going to put a little bit of this mixture on each side of my steak and you just want to press it down a little bit so it doesn't all fall off when you start to see.

She uses a lot of salt, so this is the end result, so now we're going to give the steak a touch and we're going to give it a few minutes to rest and we're going to let the seasonings melt for a minimum of five and twenty minutes. four hours in the refrigerator and in the meantime let's have our steak sauce purists say that sauce should never ruin a beautiful piece of meat, but sometimes I like to get fancy. I'm going to cream together blue cheese and butter. how nice and easy it is so let's make a log we have a piece of cling film here and then you see you roll it up my friends it's a blue cheese butter log so number one ingredient ketchup and a few others things too, so vinegar. pepper, salt, a little bit of hot sauce, this is sugar, we're going to make Worcestershire sauce, a little bit of mild flavored molasses and then I'll combine them.

I'm mixing them well and this is our steak sauce, okay, now We're going to make our delicious Verna sauce, so what we need is equal parts vinegar and wine. Two shallots that we are going to cut very thickly. These are some peppercorns. The peel of any citrus you like. I love Meyer lemons. My lemons are more aromatic. Now we are going to bring this sauce to a boil and then reduce it by half. We have wine and we want to evaporate the alcohol and we want to concentrate all the flavors. Perfect rooms will take five to six minutes to cool down. below and it will be ready to use it for our brown sauce I'm going to cut my mini lemon and some herbs that I have here so I'm going to make basil mint and thyme we're going to start separating four eggs just kidding that's going to be the base of our sauce is going to emulsify with the butter and the pickling liquid that we made before.

I previously melt the butter and cool it because if you don't cool it and it is hot while you add it to your eggs, your sauce is going to separate and you will start to see as the sauce starts to get you know thick and rich that's it, look, it's creamy but it's not super thick and that's what we're looking for, the last ingredients that I like to add are the herbs because we want the herbs to still be very fresh and mushroom powder and that's it, just mix it together. I love it, exactly what I was looking for, so the next thing I'm going to do is a kitchen mistake, so using a non-stick pan not everyone has a cast iron pan, okay, you see before you the Holy Grail, a cast iron pan molten iron.

I've been heating this up in the oven with just a dash of the neutral high smoke point oil we're going to cook it in. our sous-vide machine what the sous-vide machine does is keep the temperature the same for a long period of time, it's one hundred and thirty degrees Fahrenheit, so we'll leave the steak here for an hour and a half and then come back when it's done, like this that you just want to wait until the pan is really hot. I just have a tendency to put it on and then say, "Okay, take it," so I'll try to be patient hour after hour. and a half later our farm is preparing to leave, we are going to take it out of the water.

It is very important to dry it very well because you are not going to get that perfect golden brown, okay, come on, yes, you have a little sizzle. I'm going to sear this on each side for about four minutes, three minutes, three or four minutes until it's very, very, very crispy and now we wait. This is the most difficult part of the browning method. Haitian. I know you're Not here, but it smells so much like browned butter, garlic, that marinade we previously made, the fat from the mead, so good, so good, great, I think we're ready to use the lips, hello, there we go and we're spinning the handle of this pin.

Well, look guys, can I just tell you what perfection is? It's so perfect and then I add a little fun. I know that's where the flavor is. It's a great way to get a juicy, flavorful, buttery steak and then give it a little more flavor. This is the beauty of the cast iron skillet, it conducts heat so beautifully and retains heat, so I think this is probably as much as I want to cook it. I like it, it may be quite medium rare with this thickness of steak. Since you really want to do this sous vide machine, it cooks the steak to medium rare, so what we're doing here now is just browning the meat because you don't want to overcook it, this old lady is ready to roll. we're good, we have a good sear, a nice cross, we're going to turn this off now we're going to a super hot oven, let's say eight minutes we'll see in a moment so that the beef is ready and we're going to put it. our cooling rack and then we'll let it sit no I don't know what I'm doing you gotta let it sit because if you cut it right after cooking all the juices will come out and you want the juices not to come so while this sits I'll take my blue cheese butter that I had in the refrigerator, we're just going to cut it up, look what we have cut up and now it's time to cut it up and put it on a plate so that the The grain was this way, so we're going to cut it this way.

I like to cut against the grain because it's a little more flavorful and tender if you cut it from the other side, the steak will be tough and you don't want that. I mean, we're going amazing, so some of the juices are coming out because I did it, I might want a little more time for the rest, but it's okay, I'm at level one, okay, oh yeah, it's bleeding quite a bit, We're going to fold it right here, okay? here we go and then you take your beautiful butter and put it between the slices of steak.

I'm going to add some steak sauce on the side. I'm going to put it in a little bit as a kind of dipping sauce almost. put some parsley on top of our steak just a little bit and now it's ready to serve here are my steak friends this is my steak this is my steak okay so it's time to eat hmm this is a good steak yeah , it turned out great, I mean I mean, it's like a steak with

levels

of chewy, but not like wow, chewy and delicious. I'm going to take another bite just to make sure it's good, you know, mmm, very good, mmm, our three chefs chose different cuts of seasonings and meat sauces to make their steaks.

Emily used a skirt steak which tends to be a tougher cut of meat because it has more connective tissue and less fat. It is a hindquarter cut and is often used to make commercial ground beef. Julie used a strip steak which is a more tender and marbled cut of meat with more fat than skirt steak, that's flavor, the strip is also from the hindquarter of the muscle called the longest elk Boram, it's more tender because it doesn't used for the movement of the steer. The tenderness of the meat is inversely related to the amount of muscle work. ago while the steer is alive Adriana used a bone-in rib eye steak that comes from the rib section of the animal and is full of flavor and fat her rib eye was dry aged dry aging is a slow chemical process in which enzymes and microorganisms produce meat that is more tender and flavorful by converting proteins into tasty amino acids, glycogen into sweeter glucose, and fats into aromatic fatty acids, releasing a lot of flavor.

This happens by hanging large, dry, unwrapped cuts of beef at a low temperature for about a month. The meat also helps stretch the muscle filaments and prevents them from sticking together, which reduces the toughness of the meat. Cooking the meat on the bone also adds another layer of flavor. It helps retain moisture and reduce meat shrinkage because the bones hold the meat in place. The bones get hotter. slowly than me, so the cooking in general is slower and more careful with the meat proteins. Emily used a dry spice rub that works well on a tougher, leaner cut of meat like skirt steak, that's what I've always heard, acidic spices and salt.

Its spice massage disrupts and weakens muscle fibers and increases their ability to retain moisture. She also used some spicy ingredients like red pepper flakes. I couldn't make it, it will taste good, but it will mask some of the meaty flavor you get. just a salt-based seasoning Julie used a South African braai spice mix before cooking. This is a special dry salt-based seasoning that brings out the flavor of the meat, so of course I brought plenty of salt home. Salt can suppress bitter and meaty flavors. which come from amino acids such as arginine and tryptophan or compounds such as serine or carnosine that contribute to a more pleasant sensory experience.

Adriana used a wet marinade that included rich ingredients high in glutamate that enhances the meaty umami flavor. Glutamate is a naturally occurring amino acid. her on meat and fish as the entropies she included and spent some plant-based

food

s like mushrooms and tamari sauce. She also marinated her ribeye for several hours in a vacuum-sealed bag so it had more time for the flavors to develop. Marinades add flavor to the surface of the meat and the longer the marinating time, the greater the flavor development with savory marinades. Be careful, though if you have acidic ingredients like vinegar, you may get some sour notes if you marinate the meat too long.

The liquids released by the breakdown of muscle fibers during cooking stimulate and intensify the flavors and aromas and the meat, there is maximum liquid release when the steak is rare to medium rare, which is the temperature our three chefs chose. I'm a bit, if you continue cooking the meat, it will reduce in size because the liquids are no longer present and you will end up with a tough, dry steak that may taste a little like liver. Emily added oils for a non-stick pan, while adding oil increases the temperature at which the meat will sear. Not necessary in this case, Julie.

She rubbed her steak with oil before adding it to the heated cast iron. Adding oil prevents the meat from sticking to the pan and adds some richness to the steak. Julie finished her steak in a hot oven, a dry heating method that works well for cuts of meat like the New York Strip. I have a higher fat content. The meat stays moist and juicy while in the oven. Adriana used a technique called sous. -vide your ribeye was vacuum sealed in a bag that was placed in a water bath and kept at a constant temperature. She can do this for several hours and the meat will not exceed the temperature of the water just before serving.

Adriana took the meat out of the bag and seared it. Searing the meat doesn't seal in the juices like most people think, but it does increase Mayor Browning's impartiality. The rich, unique roasting flavors and colors of sous vide meat are a reliable and consistent way to cook steak, but it takes special equipment. Emily made a quick steak sauce with some acidic components like ketchup vinegar and molasses, which had sweetness and flavor, but it also helped tenderize her flank steak by breaking down the connective tissues. JulieAdded additional fat in the form of butter combined with blue cheese at the end, this gives a tangy and slightly spicy earthy flavor and soft texture to your New York strip steak.

Blue cheese is a strong complement. taste of the soft and succulent tenderloin steak blue cheese butter I never heard anything Adriana finished her ribeye with garlic and thyme butter as a base. She also added a flavorful Béarnaise sauce that incorporates Meyer lemons, which are sweeter than regular lemons, and powdered mushrooms to enhance the umami richness. of the Bearnaise sauce is a complex sauce based on an emulsion. An emulsion is when two liquids that normally do not want to form a mixture do so with the Bearnaise sauce, the phospholipids and lecithin of the egg yolks emulsify the water-soluble flavoring components. in a rich, velvety dressing for your steak.

There are many different ways to cook a seasoned steak the next time you're in the mood for a great steak. I hope you use some of these tips.