Steak Experiments - Cast Iron Skillet vs Stainless Steel Pan

Welcome back to another episode of barbecue and bottles, so we're going to do two New York strip

steak

s here and we'll do our typical method, you know, rosemary garlic butter, and we'll see which one produces the best crust, so the first step is. we're just going to turn on the burners here now that they're on, we're just going to put our pans on the actual grill here just like that and heat them up now that all those pans are heating up, we've got rosemary so we'll need that later. We have some homemade clarified butter. You can use regular butter, but we have a link to this clarified butter in the description below.

If you want to make it, it has a higher smoke point. I think it's 480 degrees Fahrenheit and now let's prepare some garlic, so I have some fresh garlic here. I'm going to separate them and grab some teeth. I'll add them to the pan now. cut off the ends here and then mash the garlic with a chef's knife and it's much easier to remove the skin from the garlic once you've smashed it like that. I'll also remove the green end, so now for our

steak

s we're going to use two beautiful grass-fed New York strip steaks. Our butcher cut them for us about an inch and a quarter thick and what we did was we did our typical 48 hour trial on these, so we gave them We put a generous amount of kosher salt on a cooling rack on top of a tray. for cookies and we put it in our refrigerator and left them there for 48 hours and we got this beautiful result: the surface of these fillets is exceptionally dry all the way. touch and that's what we're looking for because when the pan heats up, we put our avocado oil in there and we throw our steak in, all the energy from that

cast

iron

or

stainless

steel

pan should go into the stuck reaction and give us that brown crust that we're looking for so we have our infrared thermometer and we're just going to check the temperature of these pans that we're looking for 450 to 500, we're at just under 450 here and that's a pretty uniform temperature around the pan on the

stainless

steel

, we have 450 in certain parts, we have 380 in others, so it seems like a little less uniform heat, so we're going to load up on our avocado oil. anyway and we'll see how this goes.

I'm going to work it well around the pan here so we have an even layer. Now let's place our fillets and we'll press them down to make sure we have a perfect connection. between the steak and the

skillet

now for the

cast

iron

skillet

, okay, we're going to put the lid down and let them sit for three or four minutes on each side, you'll know that the crust forms when the steak releases freely from the skillet if you're going to move the steak and it's still stuck there, give it a little extra time for that crust to really form in the mirror reaction to do its magic, so now it's time to turn them over and just watch. on that absolutely beautiful crust, this is off the cast iron now let's check out the stainless steel also absolutely beautiful crust.

I didn't expect it to be so good apparently now we're going to bring some of our clarified butter here and Of course, some of our rosemary sprigs, now we're going to drizzle these fillets. We've got some of that garlic in there. Rosemary is beautiful too. We're going to put the garlic on the steak just to make sure it doesn't burn. from this cook slide that back in there now we'll do the same thing with the cast iron now we'll put the lid down and let them sit for another two minutes so these steaks reach an internal temperature of 128 to 130 so we'll put them on this side here, we'll cut off the fat caps and then we'll let them rest now that the fat caps are done let's take out these steaks they look beautiful now we'll cover the garlic here and the rosemary just for another layer of flavor here while they rest now that we've let them rest for 10 minutes, we're just going to remove the garlic and rosemary from the top here and leave room to cut, now this is the steak that was cooked in the stainless steel skillet and this is the one that was done in the iron skillet molten.

Now, to be honest, the appearance here is not much different. Now we run this knife through the stake just to see the bark. You know, you can hear that's there. A lot of crust formed on the stainless steel and the same with the cast iron. I don't know if there's really any difference in the crust here and it's the same on both sides like a really very solid crust. Now we're going to carve and to see if we got a medium rare throughout the steak, one of the things I was a little worried about with the stainless steel was how uneven the heat was in the actual pan now, hopefully, because we were doing it on the barbecue.

With the lid closed, this ended up almost behaving like browning steaks in the oven, but we'll see and just put them in. Look at the internal temperatures here throughout the stake, as seen in the cast iron skillet. I got a pretty good medium rare now looking at the stainless steel skillet, I will say this was the steak we had done at 130 and it seems to have spread a little more than the cast iron. steak, this one was taken out at 128, but leaving aside the slight difference in temperature degrees, it seems that there was a little less uniformity in the cooking, you can see much more pink in these center slices than in the two on the edge in relation with the mold. iron skillet in terms of uniformity and overall cooking, I'll give that to the cast iron skillet and frankly that's what I would have expected with a cast iron skillet as well, the heat capacity of that skillet really absorbs a ton of energy . as it heats up on the grill and allows for more even cooking than what we saw with the stainless steel pan so it's a slight difference but now let's do the taste test oh my goodness well this is hands down my favorite . way to prepare a steak, you get that salty flavor from the 48 hour dry brine that is seasoned evenly throughout the steak, it's not just on the surface, you get the crunch of the crust from having left the layer of fat which is really nice , light and processed. it just adds a beautiful flavor profile and of course that homemade clarified butter, I can't stress it enough, try it, it's so easy to make, it smells wonderful, it still imparts that rich buttery flavor, so that's really interesting on these and, of course, you have the garlic. and the rosemary too so now let's try the taste test on the stainless steel steak mmm that's so good so the taste test on the stainless steel steak is absolutely amazing and a slightly different level of doneness but We still have that rich, buttery meat. the texture got the garlic, the rosemary, the salty flavor, this is just perfect overall, in this comparison I will give the gold medal to the cast iron steak and that is only because of the uniformity it gave to the cook, the crusts They were almost identical. the grease cap too and frankly if all you have is a stainless steel pan at home, go for it, you'll get a phenomenal result, although it might be a little more graded in terms of its doneness than making it.

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