I’m pretty sure you meant “thin” but that typo could be read either way. And yes, it is for browning, not for ‘non-stick’, as sylmar inferred.
I agree with you. I’ve been grilling for decades, and I wouldn’t test any meat using any finger test. I always use thermometers on any cooked meat and thick cuts of fish. YMMV.
ETA: Flare-ups are due to dripping fat. Trim the fat on the outside of the steak (unless you really enjoy eating the fat). It doesn’t add anything during the cook process. It’s the intra-muscular fat (marbling) that matters.
But it will get you to the ballpark with a bit of practice. I can poke a steak and tell you with 95% certainty if it is rare or med-rare and I don’t cook my steak past that point so beyond that I don’t care too much. That’s me, and yeah I did screw it up a couple of time along the way learning how to judge, but that’s how you learn. If I want it to be 100% totally perfect, I cook indoors where I have a thermometer and controlled oven temps and a blazing hot cast iron skillet to get the final sear. You get a damn fine steak that way, but it’s not the same experience as grilling.
For me grilling outdoors isn’t about perfection, it’s about…something else. It’s about the experience of grilling outdoors as much as anything and bringing a thermometer into the equation seems like you are going against the goodness of outdoor grilling. But, do what ya gotta.
Yikes. Yeah, I meant thin. Stupid fingers thin they know better than I do.
I agree with that. I dislike thermometers for outdoor cooking as well (and I get amused at the smoking/barbecuing guys with their fancy setup keeping temps at exact temperatures to the tenth of a degree. That’s silly to me.)
But I’m particularly not fond of the finger test. It’s never been an accurate analogy, in my opinion, and I think it just frustrates a beginner. At best, it just tells you, the softer the meat, the less done it is; the harder, the more done. Well, that’s pretty self-evident. I think it’s easier just to pull the meat early and sacrifice a bit of steak and see how far along it is. (And cutting into a bit of meat is not going to drain it of it’s juices, it’s okay. You’ll lose a little bit from the area you’re cutting around, but a steak is not a balloon filled with liquid.)
The main things to remember are: if you are cooking fast over high heat, you are cooking the outside before the inside, so you will get a layered effect of doneness. The center will be raw or rare, and as you progress outwards, the meat will get progressively more done until it’s well done. If you cook at lower temperatures, you are bringing the meat more gradually to doneness, meaning you get a more evenly cooked center. I like to start my meat at around 250-275 for about a half hour and then finish on a BLAZING hot grill for about 90-120 seconds a side for the final sear. Like I said above, you can do it in the reverse manner, too (and the sear-first is the more traditional approach.) The cooler you do it, the more evenly your meat will cook. The hotter you do it, the more difference in doneness there will be between the outer layer and the inner layer of steak. (And some people like a little more transition, so that’s fine, too.)
Constantly flipping your meat, which is what I mentioned, has a similar effect to the methods involving a sear and a slow bringing up to temperature. It gradually cooks the meat evenly, instead of doing it in two discrete steps (a sear and a slow roast), you’re doing a similar hot & cool alteration by flipping every 20-30 seconds.
Alton Brown has a a couplea tricks for replicating steakhouse steaks at home. The basic trick is using the charcoal starter full of lit coals to provide intense heat to sear the meat. I guess this YouTube link goes to his procedure (I can’t view it myself, very narrow internet pipe) Alton's Porterhouse Perfection | Food Network - YouTube
He also dry ages a salted t-bone for a few days in the fridge. Its good advice, but you don’t have to follow it exactly. Even half a day, in the fridge, unwrapped will dry the outside a bit, and let it char nicely. If you don’t like his rare cooked 60 seconds twice per side steak – that’s OK. Just get a good sear down on two sides of a steak, then dump the coals into the grill and cook it to your satisfaction. Its really all about really really intense heat to rapidly cook the outside.
Sure, Alton Browns method is to use the chimney starter full of hot coals to cook the aged t-bones, not the grill. He rests the chimney full of hot coals over the steaks for 60 seconds, flips, another 60 seconds, then he balances a grill with the steak over the chimney starter, with a metal bowl to hold in the heat, for another 60 seconds per side. The steak comes out rare. Even more rare if its not dry aged several days. Even more rare (that is only warm in the center) if its an inch and a half thick fillet steak. So if you follow the video, and the steak is too rare for you tastes, you’ll want to cook it a minute or two more, the normal way.
He does a tuna steak over a chimney starter as well in one of his episodes.
While the method in that video will work fine, it’s really only good if you’re doing one steak at a time. You can accomplish the same thing in a less cutesy manner doing what many of the posters here have suggested: sear coal side, finish cooking non-coal side. I don’t really believe in a fire being “too hot” for the sear portion of the cook. I try to get it as hot as I possibly can.
I can get in the 550F range with my totally modest Weber propane grill (granted with a closed lid). Couldn’t someone stoke a big ol’ pile of ragin’ charcoal into the 800F range in a good capacity charcoal grill? That seems fairly doable.
Sure, if you want to burn through a bag or two of charcoal (not to mention the bottom of your kettle.) Grab the wife’s blow dryer and get some airflow going.
There is no reason not to use a thermometer to test when food is at the right temperature, indoors or out. I can get behind grilling being inherently low-tech, but the thermometer was invented in the 16th century ferchrisakes, and I see no shame in using one. And the OP is asking for help, not man-culture nonsense.
Typically, a charcoal fire is going to top out at around 700F at the cooking surface, unless you’re doing something like forcing air. However, this site seems to be reporting ceramic cookers getting up to 1200F at the grill. There are other sites reporting 1000F on charcoal, but the typical results you’ll see in a kettle grill will top off at around 650F-maybe 750F.
Ha, thanks for that. It wasn’t clear to me what the upper limit was to charcoal fire temps. I’m not convinced I know now based on your post, but I’m glad folks are trying to settle the issue.
This is a weird hijack, but what the heck. This isn’t a man culture thing, it’s a precision thing. How precise do you really need to be when cooking outdoors? Do you nee to know that your steak is exactly 121 or 135 or is “pink and soft” good enough for you. I mean, forget poking the steak, you can get pink and soft by counting. If you really need your steak to be cooked that precisely you are already screwing up by choosing to cook on a grill.
Crafter Man, if you haven’t figured it out yet, the #1 piece of information here is for you to stop spreading your charcoals evenly on the bottom of your grill. You need a hot zone and a cool zone, so that you can pull the steaks out of a flare up (which is a FAR better solution than spraying water on your coals and creating soot). So just pile your coals up on one side. I use these to keep things all in one place, but you don’t have to use a contraption.
