It’s my b-day today (39) and I’m going to one of my favorite steak places for dinner tonight. About 6 months-1 year ago I read in another SDMB thread about “Pittsburgh style” steaks, where the steak is seared on the outside but rare on the inside.
Btw - Whoever suggested that, thank you!
What I’m wondering is if there are other local variants that are akin to Pittsburgh style - is there a KC style, a Dallas style, Chicago, ??
I’m not necessarily looking for recipes - I don’t want to tell these people how to cook it, I’m just looking for ordering suggestions.
I’m partial to medium rare, and if you can get an aged steak, you’ll be beside yourself with joy. I had my first aged steak a couple months ago, and I’m still not over the experience.
Oh, absolutely, Kalhoun. I had an aged steak probably fifteen years ago that still stands out in my mind as the best steak I’ve ever had. I really need to get back there someday and have another.
I used to order medium rare, and then I started asking, “Does tonight’s grill chef tend toward the red, or the gray?” Now, I’m more likely to order rare.
An old friend of mine, who likes to tweak people with his fierce, furry biker image, once sent back two rare steaks as overdone. He talked the waiter into letting him go into the kitchen to watch the grill chef. After his steak had sizzled ten seconds on the grill, he grabbed it off the fire and bit into it. “Just right,” he told the wide-eyed chef.
“Rare” isn’t a completely fixed scale, alas. In my favourite steak restaurant in the world, Shanahan’s on the Green in Dublin, Ireland, the steaks are cooked for mere seconds in an oven that is 1,700°F. If you order rare, you get something that’s beautifully charred on the outside, and warm and “blue” in the middle. Fantastic. However, in Amsterdam once I ordered a steak rare and the first time I cut into it, it looked like a car wreck. These days I usually ask for the chef’s recommendation and have never been disappointed.
Can’t you just buy all your steaks 3 weeks before you want to eat them and just leave them in the fridge? From what I have read, the common aging process isn’t very different than that.
Actually, I think there is a way to do that (maybe I saw it on Alton Brown?) but I also think it’s fairly dependent on the surface area ratio. Aged beef is aged in big chunks - if not a whole side at a time, then at least big roasts from which steaks are then cut. I think just leaving one on a plate in the fridge would result in a green and fuzzy piece of meat. Ew.
Ah. Here’s an article on dry-aged beef, which does seem to imply that one can do it at home, but that it wants the thicker cuts and prime grade. Maybe someday, if I can find prime retail or grow my own.
This page from Weber seems to have the closest that I could find to a transcript of that Alton Brown show. Most of the rest of the documentation on aged beef that I could find involved whole carcasses.
I’ve been sort of dryaging steaks in my refrigerator at home. I just leave it on a plate. The longest I’ve left one out was 7 days and it tasted fantastic (I would’ve waited longer, but I was hungry). I cooked it to a medium. I’ve been using NY Strips, choice cut, 1-1 1/4", from Costco – no other store in my area sells them that thick (sometimes, the local butcher does, but I have to ask him to cut it that way, and he always looks pissed when I ask him for a larger cut). Oh, and it’s on a propane grill at 425F (about 8 mins/side if anyone wants to know, much faster than without my dry aging).
The only thing I’ve notice when cooking these steaks is that they flare up way more than when I bring them home straight from the store. It’s like cooking chicken with the skin on it. So, you have to watch it a lot or you will have massive charring.
It tastes way better than getting it straight from the store. Costco usually sells them in 4-6 lb packages, so I typically freeze them first and defrost later. I wonder how much longer I can keep them in the refrigerator? They turn out the same color as described in the article.
The one I had was either 21 or 28 days, but that was the whole hunk o’ cow…not just the individual steak. I had it at a restaurant called Wildfire. Not cheap, but worth every nickel.
We had a thread about this a couple weeks ago. Someone said ageing steaks on a wire rack in the fridge for 4-5 days works very well. I’m going to try it when I buy some really good steaks.
Make fire. Fire good! Make big fire. Fire get small. Fire get hot coals. Put meat on fire. Meat good! Get stick. Turn meat over. Take meat off. Eat meat. Meat good!
And if you poke around here (click on DFL and it’s a Flash site, or I’d give a better link), you can watch an octopus show a one-eyed green alien how to cook a steak in a cast-iron skillet.
