The Food Lab: How to Grill a Steak, a Complete Guide
I consider myself a pretty darn good grill master, but I always take a moment to read anything that has grilling tips. Last week, I got this article on how to grill a steak from one of my favorite food sites, Serious Eats. They are like an online master chef, available 24 hours a day to help you with your cooking needs. Always full of great articles, Serious Eats is one of the first places I turn for cooking help. Here you will find 11 tips on how to grill a perfect steak. So, if you’re a novice griller, or just want to brush up on your grill mastery, then keep reading.
The Food Lab: How to Grill a Steak, a Complete Guide
Want to know how to grill a steak? Here’s my advice: DO NOT DO IT THE WAY THEY DO IT AT STEAKHOUSES. It seems counter-intuitive. Surely a restaurant with years of experience cooking hundreds of steaks a day knows a thing or two about how it’s done, right? Well yes. They know how to cook a steak in a steakhouse setting where their goal is consistency, quality, and more importantly—speed. Hungry customers don’t want to have to wait for their meat, and a steakhouse has equipment and techniques designed to meet those parameters.
At home, on the other hand, consistency and quality are important, but speed? Not so much. The fact that you can take some time to treat your meat right means that it’s possible to cook a steak at home much better than it can be done at any steakhouse. True story. We’ll get to the details of how in a bit.
Summer’s here, I’ve got a brand new balcony to grill on, and a fridge full of beef,* so now seems like as good a time as any to re-examine some of the things we know (or think we know) about grilling beef. Sure, we can all agree on what our end goal is: A perfect steak should have a crusty, crunchy, well-browned exterior surrounding a core of perfectly pink, juicy, tender meat that spans from edge-to-edge. (You well-doners can go eat your hockey pucks on someone else’s lawn). A perfect steak should be a nice contrast between the smoky, almost charred exterior and the deeply beefy interior. A perfect steak should be chin-drippingly juicy, and melt-in-your-mouth tender.
*For those of you wondering, the beef is all from Pat LaFrieda and Double R Ranch, who we’re working with on a series of giveaways and recipe posts. I plan on having LOTS of al fresco dinner parties over the coming week
We all know where we want to go. The real debate is, what’s the best way to get there? You’ve just dropped $50 on some prime aged beef, and you’re rightfully nervous about screwing it all up. After all, there’s a lot at… ahem, wait for it… steak.
Ready to dive in? Let’s go!
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[Photographs: J. Kenji Lopez-Alt, unless otherwise noted]
