Ted Weigal was wondering how to cook a steak like restaurants do: seared then cooked to perfection. By the time I had found an answer for Weigal, I was ready for a thick, juicy steak.
The sources I consulted agree that pan broiling is the best method for cooking steak, although an excellent argument can be made for grilling, and you will see another method in today's recipe. Sources also agreed that:
Searing should be done in a heavy pan on medium-high heat.
Meat should be dried before searing.
Because the solids in butter will burn, oil should be used to sear meat. If you want a buttery flavor, allow a pat to melt over the finished steak or if you are serving a sauce with the meat, add the butter to that.
Rubbing oil on the meat is preferable to spreading it in the pan. This will prevent oil in unused portions of the pan from burning.
Other aspects of meat cookery — searing, salting and piercing — have been debated on a number of occasions.
That searing seals in juices has been pretty much been disproved. In "How to Read a French Fry," Russ Parsons points out that if you sear a steak on one side then turn it over, you will see drops of juice emerging through the crust that was thought to seal the meat.
So searing not only doesn't seal in juices, it dries the meat slightly. But it makes up for this by increasing the perception of juiciness, which can be attributed to both the moisture in the meat and the salivation triggered by the seared meat's complex aromas and flavors.
"Browning is good," says "Steaks, Chops, Roasts and Ribs," from the editors of Cooks Illustrated magazine. Browned food's wonderful flavor comes from the Maillard reaction, named for the French chemist who first described it a century ago. The combination of meat's amino acids (proteins) and natural sugars with intense heat results in new compounds, which in turn break down and form still more complex and flavorful compounds on the outside of seared meat.
For the Food Lab page at seriouseats.com, executive editor/recipe czar J. Kenji Lopez-Alt documents his own experiments to find the best way to cook a steak.
Like others, he concluded that searing doesn't seal in juices, but does enhance flavor and textures, and he suggests that the best way to cook steak is to have oil smoking hot in a heavy pan then add a salted and peppered steak, turning it every 15 or 30 seconds until the desired internal temperature is almost reached. And if it is a thick steak, be sure to sear the edges.
There has been some disagreement over the merits of salting meats before cooking them.
"Start with salt," advise Chris Schlesinger and John Willoughby in "How to Cook Meat" (Morrow/HarperCollins, 2000). The small amount of juice that salt draws to the surface of the meat is more than compensated for by the amplified flavor that results from the interaction of the salt with the meat.
Lopez-Alt concluded that not only does salting before cooking enhance the flavor of meat, the amount of time that elapses between salting and cooking makes a difference.
He salted several steaks at 10-minute intervals before searing them in a hot skillet. The steak that was cooked immediately after salting and the steak that was cooked 40 minutes after salting were much better than those that sat 10, 20 or 30 minutes between salting and searing.
Documenting photos and videos show how the salt is taken into the meat as time elapses. When steak is seared immediately after salting, the salt rests on the surface of the meat and the steaks juices remain inside the muscle fibers.
Within three or four minutes of salting, juices are drawn to the surface of the meat. Searing at this point wastes heat and energy to evaporate the liquid and the temperature of the pan drops, inhibiting the Maillard reaction.
About 10 or 15 minutes after steak is salted, a brine forms as the salt dissolves in the meat juices. The muscle structure of the beef begins to break down becoming more absorptive and enabling the brine to work its way into the meat, which begins about 20 minutes after salting. By the time salt has been on the meat for 40 minutes most of the liquid has been reabsorbed.
The best steak, however, according to Lopez-Alt, was one that was salted on both sides and allowed to rest on a rack, uncovered, in the refrigerator overnight. This allows the steak to dry naturally on the outside and the juices to distribute throughout the meat.
So, he suggests, if you have the time, salt the meat and let it rest for 40 minutes and up to overnight before cooking. If you haven't got 40 minutes, it's better to salt immediately before cooking.
One other subject for debate has been whether or not to pierce or cut a small slit in meat to test for doneness. Even though a lot of juice seems to escape from the meat when you pierce it with a fork, the amount is insignificant compared with the juices remaining throughout the steak, according to Lopez-Alt.
Even cutting a small slit in the meat with a knife will not affect the juiciness of the steak. If this is your chosen method of testing for doneness, however, keep in mind that the hot juices released by cutting the muscle fiber will make the meat appear rarer than it actually is.
The most accurate way to test for doneness is to use a digital thermometer.
AND ONE MORE THING
Letting meat rest for 10 minutes after cooking allows juices to redistribute evenly so when you cut it, more juice remains in the steak. Of course Lopez-Alt has a well-documented logical and technical explanation for this, which you can read at http://tinyurl.com/3fzdjl9.
Email firstname.lastname@example.org. Or write to Linda Brandt, Sarasota Herald-Tribune, P.O. Drawer 1719, Sarasota, FL 34230. Read previous articles and columns at www.heraldtribune.com/linda.