Hard to argue with a good steak. For this week's Prairie Plates, Rick Gion is serving up tips for how to buy, and most importantly, prepare a steak.
Transcript
All right, it's time to get cooking and more importantly eating with Rick Gion for Prairie Plates.
After this past weekend of getting 70 degrees and sunny and you could smell the grills coming out and you could feel people wanting to cook outside and throw some stuff on the grill. We're gonna do a lot of talking about grilling in the coming weeks and we're gonna kick it off with talking about steak
Rick Gion
Yes. Well around here. You're gonna see a lot of porterhouse and t-bone porterhouse. Obviously tenderloin by itself is a popular cut at restaurants and just grilling. The ribeye has really become the very popular cut around here but I do like a porterhouse because it's just a really nice steak bone in great flavor. It doesn't dry out. You can cook it different ways. I've cooked them right on the coals not with per se like briquettes because they get a little more ash, but cowboy charcoal...That's kind of an interesting technique.
Ashley Thornberg
Wait, you just said cowboy charcoal. Is that the technique it's called when you cook right on the charcoal?
Rick Gion
It's a little that charcoal is different than the briquettes that people are used to…the royal oak or some of those brands… but that natural charcoal really it burns hotter. So you're going to get a crust and there will be some residual pieces of coal you got to knock off. But it's kind of fun just to put the steak right on the coals and listen to the sizzle and smell it.
Ashley Thornberg
That is a very satisfying sound. We also got wat New York strip and sirloin
Rick Gion
Yeah loin is more in that middle top middle section of the cow. Sirloin's a little more in the back. It's not a rump cut…And then some plate cuts which is down at the bottom in that belly area. Flank and skirt are extremely popular around here these days for people making tacos and fajitas.
Ashley Thornberg
How important is it to know what you're going to do with the steak when you're choosing what cut?
Rick Gion
I think it's tremendously important and you should do research on that topic. In fact, I was just reading an article in America's Test Kitchen about how to properly cook Wagyu steaks, which are a totally different thing than your typical prime choice and select USDA categories. You should really do research on how to cook different steaks different ways because if you're using a sous vide, thickness of a cut, fat content, those things can really weigh in how you do those. And how they come out because after a sous vide you really want to sear them with a torch I've done it with a torch quite a few times.
Ashley Thornberg
And that's the one where they're sealed and you're cooking them boiling underwater, right sous vide?
Rick Gion
It's not quite boiling. Okay, you kind of get them to a temperature like 140…We did 140 for a couple hours on some porterhouses and bone-in ribeyes and then torched them with this torch which gets really hot after or you really crank up the charcoal on a weber grill or a big green egg and really crank it up to like 800 / 900 degrees and you're really gonna get a nice crust.
Ashley Thornberg
Yeah, and then you're just cooking that for a couple seconds I would think at the end.
Rick Gion
It doesn't last too long. You really have to watch it because if you crank that thing up to close to a thousand degrees You may burn stuff, but the goal is to get a crust. I don't really like grill marks on a steak. I'm after crust.
Ashley Thornberg
What should we be looking for whether it's a butcher shop or a grocery store when going to select a good cut of beef? Usually you hear a word like marbling.
Rick Gion
Yeah marbling, bone in, bone out, muscle structure that sort of thing. Believe it or not. A lot of the meat shops are not butcher shops. They get cuts from the same distributor as grocery stores.
One of those big slaughterhouses, yeah, and so there are butcher shops or meat shops. There's a difference there that do specialty cuts. One is Prime Cut Meats in Fargo and they'll do bone-in ribeye, dry aged, those type of things there are other meat shops in the area. There's a lot of things to steak and I'm sure I'll get some emails at plates at prairiepublic.org After this because people are very opinionated about steak and they should be well
Ashley Thornberg
We want to hear about it! plates at prairiepublic.org Tell us where you are going for our best steak or what rick and I need to still learn about throwing some good steaks on here.
You were talking about specialty cuts and A few years ago my daughter was living in Brazil.
She was finishing up high school. We got invited to all sorts of these little backyard barbecues and It was as far as I knew just cutting small bits of steak and roasting them over an open fire And then we tried to do it at home and it was actually kind of difficult because we don't cut our steaks quite the same way. If memory serves me correctly we had to ask for them to leave the fat on a specific cut.
Rick Gion
Yeah, and I think you're referring to a picanha. It's a Sirloin cap. It's very close to the rump. They cut that with the fat cap on It adds to the flavor. It's big in South America, not just in Brazil… that's a very trendy steak right now because it is absolutely delicious.
Ashley Thornberg
Okay interesting now when you say trending are you saying in restaurants or in grocery stores and doing the whole the way they do it in Brazil, which is the backyard barbecue.
Rick Gion
No, it's mostly at home. You don't find this unless you go to one of those restaurants and the closest one is Minneapolis Fogo de Chão. You're gonna have to specially order some things. That's where your butcher shop or meat shop comes in. I doubt the grocery store could get that in for you.
A couple other steaks that are trendy right now are a chuck eye which is actually an extension of the rib eye going into the chuck quarter portion of the front of the cow, the kind of that shoulder portion.
It's a little more marbled different kind of muscle structure, but it has that eye in it and that one is very trendy right now and is always like for a steak frite you and the hanger steak.
Ashley Thornberg
Now you've talked a little bit about grilling and then even the sous vide, but how about just straight up on the stove?
Rick Gion
Absolutely! I like to use a carbon steel or cast iron pan. You can use clarified butter and a little olive oil, probably some cloves of garlic
Ashley Thornberg
Why clarified butter?
Rick Gion
There's milk solids in butter and they will burn. You need a higher temperature fat to to fry that steak in however, you don't want the milk solids in that butter because you're going to stink up your house pretty bad.
Ashley Thornberg
so i've gotten ghee, which is what I am familiar with calling clarified butter, at Indian restaurants and at Indian supermarkets and sometimes they're in the Asian market, too. Can you get clarified butter at any grocery store?
Rick Gion
Well ghee is clarified butter. Sometimes it's fermented a little bit... You might want to start with a specialty market for clarified butter. Uou can actually clarify it yourself if you melt it. You can take a spoon and pull out the you'll see the milk solids and just pull them out. It's not that hard to do and they come to the top. There's some foam and then some milk solids. You'll see you can microwave the butter. If the microwave is not your thing you can just melt it on the stove and pull out the milk solids.
Ashley Thornberg
Now I've heard other things like a tuna steak. Obviously, we've been talking primarily about beef here. Is this one of those things where it's like, okay nut milk is maybe not the same thing as milk. Can there be a mushroom steak or a tuna steak?
Rick Gion
Yeah. I think just a big, thick cut of something you're gonna grill or something could be called a steak. There's mushrooms, cauliflower steak.
Ashley Thornberg
Do you let yours come to room temperature before you cook a steak?
Rick Gion
Absolutely! That's one of the big rules…You need to have it out for at least an hour in my opinion or a day
Ashley Thornberg
Ii've got a co-worker who doesn't like having cheese at my house because she knows I leave it out all day. It's a habit I picked up when I lived in France and you did not put cheese in the fridge
Rick Gion
Well, those soft cheeses are better warm. For sure when they're gooey cheese.