Turn $5 steak to $50 steak with salt
steamykitchen.com
steamykitchen.com
So, this guy compared wrongly-salted expensive steak to correctly-but-very-heavily-salted cheap steak. Unfair.
Also, in general, expensive steak isn't expensive because it's aged. Aged steak is expensive, but the difference between cheap and expensive is more commonly just which part of the cow it is. Filet mignon is a happy tender fatty underused part of the cow. Also, not very much of it per cow.
A good recipe for chicken:
Turn your oven on high (450 if you have ventilation, 425 if not). Coat a 3- or 4-pound chicken with coarse kosher salt so that you have an appealing crust of salt (a tablespoon or so). Put the chicken in a pan, stick a lemon or some onion or any fruit or vegetable you have on hand into the cavity. Put the chicken in the oven. Go away for an hour. Watch some TV, play with the kids, read, have a cocktail, have sex. When an hour has passed, take the chicken out of the oven and put it on the stove top or on a trivet for 15 more minutes. Finito.
'Salty eggs' are often used in Chinese food...
Dry-aged is more expensive than fresh, and always better.
Prime is more expensive than choice, and always better.
These things all matter. You're right, but I still want to stomp on the confusion about what "prime" means.
I heartily endorse Ruhlman's "too stupid to cook" chicken recipe. Buy two chickens when you do it, save the other for leftovers. Whole chicken is much more economical than breasts.
You can replicate a similar process at home by putting your cut of beef in an open container in your refrigerator (be sure to put a small rack under it to get air circulation on the bottom) and letting it sit for 3-4 days. For something like a rib roast the improvement in taste and texture can be quite significant.
The steak will be tender and juicy, since searing it at such a hot temperature locks in most of the juices, similar to the way a wound is cauterized.
I only recommend you do this if you have a VERY well ventilated kitchen, as the amount of smoke generated will surely set off any smoke alarms in your house otherwise.
Sidenote: Why is it that a lot of modern kitchens don't have properly ventilated hoods that actually vent outside? It seems ridiculous that most of the hoods over stoves nowadays just recirculate the air back inside. When I want to cook, I want to cook, damn it!
Here's a fun article on cooking beef: Bob del Grosso, from the Culinary Institute, losing his shit over how Mark Bittman writes up his technique for the NYTimes:
http://ahungerartist.bobdelgrosso.com/2010/01/minimalist-of-...
Tip: Most olive oils have relatively lower smoke points, especially if you're using virgin. So, if you want to prevent most of the smoke, try canola oil. The OO isn't doing much for flavor, especially if it's burning. Also, a pat of butter at the end is essential.
The diff:
1. crack peppercorns spread across a baking sheet. Lay steak upon them. Compress. I use a heavy (cold) skillet. Flip steak. Repeat.
2. Heat oil just beneath the smoke point in pan, otherwise cook steak as described.
3. Serve with any citrus-based steaksauce. (A1 if you have to, but I prefer to make my own OJ based sauce)
The peppercorn crust is quite good.
Beautiful with the peppered crust.
Being able to make a good pan-sauce is a skill that provides one of the best returns on the time investment for a home cook (second only to making your own stocks and glaces.)
In the frenzy of mixing things and moving ingredients around you tend to forget the pan is still at ~500F.
This tip has been brought to you by the scar on my left palm.
This article never gets specific, but I get the impression the author doesn't really know what "prime" means: how well marbled the cut is with fat. Salt isn't going to change that (although, again, it will improve your steak).
If tenderness is all you're after, you can use a jaccard on the meat; Google it, they're cheap. They put tiny little cuts in the meat to break up the fibers.
When people say "cheap steak" they usually mean skirt or flank. Can you even get prime skirt steak?
I've had people fly cross-country (twice) for these steaks and it's really not all that hard. But it makes for an expensive summer season with lots of entertaining on my deck.
One guy was mystified as to why I wasn't using the popular Morton's method of high heat and turn once. Then he had one, came back the next weekend unannounced "just happened to be in the area" and tried to bribe me with a bottle of Santa Rita Reserva Cab (I know cheap wine, but good). Too bad I was out of steaks.
And yes, I usually get the on-sale cheap steak at the local grocery. So long as it's decently marbled it doesn't really seem to matter much what I get so long as it's not skirt or flank.
Sounds like a good idea to me. I cooked a 15lbs kobe beef brisket last weekend and had more meat than people to share it with.
Jappanese (true) Kobe is even better, and it's the only beef I've ever even considered eating "blue" (super rare). If you're ever in Japan, treat yourself. It's worth it.
It sounds to me like this technique would really help with a complete and consistent cooking of the entire steak -- something I strongly favor. It's why I start with a low heat grill then ramp up to hot at the end. But my technique is imprecise and requires lots of attention.
Does it also help the flavor by keeping the fats close to the meat in the bag? I'd think another side benefit is that the steaks would come out so tender a fork could cut them.
I'd be curious to try throwing in some butter and seasonings into the bag, or at least for the final searing. A browned coating of butter seems to make lots of meats taste really great in my opinion (as opposed to a plant derived oil). But some people don't like the heavy oily taste it can imbue in the food.
The sous vide guide (Google for it) will give you the math for this, but their numbers are keyed on salmonella, which is what you really need to look out for; botulism appears to be easier to kill.
As far as aromatics go, cooking sous vide works on the same principal as cooking in a pouch. It amplifies most flavors, which is a good thing with few exceptions (garlic, notably, doesn't work SV).
> As far as aromatics go, cooking sous vide works on the same principal as cooking in a pouch.
Ahh, now it suddenly clicks for me. Too bad about the garlic.
Whole Food beef is select not choice. I can only speak for Bay Area definitively, I haven't checked out WF meat counter in Chicago. I doubt it's any different because Whole Foods has a nice high-margin gig going on what they call "natural" beef, which is USDA Select sold as a premium product on the strength of Whole Foods brand. It's a store brand with premium pricing, great gig if you can pull it off, good for Whole Foods.
Yep, you can probably get "prime skirt" at Schaub's. Someone fedex me a Fred Steak, please. I'll send italian beef back in reply.
(I'm good for Chicago food fedexed any time. Alinea hot-potato-cold-potato coming right up!)
Edit: If you have not seen sous vide cooking: http://amath.colorado.edu/~baldwind/sous-vide.html
It looks amazing to me.
There is a better home option now than the rice cooker + pid timer( which does not circulate water and leads to uneven cooking. http://www.sousvidesupreme.com/
This is as good as you can get without buying a $995 dollar immersion circulator(which you should buy if you can).
Pick up the more expensive foodsaver, if you can't afford a commercial unit. I cook at arazorashinyknife.com these days, and our commercial unit which costs $5000 just died on us, it cost $1000 just to have a guy look at it -.-
http://cookingissues.wordpress.com/2010/02/02/coming-soon-so... Here is a primer on sous-vide cooking, which by the way can can be done the ghetto way by sealing a sturdy ziplock bag almsot under water, to get as much air out as you can. Then you can leave a large pot of water running under the hot water tap until you can get the water to the temperture you need.
It seems that corporate profits trump safety these days. How much rocket fuel is safe to drink in our public water supply? What are a few deaths against the right to corporate earnings?
I've seen (IRL) the sous vide supreme appliance, and have a peer who got to use one for a couple weeks, and if you've got the ghetto rig, the SVS doesn't add anything. Hacker News types are better off with the PID controller.
Curious to know what your HN-related project is, yeah.
It would be pretty awesome if you documented how you made it work (especially if you do it in such a way that is cheap and easily reproducible).
2. Buy mechanically-switched Black & Decker rice cooker @ $40.
3. Buy Seal-a-Meal vacuum sealer @ $40.
4. Buy two aged rib-eye steaks.
5. Pat steaks dry, salt liberally, pepper.
6. Seal steaks in a single vacuum-sealed bag with 1 tbsp of butter for each steak.
7. Set Auber PID controller for 131f.
8. Put sealed steaks in the bottom of the rice cooker. Fill with water.
9. Ensure that the thermal probe from the PID controller is in the water.
10. Ensure that the rice cooker is plugged into the PID controller, and the PID controller into the wall.
11. Walk away for 4 hours.
12. Heat peanut oil in a skillet until shimmering.
13. Remove steaks from water bath. Pat dry. Oil should be just-smoking.
14. Sear steaks on both sides, 30-40 seconds per side.
15. Rest meat 10-15 minutes.
16. Serve.
Especially, you can't do the spectacular compressed stuff without one of those.
You can get sous-vide-like results sometimes without said equipment, though; Thomas Keller's Ad Hoc at Home book contains a lot of unstated backports from sous vide techniques. For instance, he has you blowtorch a big prime rib roast and then cook it at very low temperature in the oven (275 F) for two hours. It reliably comes out with the uniform-pink-almost-all-the-way-to-the-edges effect. Presumably not quite as close.
If you want to (a) make watermelons with the texture of a strip steak or (b) cook SV in huge volume, you need to investigate high end equipment.
Otherwise, the concept behind SV is extremely simple. Precisely controlled temperature over long cooking time. The $120 PID controllers do that job just fine.
What have you read that says you need a cryovac to do SV well? The Baldwin guide actively endorses the ghetto setup, and there are numerous blogs of people succeeding with it. The Keller sous vide book isn't a home cookbook any more than the Alinea cookbook is. You're not making French Laundry food at home no matter how you equip your kitchen.
I would think you still need something vaguely vacuum-sealer-like, since as the Baldwin guide says any air pockets will expand and insulate half the object.
But I suppose I'll try the $40 vacuum sealer.
WTF is wrong with people and osmosis? This is diffusion. Osmosis is diffusion of water and nothing else.
Also, "table salt tastes like shit" is quite true. I've been buying an unrefined sea salt for a while now, the difference is incredible. Flavor in foods, where before was mere saltiness.
For example, those "Learning through osmosis" signs in libraries, articles, shirts, etc. absolutely abound. It clearly isn't working if you think that's osmosis. Or there are tons of services with quotes like this: http://www.languagetutoring.co.uk/LearningThroughOsmosis.htm...
Evidently they aren't tutoring science.
Osmosis vs diffusion is not difficult to understand. It just seems people use it to sound smarter, and thus fail miserably 99% of the time.
They fail 99% of the time with you, but if the vast majority of the people don't know the difference (as you said they don't), then the misusers aren't failing with the vast majority of listeners. :)
Are you then implying that anything that the majority believes - heck, lets make it 99% - is true, and should be accepted?
Lets put it in geek-friendly terms, dating it back a number of years, so it strikes a chord with yc users: "Windows is the only operating system."
I'm saying they fail to sound smarter with you but perhaps succeed in sounding smarter [not at being right] with the vast majority.
I have a small bag of fleur de sel (we call it "crunchy salt") which I use to finish things, but again, it's for the texture. I wouldn't say I've found any incredible difference in salt flavor.
I'm not a big salt-flavor fan, so I effectively never have salt pieces on anything. The texture doesn't exist in any salt I use, as it's all dissolved.
edit: finally found it. Redmond RealSalt, all the big grocery stores near me carry it. ~6.50 for 26 oz, so for my uses that's 6.50 for a year of salt usage, if not more.
In the case of the salt you mention this is just kosher salt with a particular bit of marketing spin on the package. What makes kosher salt the go-to choice for most chefs is the size of the crystal -- it is large enough that you can use a "pinch" in your fingers and get some control over distrbution and these large crystals also take a little while to completely dissolve so it is much better than standard table salt when you are doing something like salting a piece of meat prior to cooking. Another reason you may like it (given your stated aversion to salty flavors) is that because of the large crystal size a given volume of kosher salt has only half as much actual salt in it compared to table salt. If you have a recipe that calls for one teaspoon of salt and you use one teaspoon of kosher salt you are actually only putting in a half teaspoon of NaCl (the other half of the teaspoon is just air.) This is not bad for most cooking, but you should go out an get a bit of regular table salt if you do any baking at all, that is one area where cutting down on salt can ruin a recipe if you don't know what all of the other components in the recipe are doing and compensating appropriately.
Using expensive salt before/during cooking though sounds crazy to me.
It's the flavor. Really. There is a difference. There's a definite marketing spin to try to sell it, but that doesn't imply there's no difference.
What's the chemical difference? Doesn't the mined salt just come from old dried out seas?
(also, incidentally, I'd say a good steak is as much about taste as texture. This sorta sacrifices one for the other)
My aunt rears poultry for several markets. Her supermarket produce is usually additionally processed in a variety of ways by an intermediate to increase it's sale value (with poultry it is usually water plumped).
It might take a while but there is sure to be a local butcher or farm shop nearby where you can buy more directly.
Edit: also I personally don't think meat is a Market that benefits from economy of scale :-) I usually find supermarkets a false economy.
EDIT: here is some info on plumping. http://voices.washingtonpost.com/all-we-can-eat/food-politic...
My Aunt's produce isn't modified all that much (because it is marketed as premium and local produce by the supermarket - they buy from numerous small producers in local regions and distribute to that region). However most of the generic chicken you see in stores will be plumped in this way. Im not sure of the exact water content but I recall watching a TV show once about it that suggested 70% water content (including what was already there)
I highly suggest you watch Food inc. :-)
Local is nonsense. If you want grass finished say so. Don't say local. And calling it commercial is misleading too, since grass finished is also commercial.
You could go further afield for your meat (I do myself actually) but a "local producer" is certainly the style your after.
Only one of the 4 is not owned by Cargill or JBS.
Unless your beef vendor is taking delivery on whole carcasses and then packing it themselves, the beef is probably packed at the slaughterhouse, as well.
But really, I don't know if the goodness in non-Giant-Eagle meat has anything to do with the meat packing industry. I just was trying to convince ars that food people aren't being totally dumb when they say that local is often better than GEagle equivalents.
Of course, the farmer isn't processing an obscene amount of cattle each year, either, and he only sells directly to consumers, face-to-face, so a small butcher can actually handle that sort of volume.
It's illegal to resell beef to consumers which wasn't slaughtered at a facility with a USDA inspector. If you buy the whole animal, like bmj does, then it can be slaughtered by anyone who knows what they're doing and packed (cut and wrapped) by any competent butcher. You then cannot resell that meat (and, in fact, all of the packaging should have not for retail stamps on it).
Now, personally, having actually toured a slaughterhouse (the one in Fresno, CA), I've got no problem with them. I definitely take issue with the "enormous horrible disease-ridden" characterization. Most of the food safety problems have been artifacts of the high volume hamburger production process. If you buy steaks, or even hamburgers made by butchers from whole cuts of meat, you should be in the clear.
I was merely trying to point out, somewhat obliquely, that unless you're slaughtering an animal you own and then buying all of the cut and wrapped meat, any beef you buy in the US was slaughtered at a huge slaughterhouse. That's just the reality of the situation, and it's a combination of regulations intended to keep you safe (having a USDA inspector on site is really, really expensive) and the continued consolidation of the packing industry (enabled by the government, NIMBY organizations, environmental groups, etc).
At the same time, as an Nth generation cattle rancher (where N > 4), I don't want to discourage anyone from buying locally raised beef. ;-)
I grew up around Pittsburgh, then moved to Atlanta for school ~9 years ago. Talk about a substantial drop in supermarket quality...
The 'local' thing has been a reasonably successful attempt at taking the place of 'organic' as a proxy marker for non-crap. It has the nice property of still mostly working after being coopted by the big supermarket chains.
It's just as bullshit, if not moreso, but it's useful bullshit.
A happy animal is indeed a tasty animal. That's why we raise cattle in dry pens (away from predators) with abundant fresh water and feed them carefully formulated food twice a day. Our cattle get better dietary planning than I do; they don't eat pure corn (as the term "corn-fed" might lead you to believe), they eat a mix including alfalfa, grass hay, corn, barley, silage, cannery surplus apples, oats, molasses, and other ingredients. The fact is, big or small, any cattleman is going to try and keep the conditions as good as possible. If your animals are standing in 2 feet of mud and eating moldy hay, they're not going to produce and you're not going to make money. Also, nobody goes into the livestock business hating the animals--we who grew up on farms probably have a better understanding and empathy for livestock than your average city-dweller, and we want to act kindly toward them.
As for grass feeding, you want to know something? One of the biggest grass-fed beef producers back home only eats corn-fed beef. Corn-fed beef is more extensively marbled and more tender. Like organic produce, grass-fed beef is a niche market for people who think something tastes better because it has a crunchy image and damn the price/scalability/sustainability.
Or how do you deal with the problem of manure in the pens? Surely you can't keep an animal confined in a cage it's whole life and expect it to shit somewhere else?
Watch Food Inc. You will never want to eat "corn-fed" beef again.
These aren't cages, they're large pens, starting at about the size of a football field and going up.
A grass-fed animal is still going to be walking in, sleeping on, and eating manure; in fact, grazing cattle often look dirtier than ours.
I'm not exactly sure how watching a sensationalist film is going to erase the 18 years of animal husbandry experience I've accumulated. I've assisted in slaughtering cattle, sheep, and pigs, I've shoveled every kind of manure imaginable, I've birthed sheep (starting at about age 5), I've hauled the inevitable dead animals, I've assisted in various basic surgical and veterinary operations. I've been to numerous other feedlots and dairies, and having observed all these things I am quite happy and secure in eating beef and drinking milk.
I don't think there's much debate that corn fed is fattier and more appealing to the average palate. The issue is health and omega-6 to omega-3 ratios. Even a small amount of corn or other seeds in the feed put omega-6 way up.
Watch a documentary called Food, Inc. and become enlightened.
However, the "freshness" of beef is in interesting topic. When a cow is slaughtered it is bled and hung in a cooler for about a week. At this point it is usually cut up into primal cuts or sub-primal cuts, sealed in cryovac and sent to the store. At wholesale clubs you can usually buy these whole sub-primals in cryovac. In a normal store the "butcher's" simply cut up the sub-primals into normal size and sell them. The people who work the meat counter in the typical store are simply meat cutters and no longer butchers in the true sense.
Some restaurants keep their meat in the cryovac for extended periods of time and they call this "aging" which is technically called "wet aging". And vastly inferior to dry aging. Dry aging is simply leaving a sub-primal in a temperature appropriate room for an extended period to allow bacteria to break down the meat and moisture to evaporate, thus increasing flavor.
Freshness in terms of beef really means "never frozen". If you freeze beef (or any protein really) then ice crystals form and cause damage to the cellular structure of the meat. This means that juices from the meat will simply exit the meat and never return, no matter how long your rest the meat after cooking.
boneless beef ribeye 3/4in thick - I used a grill pan since it's too cold to grill outside. maybe 2 minutes a side, and another 2 to finish. I added some garlic powder an that was it (no additional salt). I let it rest for a good 10 min. One end was a little too salty, which was probably my fault for not washing it better. But overall, it fantastic. I've always tried to salt generously when cooking meat, but it never really worked like this. Great tip.
Also see this post which discusses the effects of flip intervals on cooking time and evenness of steaks: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1117296
Also, some other simple tips:
1) In general, the more marbling the better. You want lots of veins of fat in the muscle of the cut. Big chunks of fat don't count, and leaner meat won't have as much flavor.
2) Hard white fat is good, spongy yellow fat is not.
3) Don't overcook your meat.
1) The animal was old.
2) Worst case: the animal was losing weight when it died. This will make the meat taste sour (as best I can describe).
3) Best case: it's grass fed and not grain finished. This fat will usually be hard. If you're in the UK (guessing because you said "mum"), that's probably what you got.
4) It's dry aged beef. The outer layer will turn a bit yellow, but otherwise the fat is going to be whatever color it was before aging. Temperature and duration of aging has a lot more to do with how tender the cut is going to be.
Really, it's the spongy feeling stuff you want to avoid. If you're in the US, and it's not marketed as grass fed, it's almost certainly from an old dairy cow or an animal which was sick when it was slaughtered (and losing weight).
This method works: Preheat grill to 500 deg F. Lightly salt and pepper the steak just before grilling. Grill for 4 minutes per side per inch of thickness. Remove, call the guests in, and serve. Yum.
Remove, [let rest for 5 minutes], call the guests in...
I'm kinda new to cooking steaks, so I don't have a lot of experience to measure this against, but I think I will do this again next time.
This works really well with fish too. My favorite catalonian restaurant cooks its fish on a slab of salt, with excellent results.
alternative: brine all your meat.
Hacking = coding for food.