We Cooked Steaks For Twitter. BONUS: Steven Cheah's Secret Recipe For A Perfect Medium Rare + Steak
This past week on the Going Deep podcast, we had a guy I consider to be the Mayor of Steak Twitter, Ryan Jensen on. Not only will he be snapping footballs to Tom Brady this season, but he cooks a ton of awesome food and posts about it. He specializes in steak, but he also gets into things like scallops and other foods and it all looks incredible.
He's also a great resource for questions about cooking. I made my first foray in awhile by posting a steak I cooked and he immediately diagnosed my issue of not waiting to cut it.
It was kind of fascinating to me that someone could know that just by seeing a picture, because to my hungry, novice eyes it looked pretty good (good enough to post). So I wanted to get my buddy and co-host Willie into the mix because Willie eats really great food. He knows great chefs and has incredible taste, so I was sure he'd be interested in taking a dip into the Steak Twitter pool, so I challenged him to post pictures of his next steak into the twittersphere. It was a promising start to say the least:
But somewhere along the line, things got away from my buddy Willie.
Tough to blame him as cooking three steaks is without question harder than cooking one steak like I did. But to level the playing field, I admitted my restrictions:
- I do not know how to use a grill (I have a grill. It came with the house. I have been avoiding it like an ex at a party and it's basically wallpaper at this point on my deck).
- I do not have a meat thermometer
Here's how I do it, which I follow to a T basically every time:
Steven Cheah's secret recipe for cooking the perfect medium rare + steak
- Leave steak that you bought a few months ago from Costco and has been taking up a ton of freezer space out and bring to room temperature (a couple of hours - use your best judgement)
- dry it with paper towels and season it with McCormick Montreal Steak Seasoning (no free ads)
- pre-heat oven to 450 too late for that temperature to ever really hit
- put oil in pan and get pretty hot (to the point you can hear it)
- put steak on in pan to sear each side. Flip around a few times to brown each side
- forget to set timer because you're busy reading twitter
- take steak off stove after it's been more than 5 minutes but less than 10 minutes (use texting or twitter timestamps to verify how long it's been)
- put steak in oven that hasn't reached 450 yet because you pre-heated it too late like a dummy
- leave it in for 10 minutes at 450, so let's say 15 mins at 350 climbing to 450.
- put a couple slabs of butter on steak and let steak rest for *what I've learned is at least as many minutes as it's been in the oven. Shoutout Ryan Jensen for that tip.
- cut steak and enjoy
I followed these instructions exactly on Saturday (except the leaving it for 15 mins, I did 12 and it showed), but it came out pretty good:
Now there are additional things like rendering fat and getting a better sear that people said in the comments, but this was only my second dip in the Steak Twitter waters in the past couple years. I will say I enjoyed it and will be back again. The kind people of Steak Twitter even awarded me the W over Willie and for that, I feel like I need to learn how to render the fat and sear better so I can clean up on Round 3 whenever that happens.
But until then, give our interview with Ryan Jensen a listen. You can get it anywhere you listen to pods: Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, Stitcher.