Grilled Steak 101

Hi, I'm Josh Ozersky, and you're watching eHow.com. Now, I've grilled a lot of different things in my time, done spareribs, hamburgers, pork chops, bacon, you name it, salami, but at the end of the day, the crowning glory of grilling is steak. Steak is the summit of the meaty sciences, the top of the great chain of being. Now, I have here a steak, not an especially great one. This is what I believe would be called a choice piece of red meat. That is to say, it is not abundantly marbled, but it's got some, and it is probably tastes pretty good. This is a T-bone steak. It's got the little bit here of the fillet mignon, and then also the New York strip, also known as the Kansas City strip, or inaccurately as the sirloin. In fact, it's the short loin, not the sirloin. Key point, the sirloin is from the animal's hip. This is not very complicated. This is the kind of piece of meat that if it's a good piece of meat, you just want to get it out of the way. So, I'm going to put a little bit of salt on it, actually I'm going to put a lot of salt on it because salt is the ultimate weapon in meat cookery, and then I'm going to put on a little bit of black pepper because black pepper goes good with steak, and I am going to put olive oil on it before I do either of those things. There's some debate over whether the salt should go on the steak before the olive oil, or the olive oil should go before the salt. I don't know how much of a difference it makes, but I always put the, I always put the oil on first because I want the salt to be on the very outside so that it crusts up nicely. The most important thing, however, is that you put a lot of salt on and that you have some oil. A steak that goes on without oil protecting it is in the position of a Japanese nuclear cleanup crew not wearing radiation suits. The results are not going to be pretty. You'll notice that I am not grinding fresh pepper here. Whenever I do grilling, I get the cheap, coarse ground black pepper, the cheapest, worst brand that they have at the Bodega or the ghetto supermarket, like I go to, and this is just fine for grilling purposes. The fact of the matter is that fresh pepper may be better in a pepper mill for when you are, you know, putting it on spaghetti or whatever, but for something like this, you need a lot of it. I mean, I don't want to take the time to grind that, but it wouldn't make a difference anyway. I don't want to do too much though. I think that's about right. Now, you see here, we have a very hot fire made of lump hardwood charcoal, not briquettes. Lump hardwood charcoal made from real wood, looks like real wood, burns hot, burns clean and cooks fast. Now, a big problem that I have with steak grilling is that people love to get those black marks on there, and they say, here, you move it this way, you move it that way, so it becomes beautifully crosshatched and everything. I mean, anything that's black on a piece of meat is ruined. Can we just say that right now? Black on meat is burnt, it is acrid, it is carcinogenic, it is essentially destroyed, denatured protein and has no place in your mouth, your stomach, or the world at large. I want a steak, ideally, to be beautifully brown and mahogany. I want it to have all of those Maillard flavors, all those robust, buttery, delicious, roasty flavors, and I also want it to have a not insignificant smoke aroma to it. So, what I'm going to do with this steak is I'm going to get some nice brown on it, not black if I can avoid it, and then I'm going to take some of these wet hickory chunks, which I have had sitting in a bowl, and those are going to go in on top of the coals. While the steak cooks, I'd like to make a little point about steak. This steak comes from a box that was in a freezer somewhere, and a lot of times people buy steaks, and then they freeze them away. I think it's a mistake. Generally, red meat holds up to freezing better than other kinds of meat, but it's never going to be as good as when it's fresh, and I mean, how often do you eat steak? I mean, do you really have steak that much that you can't go to the supermarket within a week of eating it? If you take a steak and you put it in olive oil with a lot of garlic and pepper and chino and whatever, you could maybe buy a couple of extra days, but you know what, just buy the freaking steak that day that you're going to cook it. It's really not asking too much, is it? I don't think it is. Alright, now I'm turning this over, and you'll note there are no black marks. These marks are brown, brown tastes good, brown is healthy, brown is delicious, brown is beautiful, but I am never going to carbonize my steak. I'm going to get that nice crusty fat on the side, nice and brown. Look at this, look at this. Look how nice that is after cooking it directly just for a few seconds. What a difference that makes. Okay, this is going over here. I could even put it up on the bun rack, but let's not go crazy. What I'm going to do now is get my smoke aspects going. Now, I could pour a little bit more olive oil on it, but I don't think I will. I like to layer flavors that have layers and layers of fat that the smoke can go into. Whoa baby, my steak is here, my chips are here, let me do a few more. I'm going to close this boy down, and I'm going to let them start smoking. Now, the thing about smoking is this, and this is an essential rule in barbecuing, and it applies even to grilling with a closed hood. This chimney is open. That means that air is flowing through. Air flowing through means more heat in the smoker and less smoke in the meat. If I close this off, what's going to happen is all the smoke that's coming out of it is going to go into my steak instead, and the temperature is going to be lowered concomitantly. That's a little barbecue tip about smoke and heat. Smoke and heat, inverse relationship. So, every steak is different, and this one is not very thick. It was not very cold when it went in. This is a pretty hot smoker, so I don't think that I'm going to leave this in for much more than seven to nine minutes. Let me go and check and see how this is doing. Alright, so here's my steak. In touching it, it's springy, but not mushy. You know, the old trick is they say that if you make a tight fist, that's what well done feels like. If you make it a little bit looser, that's what medium rare feels like. If you make it very loose, that's medium, and then if you just go like this, that's rare. Meanwhile, in the time it took me to say that, it made the steak probably get overcooked, but let's see. Actually, this is significant. A lesser man might, in his curiosity to see if the steak was cooked right or not, cut it open right now, but I don't want to do that. I don't ever want to do that to any steak, chop, roast or chicken that I make, because I want it to sit and rest, because as it rests, it settles. Now they used to say, oh, the juices are going around and they have to come back inside. It's really not as simple as that. You actually are wanting the juices to begin to solidify as the proteins that have broken down begin to reform. When I cut this open, basically, it should be an even pink throughout. So, I'm going to cut it, take it, let's see how I did. Oh, look at that. That is what a medium steak looks like, but is it what a medium steak tastes like. And I better make sure I get the part with the fat. I'm Josh Ozersky. Thanks for watching me, and check back again on eHow.com.