Cooking steak for the first time

>Bring to room temp about 20mins
Doesn't work that way. Your steak will rise maybe two degrees in the middle.

>your punctuation
It's a bit confusing
>an hour
>is suddenly now hours
And there the Veeky Forums insults are.

Thanks for the link. All you need for room temperature is about 45 minutes or so.

Kek. Are you retarded or pretending? Literally every restaurant I have worked at that doesn't sous vide uses this method.

You know what will stop your meat getting dry?

Not burning it to a cinder you well-done cardboard eating pleb.

No. Read the link. It takes hours for room temp.

And? Restaurants also flip once and lock in the juices. Thats why theyre myths.

Depends on how fresh you get your steak, but yeah it usually takes hours. As long as it's thawed out it'll be fine though. I think it's a good rule of thumb for tards though.

Not even close. Stop. Just stop. You go ahead and go from fridge to pan. That's fine. Do it, especially if you like rare on a bone-in. But, don't make up arbitrary miniscule numbers on the spot from some dude's psuedo-science column, that have nothing to do with your own fridge temp or the temperature in your room, or the thickness of the steak, etc. By all means, flip your steak over and over for even cooking, and make damn sure that the surface cools down so you never really get so hot it makes a nice crust.

You probably subscribe to Cook's Illustrated too ;)

>all this autism
it's cooked salted beef, get a grip people. baking a loaf of bread is 100x more complicated and I don't see you tards flinging shit over that. is this the most complicated thing anyone here has ever tried cooking?

Not an argument.

Try it yourself. Bring out a cold steak from the fridge. Check the internet temperate and then check it again in 20mins. But you won't do that because you don't want to be proven wrong.

cooking a basic steak is like that entry-level skill that Veeky Forums-babbies use to make themselves feel superior over other Veeky Forums-babbies because of some perceived artificial difficulty

when in reality it's just an application of one of the most basic cooking skills that exists

Except when people cook a basic steak they always fuck up. Sear sucks, overcooked etc. A perfectly cooked prime steak is one of the tastiest dishes.

millions of people manage to fuck up making toast every morning, and yet you don't hear anyone sperging about MUH SUPERIOR TECHNIQUE

something about steak brings out the tards, though. I can only assume it's because among working class people it's considered the ultimate sign of success if you're eating a salted cooked piece of beef

When I was a child, I tried it once, and cooked a 10 dollar steak to a grey, rubbery hunk, the loss of that one steak has haunted me all my life...

>Restaurants also flip once and lock in the juices
They flip once because they are trying to form a decent sear you blundering thundercunt. Stop making shit up.

>hours
>an hour
>20 mins

My head is spinning from the constant movement of those goalposts.

The person I was responding to brought up 20 minutes, not me. There is no goalpost moving. He said it takes 20 minutes to bring to room temp. I told that is wrong and asked him to try it himself. You need to learn how to follow a reply chain.

The issue is there is facts and there is dad science. People are so stuck in their ways they can't admit they're not doing it the best way. Us steak lovers want the best steak so we discuss the best way of doing it on a cooking board. Not sure why this would trigger you. Autism is getting mad about cooking discussions on a cooking board.

So you only moved them once then?

>They flip once because they are trying to form a decent sear you blundering thundercunt. Stop making shit up.
>you can't get a good sear flipping more than once

Retard detected.

I never moved them. A steak will not get up to room temp. in 20 minutes. Or even an hour. It takes hours for that to happen. That time is better spent reverse-searing, which would take a fraction of that time.

Why is this so difficult for you to get?

he's right about steaks bringing out the tards

just look at the people in this thread, blissfully unaware of their own autism as they hurl meainingless insults at each other, each convinced in his own superiority

Yeah. I don't understand Why don't they just try it themselves instead of arguing against facts?

> People are so stuck in their ways they can't admit they're not doing it the best way

Or maybe, just maybe, the old way is fine too? What if they're both fine? What if cooking a salted piece of meat isn't actually that complicated? What if... dun dun dun, it doesn't fucking matter?

This is like those people who use a milligram scale when pouring their coffee because they forgot that 1ml = 1g and you can just look at the water line

The pretense of science, but really it's just fashion-science, as a way for one tard to bash his opinion over another tard's head

You're on a cooking board. We discuss how to cook on this board. If you don't like it maybe you should go to plebbit.

>We discuss how to cook steak and how much to tip on this board
ftfy, get back to me when you learned to cook something else

funny you say that when you probably post in fast food threads and shitpost threads

can't have both, my neo-Veeky Forums friend.

I know how to cook lots of things. Steak is just one of them.

Nice projecting. I do not.

t. jackposter

>Salt at least an hour in advance and bring to room temp. is a meme/myth that needs to die.

Salting an hour in advance is definitely a meme for most people. Adding enough salt to achieve that "salty taste" is simply a completely different experience. For a high quality steak, there's no need to do this - that said it's still an amazing fix for shitty steak that seems to be everywhere these days.

The room temperature part is entirely dependent on what kind of beef you get - and I don't mean "ha-ha I got prime ribeye im set xd".

To start off, there needs to be some objective metrics regarding what we consider great steak, and without going into great details one of the metrics is "doesn't taste sour". Ideally, a steak should bleed buttery richness from the inside and give plenty of that fried flavour on the outside.

The sour taste is mostly induced by the blood inside the steak. Setting the steak aside to dry will alleviate some of the problem (in fact, if you dry it in a fridge - which naturally has less water by volume - it will be even better), but a lot of it also comes from uneven heating. If the meat fiber inside your steak doesn't separate, chances are it's going to taste sour from the blood inside.

Now, there's an additional thing to watch out for to make sure your steak isn't just a bag of blood held together by muscle fibers - by ensuring there's less muscle fibers and more fat. This is another reason why marbling is so important. Marbling indicates that there isn't much place for the blood to pool inside the steak, which means a steak that's not quite as sour, not to mention fat strands more or less stay in the same place when heated compared to blood which gets steamed everywhere, leading to more even heat distribution.. Lastly, fat itself doesn't sour when heated - try cutting off a fat cap and frying it, it won't go sour no matter how well done it gets.

This is basically halfway to dry-aging.

The reason to salt well in advance, funnily enough, is to draw away surface moisture and I believe makes the meat juicier. Unlike if you were to let it rest only 15 minutes or so.

I agree with letting it rest in the fridge to help evaporate the surface moisture. Doing that overnight will make a big difference to your sear.

And of course marbling is the biggest factor which is why a good prime cut is so important.

Moreover, the biggest meme in steak is probably basting. Basting is more or less a circus act. Now, the act of glazing the steak in its own juices from the pan at the end has plenty of value - it activates any freshly ground pepper (don't bother seasoning the steak before it goes in the pan, the heat and the oil washes away half and destroys the flavour in the other half), it dissolves a lot of the salt (and washes it away sadly), and it looks better because it's shiny. Basting, or repeatedly pouring oil over it, is hardly ever worth the temperature loss from having to tilt the pan over. Not to mention steak fries the fastest (and most evenly, and overall the best) when in contact with oil as opposed to when its uneven surface is partially in contact with the pan and partially in the air. There's really no reason to baste a steak, ever. Whatever "even" temperature effects you'd wanted to achieve can be reached using any number of different ways, from sous vide to having the proper equipment to an oven.

So if you get a dry-aged piece of steak, go ahead and just slap it into the pan - being a quality cut that's already been dried, it'll taste great regardless. For the rest of us, we have to find the best cut at the supermarket, dry it on a wire rack in the fridge for a couple of days (ideally on the level with the air exchange port), then let it come to room temperature.

By reverse searing yes?

I find that first drying the steak then salting it for an hour leads to an extremely bland exterior that's also too thick myself, but that's not really the worst part.

The worst part is that there's really no control over whether it comes out successful. For example, if you were to salt for an hour, then pat dry with paper towel, you'll quickly notice that "drawing out the moisture" is more or less a lie - the liquid in your paper towel had just about all the salty flavour in it. Yet for a lot of cuts of steak, salting it for an hour isn't nearly enough for the surface to reach that crystalline polish that everyone thinks means "completely dry" - it's dryER, not dry. This is more or less dependent on how much salt you add and how dry the steak was to begin with, both of them fairly hard to judge. Salting techniques usually say "at least an hour", and this is why - a precise time isn't quite as easy to get as you'd think.

What about salting and letting rest overnight in the fridge? Or do you salt only right before?

You can really do it any number of ways. The preferred methods in restaurants for those comically thick cuts has been to roast then cut, fancy food science tards love their sous vide, red blooded americans swear by the fire, and I honestly just use cast iron pans. Steaks are expensive enough as it is, and internal changes are undetectable outside of a visual standpoint when cut 99% of the time I find.

Something everyone should try once is to take a fat cap, chop it down to half/one-third inch pyramids if need be, dry it in the fridge, then fry it over high heat until it's well browned. Some people honestly don't know what a good steak tastes like until they do this.

Salting it overnight leads to probably the softest steak you'll ever have. Note that soft isn't always a good thing - soft steak tend to have blended muscle structure, though in this case it won't taste sour from the blood because again, it is dryer than a steak freshly opened from the package. The problem is that the texture is highly preferential - personally I find that a dried steak is already soft enough, though if you had bad teeth that don't chew well salting is definitely an optiton.

Also salting it for one night usually means the steak isn't quite dry enough on the inside and you'll deal with a classic "red on the inside," brown on the outside" steak.

For high quality steaks (and I don't mean prime or any of that shit - the only metrics you should use to judge a cut of meat is where it came from and how much marbling it has, even freshness is debatable as a useful metric up to a point), pink on the inside is probably the way to go. Red steaks usually mean the fat hasn't been heated enough, and brown steaks is something I've yet to crak open myself. An even pinkish that's still wet seems to be the place to be.

Good info man.

It's easier to cook steak than it is to cook anything else really, remember your just frying a piece of meat.

>Start with a good steak, hopefully an inch or more thick, with good fat running through it.
>An hour before cooking take it out of the fridge and let it come up to temp. It doesn't need to be "warm" just not that cold.
>Choose a good frying pan, i use a 10 inch carbon steel pan, excellent for frying meat. But any pan will work really.
>Put the pan on to heat up, start at a medium heat to get it going then turn it to medium high for the final cooking temp. Good habit to get into, especially if you use cast iron.,
>Give the pan time to warm up around 2 mins or so.
>When the pan is warmed up fully, season the steak with salt and pepper, or whatever you want to use.
>Add a bit of oil into the pan, give it a few seconds to warm up and spread it about, depending on the oil it might smoke, don't worry about that.
>Place the steak into the pan, rolling it away from you so that you don't get hit with hot oil.
>Cook on each side for however long you want to, depending on how you like your steak. Remember to sear any side with a line of fat, for around 30 seconds (tongs)
>For the last minute drop a knob of good butter in, baste the steak when its in the pan. You but the butter in now since it has quite a low smoke point and to sear a steak well you need high heat, you don't want to "burn" the butter since this would give an acrid taste, which isn't nice
>Take the steak out of the pan and onto a board to rest, pour some of the juices over the steak.
>Leave it to rest for about as long as you cooked it, the steak will relax and let a bit of juice out, this is normal.
>That's you done

If you wanted you could use the juices and fond in the pan to make a pan sauce once the steak is out, maybe adding a bit of garlic and herbs, but doing have anything with a strong flavour, remember you want to taste the meat itself, not just the sauce you pour over it.

Continued;

If you steak has a thick line of fat at one side its a good idea to cut through it at the halfway mark, just through the fat until the blade touches the meat. This helps it to stop curling up in the pan. If its just a thin line then don't worry about it.

PAN NICE AND HOT

Good info there