In the interest of "sharing" on SST, I just want to tell you what I cooked tonight. It's too hot outside (100F) to cook at my outside kitchen. Soo, I had a 1.25 pound prime ribeye that had been hanging around for just about enough time. I fried it, like in Spain or France. Heavy, well seasoned cast iron skillet, mixture of canola oil and butter in it. Lots of salt and black pepper on all sides of the steak. Start at high heat and sear the beast on all sides including the edges. Reduce the heat and cook until desired doneness. Result – a lovely medium rare. pl
My Mom used to cook steak like that, delicious!
And Grandma used to cook a pot roast in her cast iron skillet. It would melt in your mouth. She never trusted pressure cookers ever since her neighbor blew hers up one day.
I picked the wrong week to be on a diet. Was that steak from Crabils?
My treat too myself when I remodeled our retirement house was a commercial 6 burner stove. My brother in law is a chef & he taught me how to cook a restaurant quality steak. It’s as easy as the Col. said. Top quality meat, cast iron & lots of butter to finish it with. Just don’t be afraid of high heat. It’s really fast food. Don’t think that I’ll ever grill a steak again or go to Morton’s or Ruth’s
Balduccis’
Great choice, next time try adding caramelized onions and pepper…just like mima makes…lol
A man after my own heart, medium rare.
I enjoy raising my own beef and knowing what went into those delicious steaks and roasts.
Grew up with freezers full of locker calves, at least two hogs in the freezer, and chickens ready for frying or making dumplings.
Used to churn my own butter and make home-made buttermilk. The store bought stuff isn’t anything like home churned. They drop a pill into the milk to make it curd, instead of the natural way. Remember how my dad enjoyed clabbered milk. Never really caught onto that personally. But an ice cold glass of real buttermilk, um mm mm.
Good looking steak Pat. Glad you enjoyed it.
Sir
I’ve cooked prime rib roast on a charcoal grill many times with good results. Should also try your skillet approach. Looks like it came out perfect. I like them medium-rare too!
Possible major earthquake west coast s.america Chile landslides civilian casualties.
Looks amazing!
Have an tec 2 infrared grill that can sear meat beautifully but still like pan fried.
Hard to beat a great cut of meat rubbed with fresh pepper and salt.
Think some blackened Halibut might be on the menu tonight.
My brother and I want to make a decent brisket this summer.
In part for curiosity and because brisket is said to be one of the top three BBQ foods – and one that we don’t know yet.
The size of that piece of meat will be a bit smaller here because german butchers cut that part of the beef different than American butchers. So be it.
That written, the question I have is not so much about how much but primarily about how to do it best. We have never made it and thus it is an experiment. And since brisket is not exactly cheap it should work the first time.
We read and heard that it is wonderful but we don’t yet have an idea how to make it (and no cook books about it). Fry it? Or fry briefly and let it then cook slowly and on a much less temperature?
Any recommendations for how to do it from readers would be most helpful.
Beautiful!
Salivating is heavy on this one.
Looks absolutely delicious! We love a good steak which, with all of the nonsense about bovine flatulence adding to global warming, can be considered a guilty pleasure. I’ve learned from the “America’s Test Kitchen” TV show that cooking a frozen steak can result in a very nicely browned outside with a medium rare inside. The technique sounds strange and counter intuitive to the usual method of letting the meat come to room temperature for an hour before cooking, nevertheless I finally got the courage to try it recently and it turned out just as the TV show predicted. My preferred side dishes these days are fresh corn (cut off the cob and topped with butter and chives) and tomato wedges — both so flavorful and in abundance here in the Midwest during summer.
Terrific — but you might choose a different oil. Pressed rapeseed (aka Canola) is awful and needs to be dry-cleaned to remove the smell and taste. SST needs you Colonel !
Vegetarianism has some significant downsides. But I make an exception for Skyline Chili, when I am in Cincinnati. I know it is crap food but it is SFG, man.
I find few things as satisfying as cooking in nice cast iron. If I may add my method:
Cook sliced mushrooms in separate pan
Season steak and cook in cast iron until medium rare, 125 degrees. Set aside to rest.
Put mushrooms in steak pan with butter and scrape up all the fond, brown.
Add some brandy and cook down to a nice sauce.
Add juices from resting steaks. Stir
Put sauce on steaks
Eat.
All
I have never cooked a brisket or any of the parts of the brisket although I have watched many cooked on “BBQ Pitmasters” competitions. I hope some of those present here will help confusedponderer with this.
Fred
No. It was from Balducci’s, a fancy grocery store in Alexandria. Crabill’s is just a bit too far these days although I miss the folks there.
Jack
My approach to a bone in prime rib roast is to rotisserie it for two hours on my Lynx gas grill with the hood down. This produces a medium rare. As prep I rub it with Montreal and some extra salt. I always buy the roast with all the fat cap because I put a drip pan under the rotisserie with quartered up small potatoes. The fat drips onto the potatoes and cooks them to a state of wonderfulness.
Three tips I have for pan-fried steak:
1. Lay on some salt flakes a couple of hours before cooking – you’ll see the salt draw the moisture out of the steak, which is then reabsorbed. Breaks down the fibres, so tenderizes the meat while giving it flavour.
2. Cut off a little of the fat and melt in a high temp pan, the sear the bejasus out of the meat, 1-2 minutes either side depending on the thickness.
3. Let the meat rest for five minutes while you lick the red-hot frying pan.
Looks the business! Goose fat (kept in the fridge) works a treat as well.
You might try adding sliced carrots to the potatoes. Get them locally grown. The best you can find.
Hey, welcome to my world! Skyline is another [VERY occasional] guilty pleasure. Although with all of the fine foodie-approved restaurants that’ve opened here in the past few years, I kinda hate that our city is known for Skyline Chili (as well as Montgomery Inn ribs and Graeter’s ice cream). A Skyline 5-way with a cheese coney on the side goes down pretty easy. Quite a distinctive comfort food, for sure.
Next time I pass through the valley I’ll have to make a resupply run for you.
What chemical or chemicals are innate to the Canola oil which have to be removed to remove the awful smell and taste?
What chemicals and/or processes are used to dry-clean the awful smell and taste out of the Canola oil?
Well . . . since neither Petrel nor anyone else has replied, I think the Committee has moved on to the newer threads. So I will make my best guess about the basis for Petrel’s concern regarding Canola oil, and I will offer my best answer to what I guess that concern to be.
Traditional rapeseed oil is composed of about 50% of a fatty acid called erucic acid. Some research determined it could be bad for animals after long high-dose exposure. So various governments began to question its safety for people.
https://www.sruc.ac.uk/info/120186/novel_and_non-food_crops/173/high_erucic_acid_rapeseed
I don’t know if the good old high erucic acid rapeseed oil had a bad taste or not.
Semi-recently plant breeders developed rapeseed varieties which produced oil of only 2% or so erucic acid. I think this work was done in Canada. At the time they called it LEAR oil ( Low Erucic Acid Rapeseed oil). But someone decided that “Canola” sounded tastier than “LEAR” so the name was changed to Canola oil.
https://www.canada.ca/en/health-canada/services/food-nutrition/genetically-modified-foods-other-novel-foods/approved-products/low-erucic-acid-rapeseed-lear-oil-derived-canola-quality-brassica-juncea-czern-lines-97-03-pc98-44-pc98-45.html
Since the Canola oil rapeseed was developed to begin with to not have any nasty chemicals in it, I still wonder what chemicals would have to be dry-cleaned out of it, and what chemicals or processes would be involved in dry-cleaning those nasty chemicals out of it.
Unless or until I hear something specific about that, I will continue to regard Canola oil as a harmless oil, valued for its high “smoke point” and its lack of any taste or flavor of its own. I tried some once and I regard it as ” the tofu of oils.”