A Line Cook's Guide to... Cooking Steak

And a fresh condiment to eat along with it

Now that summer temperatures and blissfully long days have magically arrived here in Finland once again (which feels ridiculous considering we still had a foot of fresh snow on the ground last month) two questions come to mind.

1. When can I swim in a lake again?

2. When can I make a fire next to said lake and grill something?

Winter lasted from all of November to, well, basically a few weeks ago this year (as per usual we skipped spring almost entirely in Finland) and cooking outside in the sun is one of those treats that make up for those cold, dark winter months.

I find this such a motivating time of year, especially for my cooking. I get excited about trying new techniques, revisiting old ones, and cooking one type of ingredient that, for much of the year, I don’t tend to obsess about all that much.

And that ingredient is meat. Or, specifically, prime cuts like steak.

My wife and I started eating less meat some years ago now. And one thing we really don’t tend to eat much of at all is prime steak cuts.

But with the chance to cook over high charcoal heat and make use of impromptu smoke from a branch of juniper or pine, fast-cooking cuts like pork loin, or strip steak of beef are so much fun to work with during these summer months.

It also helps that my 5 year old, Sam, spontaneously stared chanting “I want steak. I want steak” the other day in a very little-boy-from-The-Shining-redrum kind of way.

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The other thing I can admit to, despite not eating much of it at home, is that I absolutely love cooking steak. When I started out as a restaurant cook, being put on the hot section with responsibility for cooking the “protein” was a big deal for me. I don’t think I’m going to win any “cool” points admitting this, but I still feel a sense of achievement when I’ve carved a steak ready for plating and it is cooked as I’d intended.

Now I am cooking meat again most days and nights in the restaurant, I feel it’s a great time to share a few tips to how I cook prime, fast-cooking cuts of meat.

I hope there are some new tips here for you, which include the simple processes I follow to create evenly cooked steaks from edge to edge.

And even if it’s all old news to you, I end this post with a bit of a summer condiment I think is great to go alongside grilled meat on a hot summer’s day that is far more interesting than the ubiquitous ketchup, mayo or heavy compound butter or cream sauce.

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The secret steak…

First, a word on cuts I’m particularly fond of…

I’m cooking a lot of what we call in Finnish ulkofilee (trans: outer fillet) in the restaurant at the moment. This cut, using US terminology, is synonymous with the strip cut from above the tenderloin.

I particularly like this cut because slicing it 1 inch thick makes for a good 150g-200g portion. A weight I think makes for a very pleasing main course. And that 1 inch is the minimum thickness of steak you want to make sure you can get great colour on the crust without overcooking the inside.

But more on that in later in this newsletter.

I’d choose the strip over fillet any day, it’s tender and really delicious.

But my very favourite cut is the one I have probably cooked the most of in my cooking career. And that cut is the hanger steak. Also known as butcher’s steak (as far as I know because it wasn’t traditionally in high demand and, it being so lovely, the butcher kept it for themselves.) If you are of a more romantic persuasion it is called onglet in French.

Alongside ribeye, this cut was what I grilled the most of at a restaurant in Stockholm called Oaxen Slip. It has a fantastic flavour and, though not to the same degree as fillet, very tender. The entire hanger steak muscle consists of two “lobes” separated by a large membrane of sinew. This takes a little work of trimming, but once that is done it is very easy to work with. We would portion it into 170g steaks and cook it medium rare. But another great thing about this steak is how it might even be better pushing toward medium. The muscle of the cut is made up of a very large and loose grain, so cooking it further than you might fillet or strip is no bad thing at all.

If you prefer your meat more medium than rare, this is the steak for you.

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How this line cook cooks his steak…

The first thing is to start with a thick enough steak.

If you start trying to cook something that has been cut less than an inch/3cm thick, things are already going to be difficult for you.

Thickness gives you control

A thick steak of at least an inch, is going to give you the chance to develop dark, caramelised exterior without overcooking the centre. Basically, thickness gives you control. It might seem aesthetically pleasing or convenient to be able to offer everyone around your table their own individual, neatly cut steak, but if that means those steaks are 1cm thin then only the well done fans will be pleased with the eating.

In short, if you’re cooking larger muscles like ribeye, make sure you get a thick cut steak(s) and then serve slices of it. Or just use strip or hanger which can be portioned easily into thick steaks.

Temp or not to temp?

Spend a little time looking at meat obsessed Instagram accounts and you’re bound to see a particular sin when it comes to steak cookery. The “influencer” will start by browning a beautiful cut of meat (often wagyu these days) until the exterior is excessively caramelised. He will take it from the grill and cut in to show off what he deems “perfect medium rare”. This “perfection” often consists of a large grey band of overcooked meat surrounding a centre that is, basically, raw.

This kind of steak cooking tends to get passed off as medium-rare, as though the doneness of a steak is an average of the levels, from edge to edge, it has been cooked to. But, like I said at the top of this post, great steak cooking is when the steak has been cooked so thoughtfully that it has been brought to the same temperature throughout.

I promise that to do this you don’t require either a fancy pants sous vide machine or “reverse searing” (which I find dries out the surface too much anyway). You just need to do, as restaurant cooks do, and take a little time.

Pretty much every guide to good steak cooking nowadays suggests you bring your steak to room temp before cooking it. Harold McGee, in his stone-cold stunner of a book On Food and Cooking, writes that “the warmer the meat starts out, the less time it takes to cook.” Pretty obvious I admit. But the added benefit of this, he explains, is that less time cooking means less time for the meat to be in contact with high temperatures, which can lead to over-cooking and drying out. Having a centre already at, say, room temp 20C/70F, also makes a raw centre/grey outer ring less likely.

Not temping your steak can also be helpful

But I’m here to say, being one of them, that there are thousands of restaurant cooks out there who don’t have the luxury of temping their steaks before they cook them. Instead, steaks are kept in cold fridges until ordered, at which point they go straight on the grill. And I believe this can actually be helpful.

By keeping the steak cold, it just gives you a bit more room to develop a great surface crust before the inside reaches too high a temperature (particularly if your steak is on the thinner side). As long as you follow the next steps, that is.

When fast cooking is slow cooking

So if we aren’t temping our steaks, how do we get a lovely even cook throughout? Well, in every restaurant I’ve worked from Michelin Star places in London to really nice steak houses in Stockholm, steaks are never cooked quickly. They are never put in a pan, cooked, then taken out, and served. In a sense, the process of preparing even the fast-cooking cuts like fillet and ribeye includes an element of slow cooking as well. I recommend you try the same at home.

I’ll go through this step by step as if I were in the restaurant.

1. The sweaty sous chef on the pass yells a new ticket. It includes a strip steak and I immediately take one from the refrigerated draw at my feet.

2. I get up and place this on a metal tray and squirt enough oil on it to lightly coat it.

3. I season it in plenty of fine sea salt. If I were to weigh it, I would have likely put a gram or two on the steak of 170g weight. Not all of this will stay on. Some will come off in the pan, run with any juices that are released. But this generous amount of salt will season a 1 inch cut of strip properly. Be bold. Meat likes salt. If your steak is thick enough, it can take it.

4. I put it on a hot pan or grill bars with no extra oil. The oil we started with is enough. How hot should the pan/grill be? We are looking for an immediate sizzle that doesn’t die down after a few moments. It should continually be sizzling, which shows you that moisture is being cooked away making the caramelisation of proteins possible. Any less than that continual sizzle and your pan/grill etc isn’t hot enough. I’ll keep that fridge-cold steak on one side without moving it for 1 minute at least, before checking the colour and flipping it if enough golden brown crust has developed. I then repeat the same on the other side.

5. With both sides browned, I remove the steak and put it on a room temperature tray or plate. The trick here is to now leave that cold tray and barely cooked steak somewhere warm for 5 minutes so that the high surface heat can gently bring the centre up a few degrees. In hot restaurant kitchens, this could be on metal racks above the grilling station (often as warm as 30-35C), or under heat lamps. For grilling at home it could be anywhere warm in your kitchen, on top of a warm oven perhaps. The key is to let some of the very high heat developed on the exterior work through the rest of the steak before repeating the process (giving it another minute on each side in the pan/grill, then removing from the heat again), until it is cooked to your desired level. This is my favourite way of cooking steak. It is also great if you have a really hot grill/barbecue because you only ever have the steak on the heat for these short bursts before relaxing and cooling it slightly again.

The key to all of this is building up great heat and colour on the exterior crust, then slowing things down to let what is called “carry on heat” (the heat that “carries on” cooking the meat having been removed from the pan/grill) cook the rest of the meat through evenly and gently.

Judging levels of “doneness”

If we are going to be scientific about things, then we could give a precise temperature to levels of “doneness”.

For example, if I were using a meat probe to judge temps I’d stop cooking a steak at 48/49C if it was to finish rare, I’d pull it at around 52 for medium-rare and so on. I’ve used thermometer a lot in the past, I really recommend them for cooking big birds like a Christmas turkey. But steak cuts are small and it doesn’t take much for your probe to be judging the doneness of the outside of the meat when you want to know the centre. That’s why coming to understand how steak feels when it passes though rare to medium and beyond is so useful.

But how to do this?

It’s not perfect, but I’m a fan of the trick I learnt at school that uses your thumb to give a feel of what different steaks feel like. If you relax your thumb and press on the fleshy part at its base, it feels loose and, well, fleshy like raw meat. Move your thumb ever so slightly that it touches the bottom of your index finger and the fleshy part of your thumb firms up somewhat, not unlike the way rare steak feels. Do the same for each finger to get an approximation of the different levels of doneness.

• Thumb to index finger = rare

• Thumb to middle finger = medium rare

• Thumb to ring finger = medium

• Thumb to pinkie = well done

Bear in mind that having taken your steak off a hot grill, carry on heat penetrating the centre from the surface will continue to cook and firm up your steak by up to a few degrees. That can be the difference between rare and medium rare.

Final touches

Hanger steak and its large grain benefits hugely from being sliced properly when eaten. Slice with the grain and it is so much chewier than if sliced against the grain. Wherever I have cooked steak professionally, we have never plated steak without slicing it first. We always do so, regardless of cut (well, apart from fillet which is tender even if eating it with a spoon), against the grain to enhance the guest’s experience of the meat. If you are serving steak, I suggest you do the same. Take a moment to identify which direction the “grain” of the meat is going and slice thick slices against it/ in the opposite direction.

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A summer accompaniment to your steak

I want to share a technique more than a recipe really. It helps create a rich and creamy but exceptionally light and fresh sauce/dip for grilled vegetables and, as we’re doing here, steaks. It is a great way of making use of any flavoured vinegars you might have, but something else I also like to use is leftover caper brine or pickle liquid.

All it requires is to take some sour cream, mix it with the flavoured vinegar or pickle brine, then “hanging” it to remove water content. You are left with something thick and spoonable that, in the case of steaks, is a great alternative to the butter or heavy cream sauce that they are often served with. I think this is particularly suited to outside eating during hot summer months, but really is great with steak regardless of when you’re eating it.

Here’s how I put one such cream together.

A recipe for hung and flavoured sour cream

200g sour cream (I used a light cream of fat content of 10%)
2 tablespoons flavoured vinegar/caper brine/pickle liquid
1/2 tsp salt (don’t add salt if you are using caper brine or a salted vinegar)

Mix your vinegar/pickle liquid etc and cream together and add the salt. Mix thoroughly. It will be very loose now you’ve added the flavoured liquid.

Line a sieve with a double thickness of moistened kitchen towel, place this over a bowl/saucepan and pour in your vinegar/cream mix.

Leave this in your fridge overnight or around 12 hours, by which time about 100g of whey will have collected in the bowl, leaving you about 100g of very thick and flavoured cream in the sieve. It's ready to use.

Note: Don’t throw away that whey. It is the perfect base for butter sauces or for brining portions of fish. I plan on writing more about that this summer!

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See you next week,

Wil