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The shop seems a little skimpy these days, this is where I buy all my beef at. It's probably the Holidays. Next time I go buy my 77Cent pizzas since I am poor, i will check out the price of ground beef. The stuff is yummy with Pink Himalayan Salt and Indus Black Pepper, and yes Indus black pepper smells like that!
If you live in virginia, then there is no reason for you to be buying grocery store meat.
I know this because I live in virginia.
In the hour it takes me to get from where I live to Charlottesville I probably pass at least a dozen farms and half a dozen butchers.
If you find a Williams and Sonoma and ask inside where you can find a good butcher, they will tell you. Williams and Sonoma will actually sell you semi fresh meat and you can actually order real kobe beef, but they order it in from local suppliers. So they will be your friend to find you some really good meat.
Damn, you don't live all that far from me. Although I've never been to a Williams and Sonoma. According to Google there's one in Charlottesville, on in Short Pump (closest to me) and one in VA Beach. I live in Hanover county. Not sure if there are any butchers around here.
There are TONS. I can promise you you have seen hundreds of butcher shops and never noticed them. I live a little west of fredericksburg so I go to the butcher in old town fredericksburg.
Two years ago I complained to my neighbor that I needed to find a butcher and he just started rattling off a long list. Then all of a sudden I opened my eyes and started to find all of them.
As for Williams and Sonoma.......yeahhhhhh. I have been to both those locations. I do not like the Charlottesville location because the people in there are as snoody as the day is long, but they are probably your best bet.
Just be patient and try not to punch someone in the face.
The short pump location is really nice, but unless they got new people, they are not too terribly knowledgeable. I haven't been to short pump since july sooo IDK. Worth a shot I guess.
Oh, another fun one for cheap steak. I wouldn't use it for something decent, but it's not too shabby on the cheap stuff.
Pretty much puree it all and coat the meat. Let sit for a while before cooking and you're good to go. Works great on onions as well.
Lime, and a lot of acidic things are actually quite good at breaking down some of the enzymes in meat that can make it tough.
@Tjj226_Angel I'll have to look around then. The only actual "butcher" I know of is in Richmond, and was rather expensive. I'm desperate to find one so I can make this stuff
Tried it with soup bones (marrow bones) but it just doesn't have the connective tissue (collagen), as far as I can tell. Or maybe I just didn't have enough bones.
The color of the liquid in the stock pot was right, but it never got to that gelatin state.
I've had demi-glace at a restaurant. I would be HAPPY to drown in it. Fucking orgasmic.
Well any good butcher is going to look expensive at first. The butcher is only like 20-30% more than walmart.
A butcher might sell you a single steak for 30 bucks, but if you look hard enough, you can find pretty much the same cuts of meat at walmart for damn near the same price with much lower quality.
I usually get 2 new york strips for like 35 bucks after tax. That might sound expensive, but I am getting 2 local grass fed 2 inch thick steak with fantastic marbling. I think the price is like 11 bucks a pound. Walmart new york strips are like 7-9 bucks a pound. So that goes to show that butchers are not as expensive as people make them out to be.
AND butchers become less expensive when you give them less work to do. The larger cuts of meat that contain some ribs and several steaks are like 8 bucks a pound. You are buying a slab of meat that might be 12+ pounds, so the initial investment might be over a hundred bucks, but once again you are getting very high quality meat for about the same price as wallmart.
If you can get in real good with a butcher you can spend 300 bucks and get a quarter cow or a half of a pig which works out to be like 3 or 4 bucks a pound. Which will make the price of food CHEAPER than wallmart.
Oh boy
The fishiness actually disappears completely. There umami amines that mimic dry aging. Don't get me wrong the salt is working as well. have you watch the whole vid ?.
Sorry to bust out your party, im a chef by profession and i speak out of my years of experience but there are several things you are doing that are either completely wrong or are not adding anything to the overall flavour of the steak rather subtracting from it.
First off, its not just about buying some steak, knowing the different cuts of meats, what you like, and what you don't like in each of them means a world of difference to making the "perfect steak". Now terminology varies from country to country but the most common steaks for quick pan frying are; porterhouse, rump, scotch fillet, bone in ribeye, and sirloin or eye fillet. Each come with their own characteristics of meat toughness, fat content, and flavour profile get to know them to better assist you in getting that "perfect steak". The butcher you choose will also determine some of these as well as the breed of cattle the steak came from, if you want that perfect steak go to a local butcher and ask questions; know where the steak comes from, how long has it been aged (any decent butcher will age their meats), when was it cut (most will cut the portions to your liking a good size is 200g), what was the cow fed with, and what breed it is from. from then on buy the steak you prefer.
Now steak purists will tell you that you should not add anything to a steak in terms of flavouring ( i know i do), any good quality meat will have enough flavour on its own that you dont need to assist it. but if you love that onion or garlic powder flavour by all means have fun and put it at the end of the day its you eating it.
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Dont just dont do this, the only thing you are gaining from doing this is to dry out the meat and lose flavour, It certainly does speed up the cooking process but at the expense of losing flavour and tenderness.
This is the step were you should season your steaks, you take it out season it and then let it reach room temperature. some coarse salt and pepper is all i put in my steaks, now i read some discussions going on about the type of salt to use and while taste preferences do vary from one to another, there is only one key point with salt, never use table salt to season steaks the finely grated nature of it makes its penetration inside the meat happen at a much faster pace thus dehydrating it and losing flavour and moisture.
Now the real reason why you let your steaks reach room temperature is that they will cook much more evenly than if they just came out of the fridge this allows to control the doneness of the steak much easier, sure as a side effect you get that the meat cooks faster but that is not what this steps aims to look for.
on this step, dont waste your olive oil on cooking a steak ill tell you why, olive oil has a smoke point (the point at which oil starts to burn generally speaking, its more complex than this) of around 160C/320F which is a way lower temperature than that of the pan thus you are burning your olive oil an introducing a rancid flavour to your steak not to speak of harmful carcinogenics that develop once you burn your oil. Instead of olive oil use a good quality sunflower, grapeseed, canola, or any other variety that has a smoking point above around 200C/392F
to cook a steak you want medium to high heat depending on your stove, high enough that it is searing the steak and that wonderfull maillard(browning) reaction is happening, but not high enough that you are burning it. If in the past and this is an asumption i am making based on your words your stekas have not "browned" or seared properly its because your pan has been not hot enough, it also helps that once you flip your steak you dont put it in the same spot of the pan it originally was since this spot will be colder than the rest of it. Also worth noting is that on cuts that present a layer of fat on the outside such as a porterhouse steak it is often recommended to sear the fat to allow it to cook since just by heat propagation alone from the meat it wont get cooked properly.
definitely and do definitely let your meat rest for at least 5 minutes after cooking and it will retain and develop much more flavours than going at it immediately after its been cooked.
Dude,
You certainly know what you are talking about. I agree with almost everything here specially the onion and garlic powder. But I also acknowledge that someone people may like it that way.
But one thing think you are not 100% right about, is the leaving the steak uncovered in the fridge. As the cool air in the fridge is dry is takes out the moister from the meat, and with dry age beef this is processed used but because they use whole cuts they have stay long and the colligens breakdown this where the flavour is. But with a portion of beef its too small for this process to completely happen, but that doesn't mean it doesnt benefit. Most of the "Flavor" of the is caused as I am sure you know by the Maillard reaction. Any moister the steak might lose would not away flavours from the meat, instead it would get the dry/optimal surface on the meat get the best Maillard reaction.
I agree that it will make the maillard reaction to happen over lower heat, however flavour is transfered to our taste buds via liquids if the piece of steak you are serving has dried out it will contain very little flavour, or rather it will have it but you wont be able to taste it. it is why meats that are rested hold more flavour than those that arent, if you cut into a steak that has just been taken out from the pan the water molecules hold much more energy and will tend to "come out" of the protein, while resting a steak and letting those molecules cool down and lose energy will keep them "trapped" inside the protein and be released once you chew thus carrying more flavour to your tastebuds.
Another point to consider is when you buy meat from a butcher that ages their cuts be it whole or otherwise it is redundant then to "dry age" in the fridge.
i rather buy my steaks aged (for home consumption) and make sure that my heat output and the temperature of the pan is hot enough to be able to cope with the extra moisture.
I agree,
pre-age steak from the butcher cost most, becuase have lost up to 20% of weight. But they are totally worth it.
I have also started playing with Sous Vide them its pretty awesome.
Sous vide everything!
just make sure you seal them prior to again get the maillard and when sealing them add the leftover liquid from the pan. Even better deglace the pan with some red wine or beef stock let it reduce and add it to the steak before sealing it, then put it in your circulator!
Ohh Prior ?
I have doing them after with super hot pan or blowtorch is that not the best way ?
i think its easier to overcook it by doing them after, also doing it prior has the added advantage of adding that juice created during the sealing process and flavouring the whole steak as it slowly cooks in the sous vide
OK cheers for the tip
TL;DR but for me personally the perfect steak is an undercooked steak. :D
so i got a sous vide around black fri, and was thinking about taking some chuck, cutting it into steak size pieces, getting a nice season and leave overnight in fridge on rack, quick sear then into a vacuum seal and into the sous vide at like 130-132 for a couple days, so tender medium rare chuck....
If you, and everyone else disagreeing with the overnight drying technique, go read the Food Labs breakdown (no pun intended) of the Dry Aging process, you will see that leaving the steak out overnight won't be long enough to cause a breakdown on the inside of the meat. For that to occur, you need several days at higher, more controlled temperature.
The only purpose of this technique is to get a better browning, faster. Doing it faster means you get less "transition zone" than you would otherwise get between the nice seared outside of the steak, and that hot pink inside.
The Food Labs tested this process, salting and short drying, with their Whole Filet recipe. Here's the difference it makes
Imperfection:
Perfection:
By drying out the outer layer of the steak, you reduce the searing time, and thus reduce that grey, overcooked transitional zone, which I believe will be much drier than the steak or cut done with the surface dried out a bit.
Excerpt:
The first step to better browning is to realize that wet things don't brown. Because water evaporates at 212°F, until you've fully desiccated the surface of a piece of meat, it's very difficult to get it to rise beyond that temperature. On the other hand, browning reactions don't really take place in earnest until temperature reach into the 350°+ range.
Knowing this, I decided to pre-treat my meat in two different ways: salting heavily and a lengthy rest.
Another Excerpt:
Resting the meat after salting offers its own obvious advantages: partial dehydration of the exterior. As I talked about in this piece on dry-aging (or not, as the case may be), a steak that's been left to sit uncovered for a night or two on a rack in the fridge will develop a nice dry pellicle that will brown very fast.
My take away: If you're doing steak, and want perfectly cooked rare, salt it, dry it, brown it fast, let it rest, dig in. You could also try the reverse sear, however I've never done that with a steak. Only Standing Rib roast, which comes out FANTASTICALLY