Did you eat Hot Dogs today?Follow

Good, that gives me time to figure out a way to get access to the episodes. I don't have cable (which, of course, means no HBO). And I haven't found a good spot for a livestream yet.

Wouldn't be a problem, but my friends have no self control and I learn more from facebook than I'd like to.

That sounds pretty much like one of the standard sauces they use for the ones in Europe, actually.

I tend to go with a mix of the other two sauces, because I'm a heathen.

So you didn't eat steak as man was meant to


Remember when I suggested that perhaps you just had retarded friends with no idea how to cook a steak? Yeah, we'll call that Exhibit A.

Tzatziki sauce (used on gyros) is made from a yogurt base for whatever it's worth. I can't speak for your strange and Godless donairs.

Oh! So it's steakwars 2011 now?



Did to!



Except that aside from the pan vs grill bit, he's operating on the exact same theory you're using. You do recall that you're basically deliberately choosing to cook steak in a manner invented by guys who didn't have anything other than a super hot boiler pipe to cook on, right? They didn't have a choice. What's your excuse for so horribly doing it wrong? I could choose to commute to work in a horse drawn wagon like my great great great grandparents out of some kind of nostalgia or whatever, but I choose not to.

"Aside from that, how did you enjoy the parade, Mrs. Kennedy?"


Do you believe every cute little urban legend or just ones about meat?

Gee. I didn't know that! Um... Yeah, I did. It's why I made the comment I made.


The "most important, integral part" is that searing doesn't really trap the juices inside the steak. It burns the sides. Some people like this because they are silly people who've learned to like it. Probably by parents who whipped them with clothes hangers if they complained or something.

Again, given that you've never had a properly cooked Pittsburgh rare steak, by your own admission since you always point to your idiot friends who frankly shouldn't be allowed to make a ham sandwich unsupervised from the sound of it, you're not in any position to say what one tastes like.

I fully agree that whatever sh*t the 'tards you hang out with make is probably crap and inedible to all except dogs and raccoons.

I'm reading a transcript of Alton Brown's myth busting episode. The net loss of the seared steak was higher, which they attribute to the fact that high heat causes the cells to break down, which causes moisture loss.

The problem I'm having with this is that all anyone cares about is the internal moisture level. Naturally, in creating a crust, you have caused all of those cells to lose their moisture. That was kinda the point, no?

So, realistically, a study would need to only examine the internal moisture levels to get a result anyone should care about. I don't see how you could reliably do that, of course, but the point remains.

When discussing a Pittsburgh rare steak, it's not really a matter of searing it to "seal in" the juices during further cooking because there isn't much further cooking. Properly cooked, the outside is quickly pan seared (not completely burnt) and the inside is about as rare as you can get it while escaping a USDA violation. While the result is juicy, if it wasn't I'd wonder where you're getting your pre-dried steaks.

Done properly, you get a mixture of the flavor of the cooked juices and texture of the seared meat against the flavor and coolness of the rare interior. It's a pretty tasty combination. Done improperly, the outside is just crunchy or else not cooked well enough to bring out the flavor. There's a skill to it and you'd never do it on a grill and "searing it to keep in the juices!" isn't the same thing.

Then again, Gbaji comes from a land where their idea of cuisine is to throw avocados on everything and declare it "California style!" so I wouldn't expect him to know sh*t about how to cook meat beyond the stock basics

I think he wants to watch it as it airs rather than have his friends spoiler for him.

That's about the dumbest article ever. It spends the first two pages debunking arguments that no one makes (strawman anyone?), then spends the final page basically comparing searing to not searing when one cooks meat in an oven (ie: baking).

But that's not the question, is it? The question is: If I'm grilling a steak and only grilling a steak, will I produce a juicier steak by setting the temperature at a modest level based on the thickness of the steak and then cook it slowly and relatively evenly, or by using a pan or other flat surface set at a super hot temperature and "searing" the top and bottom in order to seal the juices in, and then cook it the rest of the way?

The first method results in a evenly cooked steak which depending solely on how long you cook it for can range from well done to rare. The second method results in a hard crust on the outside of the steak, and a soft mushy and nearly raw interior. Unless you cook it longer, in which case you end out with a steak that is burnt on the outside and cooked (and often very dry) on the inside.

Where the article goes wrong, is that both techniques are "dry heating" the outside of the steak. The only real question is whether you believe that somehow by overheating the outside as quickly as possible, you can produce a juicier steak because it "traps in" more moisture. The problem is that even if we accept that it keeps more moisture in than grilling it at a more reasonable temperature (which the article doesn't even attempt to prove at all), any increase in moisture inside the steak is more than offset by the shoe leather consistency outer shell you've created in the process.

Unless you like having to saw through the outside of your steak, the argument about which is juicier is pretty much moot.

Edited, Jul 5th 2011 5:22pm by gbaji

Considering most professional chefs don't cook steak that way, I'm going to guess that this is a bad argument.

And if you can explain to me how cavemen managed to warm meat-cooking surfaces to 500 degrees, I'd love to know. I'm going to guess that nomad societies only ever built small fires. And I'm guessing they didn't cook their meat in the center of them.

They probably put them near a campfire, as small campfires can easily reach over 500 degrees.

Sure. But somewhat by definition, any kind of "sear" on the outside of the steak is going to be harder and dryer than the part that isn't seared. Certainly, if someone's arguing that this is done to the point of "trapping in juices", it has to be done to the point of making the outsides tough.

Silly me. I want a steak that is soft and juicy all the way through. For me, it completely defeats the purpose of having a juicy interior if I have to saw through the outside to get to it.



Yeah. My argument doesn't depend on the outside being charred/blackened/whatever.


Honestly, this is just a fun rehash of an old argument Joph and I had. As I said, it's a matter of taste. He tosses out his Pittsburgh Rare as some kind of Shangri-La of steaks, while I find the whole thing absolutely disgusting. The original topic which started us on this little steak-feud was my comment about a steak place I went to in Vegas (one of the higher end places), which cooked their steaks too crusty on the outside for my taste. Joph proposed that it would have been better if it had been cooked in the non-edible manner he likes his steaks.

/shudder!

The point isn't about how hot the fire is, but how evenly the heat can be projected into the meat for the time period that the meat is cooking. Too hot, and the outside will get crisp/burned before the inside will properly cook. Too cool and you can evenly cook it, but it'll be dry as hell by the time you're done. If you can get the correct evenly sustained temperature based on the thickness of the steak, you can cook it fast enough to avoid drying, but slow enough to prevent crisping or burning the outside. This produces an ideally cooked steak.

With the exception of the Pittsburgh Rare (Joph's preferred steak), where the intention is to crisp the outside while leaving the inside nearly raw, if the outside is significantly tougher/crispier than the inside, the person cooking the steak cooked it at too high a temperature. In other words, they did it wrong. The objective of cooking steak (bizarre form of rare aside) is to cook it as evenly through the whole meat as possible.


A medium rare (my preferred steak) should gradually change from brown and tender on the outside to pink (but not bloody) in the middle. It takes both correctly setting the temperature to the thickness of the steak and correctly timing the cooking to get this right. If the temperature is properly set, you should be able to cook any similarly thick steak anywhere from rare to well done simply by adjusting the time it's cooked. The key is to learn the proper temperature for the steak you are cooking. Some steak houses will claim to be deliberately cooking it more crisp on the outside as some form of "style" of steak, but IMO that's really just an excuse for not spending the effort to do it correctly. Even the Pittsburgh Rare IMO is a cop out. It's the ultimate example of people not knowing how (or wanting to spend the effort to) set the proper temperature for the steak they're cooking and just kinda going "F it!" cranking the temperature up to 11 and searing the hell out of the outside, leaving the inside raw and calling it a day.


Most people just accept improperly cooked steaks because they either don't know any better, or they don't want to say anything. Some crazy wacky nutty people like Joph actually glorify their simplistic barbarian style of steak cooking and call it some kind of exotic delicacy or something. You know what else is a delicacy? Monkey brains, snails, balut, and haggis. Why imitate a food item that exists largely because of necessity, desperation, and/or extreme hunger?


But hey! That's just my opinion on the subject. It's a matter of taste, right? My taste just happens to be better than some others... ;)

Edited, Jul 5th 2011 6:35pm by gbaji

Tee hee! Yup.

Oh. And in a mild defense of my friends indefensible comment about "searing" the outside to trap in the juices, the grill he was using has a temperature gauge on it. Said gauge actually has a range of temperature labeled as "sear". I looked. Yes, I couldn't believe it either. I'm sure it's made that way just so that people who think you should sear your meat to seal in juices have a setting to do this with. Never mind that you don't want to do that in the first place, and never mind that a grill can't actually sear the whole surface of the meat, but I'm sure that some marketing guy realized that they'd be better able to compete in the gas-grill market if they put that label on there.


It's called "marketing to idiocy". But what the hell, right?

Or you can use two different heats, a high temperature to sear and then a low temperature to finish off as is extremely common. Searing a meat first is a different technique. There is a slight moisture loss traded to result in a very different flavor due to caramelization and the Maillard reaction that cannot be achieved by using a constant temperature.

The idea that is in any way the wrong way to cook meat is completely ridiculous.

Edited, Jul 5th 2011 8:55pm by Allegory

I can't help but think that you'd be happy if the waiter brought you a living cow.

I never even eat steak so it doesn't matter to me. :P

I prefer a medium rare steak. I like the taste of the warm red center. I will eat them rare, and do sometimes (usually if the steak was a bit thicker and I didn't cook it long enough). But I still prefer the medium rare. I always hate it when my extended family come over for dinners, and ask me to ruin steaks for them. All my Aunts' families demand a well done steak...

To be fair, I happen to prefer cooking it with a constant heat source the way Gbaji does. But I also like my steaks marinated and well done, which is a crime against humanity to most people. There are more reasons to cook meat than just staving off salmonella.

Rawer meat simply tastes gummy to me, and I don't enjoy the texture at all.

I wouldn't give someone crap for liking their steak well done. I'm just laughing at all the misguided notions in his lectures. Then again, if someone asked me how to properly make a pizza with chicken, artichokes and white sauce I'd probably get all the details wrong as well.

My dad always cooked his steaks "Joph's" way and honestly I think it is awesome. Then again I won't shy away from steak tartare.