Steak Confit

What else can be said about how to cook a steak? Throw it in a hot pan, flip it once, serve it up, right? Not so fast. The home cook can employ a few techniques to elevate the home-cooked steak to a level that competes with steakhouse offerings. I'll use tonight's steak as a case study. Last night I stopped into our local market, which is more of an alky stop than a legitimate store but they have surprisingly high quality meat. Much to my surprise they had some USDA PRIME rib eye/spencer steaks. I violated my rule of thumb - when you see a great piece of meat buy it and worry about when to cook it later - and bought some prawns instead. I wanted to eat "light" last night. Over dinner I told the wife about the prime steaks and she chided me for not buying a couple. I thought about my missed opportunity the entire next day so I swung by the market on my way home that evening. They still had some prime steaks in the case but I ended up following my other rule of thumb - trust your eye when evaluating steaks (per earlier post on marbling). A couple steaks were as beautifully marbled as the Prime grade steaks so I snatched them up. My current technique with rib eyes is to surgically remove most of the big ribbons of fat that separate the eye from the "ring of heaven" and then use cotton string to tie up the steak in a tight, plump medallion. With such quick cooking,the large pieces of fat between the muscles do nothing to enhance the tenderness or juiciness of the steak but they make eating more cumbersome and awkward. I especially recommend this technique if you are preparing rib eye steaks for guests. No sense requiring your company to become amateur surgeons just to eat their dinner. The other technique I'm employing lately is salting meat prior to cooking. I do not pretend this is an original concept. Every one from the French to troglodytes (technically two different groups) have advocated salting meat and fish for preservation and flavor, but with the advent of refrigeration it is not utilized as it once was. I have no idea what the ideal time frame is but one cooking magazine stated that a minimum of twenty minutes is required to get any benefit. My barbecue cookbooks have you season the meat the night prior to smoking in order to get full benefit. A couple weeks back I salted a couple steaks prior to a weekend trip and cooked them when we returned. Four days of salt curing resulted in very tender and flavorful meat that was not excessively salty. The steaks in this article had about an hour and half of salt exposure, sitting out at room temp, prior to cooking.

The third technique I'm employing when pan frying steaks, and the point of this subject, is using the fat trimmings of the steak for the cooking oil. Rather than using a vegetable oil to sear the steaks I use the fat I've trimmed off the steaks. I put them in the cast iron pan and slowly render the fat while I prepare other elements of the meal then cook the steaks in their native fat. Why not vegetable oil? Perhaps the question should be "why vegetable oil?". Several of them have low smoke points and oils like canola smell nasty when they get too hot. Cooking a steak in its native fat results in beautiful browning and unparalleled flavor. From a health perspective I'm not too concerned because the steak isn't going to absorb much (if any) of the cooking fat, whether it's a trendy vegetable oil or rendered beef fat. Tonight's steaks were, and I don't say this lightly, New York steakhouse quality. I started with good quality steaks but I'm sure the salting and the cooking in their own fat (a la confit) made a difference. Trimming the excess fat and cinching them up with string created a fat steak that didn't overcook before the exterior was browned. The Catena Malbec from Argentina was a perfect compliment.