HAVE YOUR STEAK & EAT IT, TOO

By David W. Brown

It's steak season and the time has come to fire up your grill. It has been a hard, lonely, interminable year, but as vaccines are doled out and the pandemic recedes, the fullness of summer promises to bring together our friends, families and neighbors at long last. In 2021, we might eat and celebrate as though we never knew what wonders could be created by applying heat to meat.

To keep your grill busy, Rouses maintains a robust stock of choice and prime beef— the two highest grades of beef by the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Grades are determined by marbling (fat spread throughout the beef), tenderness and cattle feeding practices. “Other companies will buy select beef and ungraded beef—which is the lowest quality beef that you can buy—and then push it cheap,” says Nick Acosta, the meat director for Rouses Markets. “For us, it’s only choice beef—which tends to be most popular—and prime beef, both sold at great prices every day.”

Once you choose a cut and buy it, it’s time to prepare and cook your steak. The big three options are charcoal, propane and stovetop. (Sorry, smoker people. Maybe next time.) No matter which method of heat you choose, general steak preparation is universal. Never poke your steak with a fork or use a fork to flip it. It’s tongs or nothing in this game, as puncture wounds will cause moisture loss. You didn’t go all the way to Rouses to buy the best steaks in town just to eat the dry stuff some other stores sell. And just as certain grill, oven and stovetop temperatures are vital, so too is the temperature of the raw meat.

“You don’t want to take your steak directly from the fridge and put it straight onto the barbecue pit,” says Nick. You want to let the meat reach room temperature before cooking it. “If it’s still cold when you put it on the grill or cooktop, it will burn by the time you reach your desired doneness.”

SWEET LADY PROPANE

As Hank Hill would happily tell you, the best way to prepare a steak is on a propane grill, using propane accessories. In terms of cooking accuracy and even heating, you just can’t beat a gas grill. The secret is to give the grill a good half-hour, at least, to reach the proper temperature. Preparation of the gas grill in many ways is the same as preparation for the charcoal variety. It’s a good idea to clean the grates before grilling, and to oil them up so your steaks flip easily. If you trimmed fat from the steaks, you can use the fat to grease your grill, which is the sort of next-level grill master move that will impress your friends and earn the respect of your enemies.

Paint a little avocado oil on both sides of your steak before grilling and season them with rosemary. If barbecue sauce is your thing, have at it, but there’s no need; the whole point of steak is to taste the steak. Save the sauce for the burgers. When grilling on a propane stove, be sure to avoid laying your steaks directly over the flames, as dripping fat will cause flames to well up and singe the beef, undermining the whole point of your gas grill: an even cook.

For a standard-issue inch-and-a-half thick steak, grill it for five minutes on each side on a propane stove to get it to rare. For medium, you’re looking at nine minutes on each side. For well done, find some other free grocery store magazine for advice, because I want no part of your awful decision-making.

CHARCOAL AND MEAT: A LOVE STORY

Some people swear by charcoal, because making fire is fun and cooking meat is fun and cooking meat while making fire is just the cat’s pajamas. As with a propane grill, make sure you get those grates extra clean before slapping on the steak, and the steak fat grease method is still a winning plan. As for the charcoal itself, we need to talk about charcoal chimneys.

Growing up, I had never heard of such a thing, but somewhere along the line, charcoal chimneys became ubiquitous: the avocado toast of the grilling world. (I blame Food Network for this, but I bet social media hasn’t helped.) In short, rather than heat your charcoal in the grill, you heat it in a big metal canister. Note: Be sure to buy an actual charcoal chimney from the hardware store; do not just find a big metal container and improvise. We don’t need a repeat of the Thanksgiving fried turkey emergency room visit.

Once the charcoal in the chimney is totally ashed, dump it into the pit. I do not know why a chimney is necessary for this, but it seems to be the consensus, and who am I to argue with charcoal people? (#teampropane.) I have seen it recommended that rather than spread your charcoal evenly once in the barbecue pit, you will want to dump it all to one side so that half the grate is over direct heat and half is cooler.

While all this is going on, your steak has reached room temperature and you’ve seasoned it as above. Do you have a grill thermometer? If not, you’re going to want a grill thermometer. Before slapping steaks on metal, you want the grill at 500 degrees. Be sure to keep the grill covered so that the heat does not escape. When ready to cook, we are going to go for four bursts of two minutes each for a medium-rare steak. (You can take it back to a minute or one minute and 30 seconds for rare, though the height of the grate from the charcoal and the size of the steak are going to have a say in all this. It might take experimentation, so if there is someone at the cookout that you don’t like, cook theirs first.)

The process of cooking on a charcoal grill will look like this: Once the pit reaches 500 degrees, open the lid, add your steaks to the charcoal side, close your lid immediately, and grill for two minutes. Then open the grill, give the steaks a quarter turn, and close the grill again. Two more minutes. (The point of the turn is to get that perfect grid of grill marks on the meat.) After two minutes, flip the steaks. Cook two minutes. Again, open the grill and give the steaks a quarter turn. After two minutes, remove them from the pit.

If you find the steak is too rare for your liking, place it on the cool side of the grill. (See, there was a point to that!) This will allow you to get the heat without the burn. Grill to your liking, though since I don’t know how over- or undercooked your steaks are, you’re going to have to use instinct here. I believe in you.

IN THE KITCHEN

I live in an apartment with no balcony, so any attempt to light a grill in my home would result in the fire department chopping down my door with an ax, eviction and possibly negligent arson charges. As all three of those things happen to appear on my Do Not Want list, I am forced to use my stove. As it turns out, though, I might be ahead of the curve.

When asked his favorite way to prepare a steak, Nick doesn’t hesitate to answer. “In the skillet,” he says. He is a big fan of searing steaks in avocado oil because it has a high smoke point. First, preheat your oven to 450 degrees. “Next, get a cast iron skillet sizzing hot, and sear the steak on both sides for four minutes each.” After that, he likes to add butter and rosemary to the steak and put it in the oven for a couple of minutes, to the desired doneness. (This depends mightily on the size and type of the steak.)

WHAT AM I BUYING HERE?

A casual stroll through the meat department at Rouses will reveal a surplus of options, but when it comes to steaks, the classics tend to be ribeye, filet mignon, strip and porterhouse. But what does it all mean? This little guide should light your way.

The ribeye is the king of steaks—by far the most popular of its brethren. It is cut from the loin along the ribcage. It is well marbled— there’s a lot of fat and that textbook “steak” flavor in there—and because of that, will cook evenly throughout, and will get that classic, crispy texture. If you are throwing a fancy party and need good steak that everyone will love, this is your cut.

The filet mignon is among the leanest and tenderest cuts of beef you will ever enjoy. This is because the part of the cow where it lives before… well, you know… is from the tip of the tenderloin, next to the backbone and beneath the ribs. Basically, this tiny part of the cow doesn’t actually do anything, so it never develops a toughness. It is also largely devoid of fat, and thus less juicy and flavorful, making it the perfect canvas on which chefs the world over can create culinary works of art.

The strip steak is a lot like the ribeye, found along the same muscle. The strip is nearer to the back of the cow, while the ribeye is found at the front. This is “middle ground” steak; not tender like the filet mignon, and not as marbled as the ribeye. If you are throwing a party but don’t want to spend as much money, this is a good choice.

Lastly, let’s say you want a filet mignon and a strip, but you don’t want to order two things. Well friends, let me introduce you to the T-bone steak (sometimes called a porterhouse). One side of the steak is a filet mignon. The other side is a strip. The two are connected by a bone shaped like a T. That bone makes preparation something of a challenge, because as any steak cooks, it shrinks, but that big bone doesn’t, making it hard for both types of beef to maintain contact with a skillet. Go for the grill with this one and you can’t go wrong.

David W. Brown is a freelance writer whose work appears in The Atlantic, The New York Times, Scientific American and The New Yorker. His next book, The Mission: A True Story, a rollicking adventure about a motley band of explorers on a quest to find oceans on Europa, is in bookstores now. Brown lives in New Orleans.