steakFEED

No, I don’t mean a battle where the combatants use steak for weapons, as cool as that would be.

Rather, I’m referring to what sounds like an exhaustive study of steak preparation technique, carried out by a lovely and compelling food blogger named Helen. She and her S.O. Jason face off against each other, against rib-eyes and NY Strips, and hanger steaks, and against Alton Brown, trying to come up with the most reliable method for preparing a Great Steak. This whole saga runs two long posts at Beyond Salmon: The battle of the steaks (and the sexes), and Perfect steak at last.

It’s great writing! Very entertaining, and also quite admirably methodical. But what struck me most was the method Helen arrived at. See her goal was to develop a formula, so that, as infrequently as she prepared Great Steak, it would always turn out Perfect. And by perfect she means seared and slightly crusted on the very outside, and evenly tender and juicy on the inside. It’s tricky! The bistro method gets it close, and Helen starts here too: Quick sear at very high heat, and then finish in the oven.

But here’s the amazing part: she rests the steak for ten minutes … before finishing it in the oven at a very low heat for 12 to 15 minutes!!

I’m gonna try it. Even though I think it’s still a matter of much variation to get a steak perfect, there’s something really interesting to me about her strategy of temperature and minimizing “heat disturbance”.

Generally, posts from myspace blogs need no comment.

Here are two:

  »   Dog’s life at steak, please repost

  »  Butt cheeks hurt after movie, Patty cooks up a couple of steaks.

Armida Cooks!: Dry-Rubbed Skirt Steak

This looks terrific! She’s done a nice photograph of the steak, and I think this might induce me to try a Batali recipe too. The dry rub (that always sounds a tad suggestive to me!) is made with ground porcini mushrooms! Yowza!

Now to find a skirt steak for sale in this dumb burgh.

Eat Out Dubai: Royal Steak: The Rib Room

If you’re ever in the UAE, you’ll want to try The Rib Room. Right next to the Jumeirah Emirates Towers hotel lobby.

beef

Originally uploaded by taciturnal.

this is beautiful~!

MyFiancee and I have been trying to get HerMom out to dinner for a really long time, because we believe that everyone needs to try our Favorite Little Italian Place Down the Street. So, it was her birthday on Friday, and she consented to join us for what we like to call “the best” Italian (in town). They had lovely crab + asparagus + five cheeses handmade ravioli.

I had a NY Strip with port wine sauce, topped with gorgonzola, sauteed shallots.

I new there was going to be a problem as soon as Franco took more than 20 minutes to visit our table to recite the speciales. He was very distracted, and kept looking over his shoulder, watching the service staff, and the kitchen. Franco, a real Italian guy with tons of energy looked weary. We were to learn soon that this was the first night of service with doubled seating capacity. The worst possible night maybe, to bring HerMom for her first time.

The raviolis were lovely, the ladies said. The service was, although agonizingly drawn out, basically accurate. When we asked Franco politely if we could pay and leave, we’d been there almost three hours. Thank god the chianti was kept filled.

I think I’m going to have to go down there, or call down there or something though, because what I was served as a NY Strip was almost unrecognizable as that cut of beef. I have no idea what was going on in that kitchen, but it must have been difficult enough that the kid at the grill wasn’t able to see my steak. There’s no way this thing would have passed a visual “is this a New York” test. It came apart in three weird sections with barely any meat between great tangles of other tissue. It was almost like chuck steak, cut 3/4 inch thick. Oh, and there weren’t any shallots, anywhere.

The thing is, with all their difficulty that night, it would have taken an additional forty-five minutes for me to try and get a better cut of New York. If I’d had the heart to mention it… If I wasn’t a Minnesota-no-send-back’er.

I hate to think I’m not able to order a good steak at my favorite Italian joint. I’m left puzzled. What happened to the real NY Strip that night?

Sorry Mom.

Steak Feed :: MEAT CAKE :: August :: 2006 Steak Feed

Reposted in recognition of Dethroner’s Bachelor Party Week

psst. I have a question for you, it’s not right for the bride-to-be to put limits on what kind of fun stuff I can do for the wedding+reception is it? Like: “Top hat or meat cake. but not both!” I mean, yeah yeah. It’s her special day and all that claptrap. But, it’s fricken my special day too, right? I can put Judas Priest in the after-dinner playlist, right??

blog.myspace.com/proudjagmom

I know it might not be fair, but it is on the internet.

We haven’t had the chance to do a fully-staffed review of a Ruth’s Chris Steakhouse yet. I’ve never really thought of it as an important destination — more like in the same category as Stuart Anderson’s (Black Angus). Apparently though, it’s quite impressive!

Through the miracle of internet myspace homepage blogs, we get a peek inside what seems like a very fancy, high-class operation Ruth (or should I say “Mrs. Fertel“?) puts on in New York.

Please read about Joe and Ricky’s Bdays on Simply ~ Dee’s Myspace blog. It speaks for itself.

I found this one on the internet, from one of those Technorati blog search engines. It’s a real stinker, and I’m trying to improve on it by converting it to a regional, self-deprecating form I’m familiar with from my youth (that’s yoot with a silent H) in Minnesota

So, one day, Sven and Ole went up to The Norseman to have some supper. Lena comes by (she’s the waitress, see?) and she serves up the boys two fried steaks. Quick as can be, Ole picks up the bigger steak for himself.

Sven, he wasn’t too pleased about that. He says, “Ole, when are you going to learn to be polite, eh?”

Ole frowns a little bit, and then he says “Well, Sven. If you were to be the one that had the chance to pick first, which of these steaks would you have chosen, then?”

Sven says, “Of course I’d have picked the smaller steak, ya know?”

“Well then, Sven,” says Ole. “Quit your belly-achin’. The smaller steak is the one you wanted, right?”

Not a Chef? » Blog Archive » Emeril’s Mushroom Steaks

This place just popped up on my steak radar screen today. It looks like one of those in-between food blogs. By ‘in between’ I mean, “it’s got the promise of tons of recipes, and a pretty neat layout.”

The Emeril Mushroom Steak recipe looks pretty straight-up and reasonable. I dunno if I can find black trumpets anywhere, but they’re evocative aren’t they?

Not a Chef?’s Steak category looks pretty good. I’ll keep an eye out and check back later because they promise Millions of Recipes!! FUN Stuff!

Nerd Approved - News and Reviews - »
T-Bone Steak Meat Cuddler

On the one hand, I think, $20 for a nine inch steak?! WTF? It’s not even a steak you can cook or eat. Why would you pay twenty bucks for it, right?

But then I got to thinking, maybe since it’s soft and cuddly, you could do other things with it? It certainly won’t spoil, and it probably wouldn’t ever be used up, depending on what you do with it. Maybe a more durable steak would be worth twenty bucks? I’m just not sure.

On the other hand, isn’t it a little bit discomforting that the steak has a face? Mister Steak on the streets of Hong Kong doesn’t really even have a face, especially not a stupid googly-eyed face like this guy. How could you eat a guy with this face?

Not that we really even have stats to check, but we’ve decided to remove the SiteMeter free web statistics package from all of our pages. It seems they’ve elected to do a partnership with a shady internet marketing metrics provider called SpecificClick. They’ve started to fess up to it, but I tend to believe that before you go installing suspicious code that sets off alarms in millions of readers’ anti-spyware software, you should run it by your community and gauge the reaction. They claim they’re gonna be able to offer lots of gee-willikers features with this snoopy poopy junk in their counters. I just think it’s a rotten way to do business.

Plus there are better free Stats trackers out there anyways.

Robert J. Bolesta : an alphabet made of packages of ground beef. Most likely not steak, but red and meaty nonetheless.