The different ways to cook a steak 🥩
Everyone loves a good steak, but deciding how to cook one can often leave you scratching your head. There are many different techniques, some easy but equally easy to screw up, and others more complex with a more certain end product. Here are 4 popular ways to cook a steak:
Pan or skillet 🍳
Searing your steak on the stovetop is the easiest and most common method, and can yield a well-cooked steak if you know your stuff. Some important things to remember are to let your steak come down to room temperature, to make sure your pan is as hot as possible, and to flip it to create good colouring on either side.
This method of course does not come without its drawbacks, the most prevalent of which is overcooking your steak and ending up with tough meat. This is a huge bummer, unless of course you like your steak well done, in which case we ask you to revisit your values.
On a grill 🍖
When grilling steak, you get a more smoky flavour than with other methods, and a great char on the outside. You can use a charcoal, wood fire or gas grill (although the latter is least recommended) and it’s recommended to establish more than one cooking zone of different temperatures or heat exposure. You should also make sure the grill is hotter than hell before getting your steak on.
With this method, it’s not so easy to get a perfect end product every time, because the thickness of the steak, the type of cut, and the desired doneness require time and temperature adjustments, so you need to keep a good eye on what you’re doing. For example, grilling on direct high heat works well for a thin steak but not for a thick one.
Reverse Sear ◀️
The process of a reverse sear involves baking in the oven, and then searing the steak in a pan to get the signature browned crusty surface. It’s called a reverse sear because the historically traditional method of cooking meat is searing it first, and then finishing it off in the oven. Nowadays it's well known amongst steak connoisseurs that finishing off with a sear provides the best results.
Baking in the oven is ideal because it allows better internal temperature control than pan-searing alone, where you have a higher tendency to cook the steak unevenly. By starting the steak in an oven at low temperature, the meat cooks gently and evenly due to the low-temperature gradient. After this, a quick sear on very high heat will give you the exterior you’re looking for, and the perfect steak is complete. This method tends to work best with thicker cuts of steak.
Sous Vide 💨
Literally translating to “under vacuum”, this technique is also known as ‘low-temperature long-time cooking’. It involves sealing the food so that no air can get through, for example in a vacuum-sealed bag, and cooking it in water of a precisely controlled temperature. To control the cooking process, a specific machine is used (duly called a sous-vide machine).
When it comes to steak, the sous-vide technique is carried out by sealing the protein in marinade and letting it cook slowly. Since the temperatures in the sous-vide machine never get too high, the steak takes a while to cook but is never overdone. This leaves you with a perfectly cooked steak, apart from the outside - which will obviously be lacking that signature crisp charred exterior. This means that after sous-vide cooking, a quick sear on a hot pan is required to get the outside looking just as good as the inside.
Whichever way you choose to cook your steak, we can all agree that a nice cut of meat is one of the best home-cooked meals around. 🥩
What’s your favourite steak-cooking method?
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