Steak Dinner based off Alton Brown's Recipe

For those of you that don't know who Alton Brown is...shame on you! 

He is the mastermind behind Good Eats, the food network show that matches delicious food with interesting trivia and science about the food that is being made. Ian was looking through one of the cookbooks I bought at one of Alton's lectures in D.C. and came across the pan fried rib-eye steak recipe...yummmm. He added a red wine marinade to the recipe because we adore making steak sauce.

 Ingredients Used:

- 2 boneless rib-eye steaks

-1 tsp olive oil

- 1 tsp kosher salt

- 1/2 tsp black pepper

Marinade: 

(This deviates from the recipe, but we always like a little extra flavor)

- 1 cup red wine

- 2 tbs soy sauce

- black pepper to taste

-dash of tumeric powder

Equipment Used:

- Cast iron skillet 

(look at flea markets, thrift stores and garage sales for one)

-Kitchen thermometer

 Begin!!

  Bring the steaks up to room temperature. Mix together the marinade ingredients and pour into a glass dish that will fit both steaks

*During this time, place the skillet in the oven and heat to 500 degrees. Trust us...it's gonna be awesome.

Once the skillet has been cooking for 15 minutes, take it out of the oven and put it over a hot stove. We have a gas stove so we turned the gas up to the highest setting. You then blast your skillet with inferno level heat for another 5 minutes to make sure your steak is entering Hell when it hits the surface.

Here's the fun part...

Once the skillet is indistinguishable from Hades' playpen,  place both steaks in the skillet and watch them sizzle for 30 seconds. Immediately flip them over and have them sear for another 30 seconds. After the 60 seconds of fun are over, put the skillet back into the oven and continue cooking. The point of this is to create a grilled effect that sears both sides of the meat and leaves the juices inside to keep the steak very juicy.

You can check the progress of your steak by inserting a meat thermometer into the thickest portion of the steak. According to a quick google search you have the following temps to consider  

Rare - 120 degrees F
Medium Rare - 125 degrees F
Medium - 130 degrees F

You screwed up- 130 + F

Okay, so maybe that last section was a personal addition, but you get the point. Alton Brown prefers the insides of his steaks to reach absolutely no higher than 130 degrees. Ian and I prefer medium rare. We cooked the steaks for a few minutes, tested it with a thermometer (that didn't register below 140 degrees, which will be discussed later) and then popped the steaks back in the oven to complete them. 

To keep them juicy

To let the steaks rest, Ian put them in a colander with a plate over top to keep the warmth in. According to Alton Brown, this let's the steaks rest, and some juice come out that can be used for the steak sauce later.

The marinade that Ian made earlier was thrown into the cast iron skillet used to cook the steaks, and heated till it had a good boil going on. One way to thicken steak sauce (or reduction) quickly is to add a little arrowroot to the juice. Arrowroot (gluten free) is a natural thickener and can help speed things along if you don't have a lot of time. Today we had plenty of time, so just went the old fashioned way of reducing the sauce until it was thick enough to cover the spatula.

Once the steaks were put on the serving plate, we adding the remaining steak juice to the skillet and mixed it into the sauce.

Toss the sauce into a bowl and the steaks on a plate and voila!! Steak dinner is complete!

Now, to make sure that you are having a true American steak dinner...you gotta have some roast potatoes. Ian has a trick of microwaving the potatoes (one of the only times we ever used a microwave for cooking) to soften them up and then throws them in the oven for a final crisp. Because the oven was already hot from the skillet, this worked out nicely. Add in glasses of wine and butter for extra cholesterol, and you have one hell of a tasty feast.

Verdict

Well, this was our first time trying the skillet version of steak. We usually just pan fry the steaks from start to finish and have enjoyed that in the past. The steaks ended up not being done quite enough (rare instead of medium rare) so we had to pop them back in the oven for a bit. My guess is this happened because our steaks were abnormally large, about 2" tall. The best steaks are supposed to be about 1.5" tall so that they heat up evenly without overcooking and drying out. 

Even with the second round of cooking, however, the steaks were juicy and tasty very good. The steak sauce was incredibly rich with the added steak juice, and will definitely be repeated again. Oh, and mixing butter with the sauce to melt on top of the steak?? Pure heaven.

To fully enjoy the meal, we went with Ian's favorite wine, the Tarima Monastell 2009

(look at earlier post for our review of this wine!)