Turn $5 steak to $50 steak with salt

http://steamykitchen.com/163-how-to-turn-cheap-choice-steaks-into-gucci-prime-steaks.html

by maxklein • 16 years ago

188 142 16 years ago

steamykitchen.com

houseabsolute• 16 years ago

Stupid question: does this work with chicken? I tend to prefer the white meat.

rms2• 16 years ago

The article says one of her influences was a chef that did this with chicken.

Alex3917• 16 years ago

http://www.nytimes.com/1982/07/07/garden/getting-the-most-ou...

This works really well with fish too. My favorite catalonian restaurant cooks its fish on a slab of salt, with excellent results.

colonelxc2• 16 years ago

I'm having steak this weekend, will have to try this out. Educational and tasty (hopefully)!

PebblesRox• 16 years ago

Let us know how it turns out!

colonelxc2• 16 years ago

It turned out well! I didn't make a control sample, but both my girlfriend and I enjoyed it (for both steaks last night, and steak burritos today for lunch). As the author suggested, we also added garlic and rosemary to the salting process.

I'm kinda new to cooking steaks, so I don't have a lot of experience to measure this against, but I think I will do this again next time.

dgordon• 16 years ago

I tried this once -- it was very salty, which I don't mind, but it was nothing special as far as tenderness.

mousebender2• 16 years ago

Seconded. I salted a one-inch-thick steak about an hour ahead of grill time, with a rinse and pat-dry just before grilling. It still tasted too salty. Furthermore, even with 5-10 minutes' rest time after grilling, the steak still lost too much juice upon cutting.

This method works: Preheat grill to 500 deg F. Lightly salt and pepper the steak just before grilling. Grill for 4 minutes per side per inch of thickness. Remove, call the guests in, and serve. Yum.

encoderer3• 16 years ago

You missed a step.

Remove, [let rest for 5 minutes], call the guests in...

ErrantX4• 16 years ago

I've tried this a couple of times. It's nothing special. Your better off finding locally sourced fresh meat - it's usually as cheap and you will be able to find one you like.

(also, incidentally, I'd say a good steak is as much about taste as texture. This sorta sacrifices one for the other)

garply3• 16 years ago

What good does local sourcing do? Is it freshness? I'm not a meat expert, but I would guess that a big company with an economy of scale would be able to produce higher quality meat for a lower cost. Also, if you're sourcing locally from non-big brand names, don't you have concerns about their cold chain?

ErrantX4• 16 years ago

You'd think so. But I have found you get better quality for very little premium. And even the cheap stuff is better than supermarket schmuck.

My aunt rears poultry for several markets. Her supermarket produce is usually additionally processed in a variety of ways by an intermediate to increase it's sale value (with poultry it is usually water plumped).

It might take a while but there is sure to be a local butcher or farm shop nearby where you can buy more directly.

Edit: also I personally don't think meat is a Market that benefits from economy of scale :-) I usually find supermarkets a false economy.

dzlobin7• 16 years ago

Locally sourced meat tends to be grass-fed or at least grass finished. It also tends to have WAY better living conditions than any commercial plant. A happy animal is a tasty animal.

I highly suggest you watch Food inc. :-)

illumin85• 16 years ago

If you buy local you're much more likely to get beef that is grass fed, and not factory farm raised beef that is fed corn and lives in their own filth. You know in order to kill bacteria in ground beef, they actually use an ammonia bath, and they can only guarantee it will kill 99% of the bacteria? Somehow, the FDA thinks this is safe. What's the harm in 1% E. Cohli, after all?

Watch a documentary called Food, Inc. and become enlightened.

logicalmind4• 16 years ago

You're right on about taste vs texture. Often times the tenderness/texture is inversely proportional to the flavor in steaks. Which is why you see many menus placing something like blue cheese on top of beef tenderloin.

However, the "freshness" of beef is in interesting topic. When a cow is slaughtered it is bled and hung in a cooler for about a week. At this point it is usually cut up into primal cuts or sub-primal cuts, sealed in cryovac and sent to the store. At wholesale clubs you can usually buy these whole sub-primals in cryovac. In a normal store the "butcher's" simply cut up the sub-primals into normal size and sell them. The people who work the meat counter in the typical store are simply meat cutters and no longer butchers in the true sense.

Some restaurants keep their meat in the cryovac for extended periods of time and they call this "aging" which is technically called "wet aging". And vastly inferior to dry aging. Dry aging is simply leaving a sub-primal in a temperature appropriate room for an extended period to allow bacteria to break down the meat and moisture to evaporate, thus increasing flavor.

Freshness in terms of beef really means "never frozen". If you freeze beef (or any protein really) then ice crystals form and cause damage to the cellular structure of the meat. This means that juices from the meat will simply exit the meat and never return, no matter how long your rest the meat after cooking.

char• 16 years ago

I'm pretty excited about the prospect of eating a delicious steak for only a few bucks! I also enjoy that this person has the same method of cooking as I do, which is to create a recipe and then iterate on it several times within the span of a few weeks before it eventually tastes amazing.

weaksauce2• 16 years ago

OK. Sous Vide looks more interesting to me that overly salting a piece of meat. tptacek care to weigh in? I am about 23 hours away from buying a rice cooker + pid controller to make this happen. I do the pid part at work so it is interesting to me from a work point of view too.

Edit: If you have not seen sous vide cooking: http://amath.colorado.edu/~baldwind/sous-vide.html

It looks amazing to me.

dzlobin7• 16 years ago

I was cooking at a two Michelin star restaurant last year where a large majority of proteins and vegetables were cooked sous vide. Don't underestimate the importance of a good salting, but sous vide will make everything you cook perfect, and consistent.

There is a better home option now than the rice cooker + pid timer( which does not circulate water and leads to uneven cooking. http://www.sousvidesupreme.com/

This is as good as you can get without buying a $995 dollar immersion circulator(which you should buy if you can).

Pick up the more expensive foodsaver, if you can't afford a commercial unit. I cook at arazorashinyknife.com these days, and our commercial unit which costs $5000 just died on us, it cost $1000 just to have a guy look at it -.-

http://cookingissues.wordpress.com/2010/02/02/coming-soon-so... Here is a primer on sous-vide cooking, which by the way can can be done the ghetto way by sealing a sturdy ziplock bag almsot under water, to get as much air out as you can. Then you can leave a large pot of water running under the hot water tap until you can get the water to the temperture you need.

ars2• 16 years ago

Aren't you worried about the plasticizers from the bags?

tptacek27• 16 years ago

Totally not sold on the value of the circulator for a home rig (although, don't spent $1000 on an IC, since the price circulation is about to drop radically). Unless you want to make a poster of eggs cooked to every degree between 130 and 150, the ghetto PID controller setup is plenty precise enough.

joshwa2• 16 years ago

arazorashinyknife, eh? We run in similar circles (friends with cathy erway?). Is your project food-related?

whimsy• 16 years ago

I thought of this exact page whilst reading; I'm glad I wasn't the only one.

It would be pretty awesome if you documented how you made it work (especially if you do it in such a way that is cheap and easily reproducible).

tptacek27• 16 years ago

1. Buy Auber Instruments SV controller @ ~$120.

2. Buy mechanically-switched Black & Decker rice cooker @ $40.

3. Buy Seal-a-Meal vacuum sealer @ $40.

4. Buy two aged rib-eye steaks.

5. Pat steaks dry, salt liberally, pepper.

6. Seal steaks in a single vacuum-sealed bag with 1 tbsp of butter for each steak.

7. Set Auber PID controller for 131f.

8. Put sealed steaks in the bottom of the rice cooker. Fill with water.

9. Ensure that the thermal probe from the PID controller is in the water.

10. Ensure that the rice cooker is plugged into the PID controller, and the PID controller into the wall.

11. Walk away for 4 hours.

12. Heat peanut oil in a skillet until shimmering.

13. Remove steaks from water bath. Pat dry. Oil should be just-smoking.

14. Sear steaks on both sides, 30-40 seconds per side.

15. Rest meat 10-15 minutes.

16. Serve.

ecuzzillo6• 16 years ago

I really want to do sous vide, but basically everything I've read says you get bad results unless you have a serious-dude vacuum chamber packer sealer $4000 thing, which seems mildly impractical.

Especially, you can't do the spectacular compressed stuff without one of those.

You can get sous-vide-like results sometimes without said equipment, though; Thomas Keller's Ad Hoc at Home book contains a lot of unstated backports from sous vide techniques. For instance, he has you blowtorch a big prime rib roast and then cook it at very low temperature in the oven (275 F) for two hours. It reliably comes out with the uniform-pink-almost-all-the-way-to-the-edges effect. Presumably not quite as close.

tptacek27• 16 years ago

I call shenanigans on the $4000 SV rig stuff. Commercial kitchens will spend $4000 on an immersion circulator alone, and that's before the cryovac or whatever they're doing to seal food.

If you want to (a) make watermelons with the texture of a strip steak or (b) cook SV in huge volume, you need to investigate high end equipment.

Otherwise, the concept behind SV is extremely simple. Precisely controlled temperature over long cooking time. The $120 PID controllers do that job just fine.

What have you read that says you need a cryovac to do SV well? The Baldwin guide actively endorses the ghetto setup, and there are numerous blogs of people succeeding with it. The Keller sous vide book isn't a home cookbook any more than the Alinea cookbook is. You're not making French Laundry food at home no matter how you equip your kitchen.

fms• 16 years ago

You are right. SousVide cooking prepares healthy meals with less salt and spices, and at the same time, preserve the vitamins and nutrients and flavour much more than conventional cooking. Our latest release SVM 1500D temperature controller works beautifully with a basic rice cooker. FreshMealsSolutions is introducing another new product called FreshMealsMagic which is a heater and circulator all in one for $159.00. It will make any pots into a constant water bath for sousvide cooking ( no need for rice cooker).

tptacek27• 16 years ago

Get me a review unit! If it works, I will sing its praises to the heavens.

jasonwilk• 16 years ago

Finally a Hacker News article I can share with my Mom!!

josefresco• 16 years ago

Just don't share it with your wife .. she may take offense.

jobu• 16 years ago

Hah! My wife was the one who told me about <a href="http://www.google.com/search?q=March+14th>March 14th</a>. This will make it even better.

dzlobin7• 16 years ago

protip: salt all meat 10-60 minutes before cooking, depending on size. Don't do this with fish.

alternative: brine all your meat.

euccastro• 16 years ago

Why not on fish? Around here (SW of Europe) it's customary to salt mackerel and sardines the morning before cooking. Even the whole day before, if they're going to be boiled.

ecuzzillo6• 16 years ago

Salting things a while beforehand so the salt penetrates it is a good idea in general. You're supposed to do that to basically any savory food, including chicken, meat, eggs. For big things, like prime rib roasts, you salt it a whole day ahead.

So, this guy compared wrongly-salted expensive steak to correctly-but-very-heavily-salted cheap steak. Unfair.

Also, in general, expensive steak isn't expensive because it's aged. Aged steak is expensive, but the difference between cheap and expensive is more commonly just which part of the cow it is. Filet mignon is a happy tender fatty underused part of the cow. Also, not very much of it per cow.

A good recipe for chicken:

Turn your oven on high (450 if you have ventilation, 425 if not). Coat a 3- or 4-pound chicken with coarse kosher salt so that you have an appealing crust of salt (a tablespoon or so). Put the chicken in a pan, stick a lemon or some onion or any fruit or vegetable you have on hand into the cavity. Put the chicken in the oven. Go away for an hour. Watch some TV, play with the kids, read, have a cocktail, have sex. When an hour has passed, take the chicken out of the oven and put it on the stove top or on a trivet for 15 more minutes. Finito.

From http://blog.ruhlman.com

dzlobin7• 16 years ago

ruhlman is the goddamn man.

wooster5• 16 years ago

The difference between prime and choice is not aging, it's marbling. Marbling will also usually be the difference between pricing of different cuts of meat from the same animal, as more often-used muscles will tend to be leaner and tougher.

drtse4• 16 years ago

Right, marbling is what really makes a difference (just look at kobe beef, what is its key characteristic?). Btw, the linked article presents nothing new, over salting+removing is an approach already seen in many other places(even cooking show). As the advice of drying it, essential. @ecuzillo, the salt crust method is perfect for fish, salt encrusted seabass is pretty popular here.

d_c• 16 years ago

How would you do that with eggs?

aarongough• 16 years ago

Eggshells are actually very porous. Putting eggs in very salty water will see the salt get absorbed through the shell and into the white and yolk.

'Salty eggs' are often used in Chinese food...

ecuzzillo6• 16 years ago

If you're frying or baking them, you salt them before they set, rather than after they go on the plate. If you're poaching, you salt the water. If you're doing the crazy poach-in-the-shell stuff, I imagine you do something with the shell porousness, like the sibling comment.

tptacek27• 16 years ago

Filet is more expensive than hanger, and often better.

Dry-aged is more expensive than fresh, and always better.

Prime is more expensive than choice, and always better.

These things all matter. You're right, but I still want to stomp on the confusion about what "prime" means.

I heartily endorse Ruhlman's "too stupid to cook" chicken recipe. Buy two chickens when you do it, save the other for leftovers. Whole chicken is much more economical than breasts.

ajross• 16 years ago

I think the second point is a matter of taste. Aging is a fermentation process, and it changes the taste of the meat. Some like it, some don't. It's not like prime vs. choice, which is an issue of fat distribution: people almost universally like well-marbled meat vs. lean or fatty chunks.

assemble• 16 years ago

I actually prefer Strip or Sirloin to Filet. Filet is tender all the time, but I think the others have more flavor :)

illumin85• 16 years ago

A great way to cook a steak if you have good ventilation is to use a cast iron skillet and heat the skillet in an oven to 500 degrees. Brush the steak with olive oil ahead of time, and make sure it is room temperature (not fridge temperature). Pull the skillet out of the oven, put it on the stove. Turn the burner up on the stove, and cook the steak for 30 seconds on each side, then put the entire skillet back in the oven for 2 minutes on each side.

The steak will be tender and juicy, since searing it at such a hot temperature locks in most of the juices, similar to the way a wound is cauterized.

I only recommend you do this if you have a VERY well ventilated kitchen, as the amount of smoke generated will surely set off any smoke alarms in your house otherwise.

Sidenote: Why is it that a lot of modern kitchens don't have properly ventilated hoods that actually vent outside? It seems ridiculous that most of the hoods over stoves nowadays just recirculate the air back inside. When I want to cook, I want to cook, damn it!

logicalmind4• 16 years ago

Your instructions provide a perfectly reasonable way to cook a steak, but the theory on searing locking in juices has been proven false (see Good Eats or America's Test Kitchen). The purpose of searing steak is to invoke the Maillard Reaction which dramatically increases flavor:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Searing

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maillard_reaction

dminor• 16 years ago

That is Alton Brown's recipe (http://www.foodnetwork.com/recipes/alton-brown/pan-seared-ri...).

ModelCitizen• 16 years ago

I also sear, then finish off in the oven, especially in the winter when I don't want to brave the snow to get to the grill.

Tip: Most olive oils have relatively lower smoke points, especially if you're using virgin. So, if you want to prevent most of the smoke, try canola oil. The OO isn't doing much for flavor, especially if it's burning. Also, a pat of butter at the end is essential.

encoderer3• 16 years ago

i make a mean peppersteak using a similar technique that I picked up from a local restaurant.

The diff:

1. crack peppercorns spread across a baking sheet. Lay steak upon them. Compress. I use a heavy (cold) skillet. Flip steak. Repeat.

2. Heat oil just beneath the smoke point in pan, otherwise cook steak as described.

3. Serve with any citrus-based steaksauce. (A1 if you have to, but I prefer to make my own OJ based sauce)

The peppercorn crust is quite good.

wooster5• 16 years ago

This is basically the method I use when cooking steaks.

Also see this post which discusses the effects of flip intervals on cooking time and evenness of steaks: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1117296

Also, some other simple tips:

1) In general, the more marbling the better. You want lots of veins of fat in the muscle of the cut. Big chunks of fat don't count, and leaner meat won't have as much flavor.

2) Hard white fat is good, spongy yellow fat is not.

3) Don't overcook your meat.

taitems• 16 years ago

My mum came along for a trip to the market a few weekends ago and had me looking for well aged porterhouse. She told me to look specifically for the yellowing fat as its a sign of age. She grabbed one that looked sickeningly yellow but I can confirm that this was one of the most tender porterhouses I've had.

wooster5• 16 years ago

Yellow fat can indicate a lot of things, most of them not good:

1) The animal was old.

2) Worst case: the animal was losing weight when it died. This will make the meat taste sour (as best I can describe).

3) Best case: it's grass fed and not grain finished. This fat will usually be hard. If you're in the UK (guessing because you said "mum"), that's probably what you got.

4) It's dry aged beef. The outer layer will turn a bit yellow, but otherwise the fat is going to be whatever color it was before aging. Temperature and duration of aging has a lot more to do with how tender the cut is going to be.

Really, it's the spongy feeling stuff you want to avoid. If you're in the US, and it's not marketed as grass fed, it's almost certainly from an old dairy cow or an animal which was sick when it was slaughtered (and losing weight).

rms2• 16 years ago

I think you could use less total sodium when doing this if you substituted some MSG for salt.

logicalmind4• 16 years ago

A more natural way to achieve the same result would be to wrap the steak in kombu and allow it to rest in the fridge for a while. The Japanese use this technique for some fish preparations.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kombu

JshWright• 16 years ago

Ok, that's just not cool... It's 8:30 in the morning, and now I _really_ want a steak...

tptacek27• 16 years ago

What you really want to do is move to Argentina, where an 8:30AM steak is perfectly normal.

tptacek27• 16 years ago

Liberally salting your steak is a fine idea, but where is this person finding choice ribeye for $5? Choice isn't "cheap". The $15/lb ribeye at Whole Foods is choice, as is pretty much every other steak you buy outside a specialty store. There's nothing at all wrong with it.

This article never gets specific, but I get the impression the author doesn't really know what "prime" means: how well marbled the cut is with fat. Salt isn't going to change that (although, again, it will improve your steak).

If tenderness is all you're after, you can use a jaccard on the meat; Google it, they're cheap. They put tiny little cuts in the meat to break up the fibers.

When people say "cheap steak" they usually mean skirt or flank. Can you even get prime skirt steak?

elblanco3• 16 years ago

I usually just put a liberal coating of garlic salt on and grill at a low temperature, rotating every 2 minutes or so until the meat looks visibly moist. Turn the heat up to high at the end for the final 2 rotations and done.

I've had people fly cross-country (twice) for these steaks and it's really not all that hard. But it makes for an expensive summer season with lots of entertaining on my deck.

One guy was mystified as to why I wasn't using the popular Morton's method of high heat and turn once. Then he had one, came back the next weekend unannounced "just happened to be in the area" and tried to bribe me with a bottle of Santa Rita Reserva Cab (I know cheap wine, but good). Too bad I was out of steaks.

And yes, I usually get the on-sale cheap steak at the local grocery. So long as it's decently marbled it doesn't really seem to matter much what I get so long as it's not skirt or flank.

tptacek27• 16 years ago

I cook steak in a vacuum-sealed bag submerged in a water bath held with a PID controller at precisely 131f, then sear them in a cast iron pan with just-barely-smoking peanut oil for about 30 seconds a side. Nobody has flown cross-country for my cooking, but the Chicago HN'ers should do a dinner sometime.

gleb2• 16 years ago

USDA beef grading is assigned to the whole carcass, so you can get any part of the cow in prime. Only cuts where USDA rating correlates with quality are typically marketed as prime/choice, typically just loin and rib-eye. You do see things like "prime skirt steak" but it's uncommon, because there won't be any difference in marbling or tenderness on that cut. For other cuts like chuck, prime is actually too fatty for many applications (e.g. try chuck @ Schaub's @ Stanford -- not good for moist cooking, could be good for hamburgers I guess).

Whole Food beef is select not choice. I can only speak for Bay Area definitively, I haven't checked out WF meat counter in Chicago. I doubt it's any different because Whole Foods has a nice high-margin gig going on what they call "natural" beef, which is USDA Select sold as a premium product on the strength of Whole Foods brand. It's a store brand with premium pricing, great gig if you can pull it off, good for Whole Foods.

tptacek27• 16 years ago

When the steak in front of me is labelled "USDA Choice", it's choice. I would be surprised to find out that any of the steaks at Whole Foods are "select". I think you're just wrong about this.

Yep, you can probably get "prime skirt" at Schaub's. Someone fedex me a Fred Steak, please. I'll send italian beef back in reply.

madebylaw• 16 years ago

FTA: * And yes, I know what “Choice” and “Prime” means – it’s the marbling. The salting doesn’t affect fat content – I’m using those terms as a figure of speech.

narendranag• 16 years ago

Drool. Drool. Drool.

Hacking = coding for food.

Groxx5• 16 years ago

Water dissolves salt, and some of it gets sucked back into meat via osmosis

WTF is wrong with people and osmosis? This is diffusion. Osmosis is diffusion of water and nothing else.

Also, "table salt tastes like shit" is quite true. I've been buying an unrefined sea salt for a while now, the difference is incredible. Flavor in foods, where before was mere saltiness.

jackfoxy• 16 years ago

Cut her some slack. She did confess to sleeping through chemistry and otherwise wrote and illustrated a good article, while pounding bourbon.

Groxx5• 16 years ago

It's not the article writer in particular, the article is basically fine in other respects, it's people in general. I see far more people using "osmosis" more often than "diffusion", despite almost never using it correctly.

For example, those "Learning through osmosis" signs in libraries, articles, shirts, etc. absolutely abound. It clearly isn't working if you think that's osmosis. Or there are tons of services with quotes like this: http://www.languagetutoring.co.uk/LearningThroughOsmosis.htm...

Evidently they aren't tutoring science.

Osmosis vs diffusion is not difficult to understand. It just seems people use it to sound smarter, and thus fail miserably 99% of the time.

tptacek27• 16 years ago

You're noticing the difference in the texture of the salt, not the flavor of the salt. You'll do just as well with kosher salt, which is significantly cheaper than sea salt (and, more importantly, comes in bigger containers).

I have a small bag of fleur de sel (we call it "crunchy salt") which I use to finish things, but again, it's for the texture. I wouldn't say I've found any incredible difference in salt flavor.

Groxx5• 16 years ago

No, the flavor. Unrefined salts tend to carry loads of random minerals from the source, which lend their flavors to whatever you use it on.

I'm not a big salt-flavor fan, so I effectively never have salt pieces on anything. The texture doesn't exist in any salt I use, as it's all dissolved.

edit: finally found it. Redmond RealSalt, all the big grocery stores near me carry it. ~6.50 for 26 oz, so for my uses that's 6.50 for a year of salt usage, if not more.

kingkongreveng_2• 16 years ago

> table salt tastes like shit

What's the chemical difference? Doesn't the mined salt just come from old dried out seas?

grandalf3• 16 years ago

Alternate title: Lure redditors to HN with steak.

gcv• 16 years ago

You can also break down collagen (the tough protein) by braising, or a couple of other simple slow-cooking methods. The meat will have different taste and texture from grilled steak, but in no way inferior. Braising can easily turn a $5/pound cut into something that tastes better than 95% of the dry-aged porterhouse steaks out there.

Edaname3• 16 years ago

Sous vide is great for braising at the exact temperature that you want. Braising is still high heat cooking and you don't have precise control over it. Sous vide allows one to braise with moisture intact and preferred "doneness".

antidaily• 16 years ago

Just tried it - it works!! best steak I've ever cooked for myself. picture (that adds nothing, but I took it anyway): http://i48.tinypic.com/2nkulfn.jpg

boneless beef ribeye 3/4in thick - I used a grill pan since it's too cold to grill outside. maybe 2 minutes a side, and another 2 to finish. I added some garlic powder an that was it (no additional salt). I let it rest for a good 10 min. One end was a little too salty, which was probably my fault for not washing it better. But overall, it fantastic. I've always tried to salt generously when cooking meat, but it never really worked like this. Great tip.

Edaname3• 16 years ago

I don't know why you guys keep pushing Auber controllers, most professionals use SousVideMagic controllers and now the people at Fresh Meals Solutions have the latest 1500D with better accuracy and many safety features. Free shipping too!

computerofmeat• 16 years ago

I tried this about a year ago. It works pretty well. It's not a complete substitute for a great cut of steak but it's a good way to save money on meat.

Turn $5 steak to $50 steak with salt

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