No Walkers. No Coleman stove. Tallow, carbon steel, salt, and a $15 Bordeaux.
Jack will cook steak over a camp stove if that is the day he has. He prefers not to. When the power is on and the Walkers are not at the door, this is how he does it.
The point is not restaurant theater. The point is a crust, a warm center, and the sense that you still live like a person.
The steak
Ribeye or NY Strip. At least 1.5” thick. Salt only. Dry brine at least an hour, up to twenty-four. No pepper. No rub. No sauce later to apologize for a timid sear. Pat it dry before it goes in the pan. If you want pepper, do it after the steak is cooked. Trust me.
If the butcher looks at him like he asked for a unicorn, Jack finds another butcher. He has done this with coffee beans. He will do it with beef.
The pan
Carbon steel. Always. This one is the Made In Blue Carbon Steel, not the De Buyer Mineral B Pro. The De Buyer is beloved and goes in the 4Runner. This pan is the one for a stove-top steak. Heated until it is smoking hot. Tallow in the pan, not oil and not butter. Tallow takes the heat. Butter burns before the crust arrives.
Jack makes his own tallow, but you can buy it in the grocery store.
The cook
Steak straight into the smoking pan. Fresh rosemary and whole garlic cloves in with it. Turn every two minutes. Let the crust build. Do not poke. Do not fuss. When the center hits 125°F, pull it. You do use a good digital thermometer, right? Rest at least five minutes. Toss the nicely cooked garlic on top of the steak. Then slice across the grain.
125°F in the pan is the pull. The rest is part of the cooking. Cut it early and you waste both.
The plate
Steak. Salad. A decent wine. That is dinner. Don’t bother with any fancy stuff. No need for a red wine sauce, or mushrooms, or whatever. A potato is a distraction. Steak. Salad. Wine.
Jack’s salad is tomatoes, cucumber, red onion, and feta. Salt, pepper, olive oil, a bit of vinegar. That is not a side project. That is the green thing.
Do not overspend on the bottle. A $15 Bordeaux is fine. Jack is not impressing a sommelier. He is eating dinner. Anything else on the table is fuss, and fuss is how a good steak gets lost.
The rule
Same rule as the rest of his life. Do it properly or do not pretend you did. A steak is not survival food. It is a reminder that standards are portable. You can keep them in a 4Runner. You can keep them in a kitchen with a working stove.
We shoot the Walkers. Then we go back to the beans. On a good night, with the lights on, we also cook the steak like we mean it.
Bougie Apocalypse
A serial about heirloom beans, carbon steel skull-crackers, and refusing to let the apocalypse win.
#BougieApocalypse #StayHuman #JackHarlan
Fantastic! I think that's my favorite salad as well. And we have about five huge rosemary bushes in the backyard, so rosemary goes on almost everything here.
I buy the whole NY strip from Costco (last time I hit paydirt and got a very Prime-looking Choice) and slice it myself into steaks. 1.5" absolutely. Trim it good (remove the silver skin, etc.). You will get some scraps of good meat--save those for chili. If you only want the very best steaks, take the "bad end" strips with the gristle in the middle, cut out the gristle in the middle, cut to 3/4", and make some really good fajitas with them. If the worst steak on the end is really bad with gristle, clean it up and throw it in with the rest of the chili meat.
If you buy your steaks precut from Costco (or elsewhere), find a tray with no "bad ends". Tell a butcher you don't want the bad end either.
Use the fatty trimmings to make your own tallow. Just put them in a saucepan and slowly heat it (to prevent spattering as the water boils off) until the pieces of gristle and random tissue begin to cook. Filter it when it's just cool enough to handle through a strainer lined with a coffee filter. Let it cool too much and it will set up in the filter. If it starts getting too cool, nuke it a little. Pour the filtered tallow into an ice cube tray and freeze. Pop out the tallow cubes and pop in a Ziploc and back in the freezer.
If you're slumming it with a bag of frozen french fries, throw a tallow cube in with the fries in the pan. Your economy fries just got a free upgrade to first class.
Waste nothing--except the silver skin. Nothing good comes from that. You can scrape the meat off the back of it with your knife and add that to the chili pile.
Why carbon steel instead of cast iron? Sometimes cast iron holds too much heat...??? Is that it? I use a 10" Lodge from the 1930s that my grandparents must have gotten as a wedding gift.
Good call on the dry brine and no pepper. Pepper on a raw steak will burn.
Add some fresh thyme to the rosemary and garlic. The thyme you can strip off the stem when done and eat it along with the garlic. Don't try that with the rosemary.
If you're in the South, once a rosemary plant gets established, it will overwinter nicely and give you free rosemary for years. It will eventually die, but not until several seasons pass. If there's a threat of really cold weather (say, less than 10 degrees F), bring it in for the night.
My pull is in the high one-teens--115-118 degrees F or so. Until that timer goes off, do not touch that steak except to take its temperature. Flip it, reset your timer, and leave it alone.
A good thermometer prevents overcooking any kind of protein--especially chicken. Except tofu, which should be cooked until black and thrown in the trash. If you want beans, eat beans. Beans are quite good. Beans, beans, good for your heart, the more you eat, the more...your cholesterol goes down!
If you want a starchy side, you want something like couscous, quinoa, risotto, or the like that will serve as a sponge for the steak juices. Waste nothing! A baked potato, while yummy, will leave you feeling bloated.