Entries from The Amateur Gourmet tagged with 'steak'
The Steak Spoon
In the comments for the perfect steak video I linked to yesterday (which is already a big hit, thanks for watching it!) someone wrote: "What is w/ the spoon? Where [are] your tongs?" It's a great question because it IS a little unusual to flip your steak over with a spoon, isn't it? The answer is that I got the spoon idea directly from the chef, Chris Lim, who uses a spoon in almost all of his kitchen activities. Think about it: with a spoon, you can flip the steak over, you can baste it with the fat, you can taste the accompanying sauce, you can stir in another ingredient, and you can neatly deliver the sauce to the plate. A spoon, used well, is a powerful cooking tool, especially when you're making steak....
Perfect Steak
I don't want to toot my own horn, so I won't: I'll toot the horn of Chris Lim of BLT steak. In our latest Food2 video this genius chef teaches me a technique for making steak at home that is so perfect, so dead-on that I will never ever ever make steak any other way again. It's a brilliant technique, an industry technique that steakhouses across the country use to make steak that forces you to say, "Why can't I have steak this good at home?" But now the secret's out and steakhouse quality steak is yours for the making. You can thank us later!...
What Makes A Great Steakhouse
1. It must be dark, like you're underground. The consumption of red meat is such a primal, bodily act that darkness--like darkness in the bedroom--opens one up to experience pleasure with reckless abandon. 2. There must be a piano player with a bad toupee singing Neil Diamond songs or a cheesy duo of guitar player and female lounge singer doing their best cover of K.C. and the Sunshine Band. Even Edmund White, in his classic "A Boy's Own Story," describes such a figure when his family takes him to a steakhouse, "a place where the overweight ate iceberg lettuce under a dressing of ketchup and mayonnaise, steaks under A.1. sauce, feed corn under butter, ice cream under chocolate, where a man wearing a black toupee and a madras sports jacket bounced merrily up and down an electric organ while a frisky couple lunged and dipped before him in cloudy recollections of ancient dance steps."...
Rib-Eye For One
Please remove your heart strings so I can tug them a bit: I am lonely! I miss Craig! He's been gone all summer shooting his movie in Washington State. Well, he was in pre-production for the last few months; he just started shooting two weeks ago. The second day of shooting, he almost gave me a heart attack: he called me hysterical to say that, "The worst thing in the world that could've happened happened." The equipment truck had caught fire in the night and it looked like all their film and equipment was destroyed. He hung up and I didn't speak to him for another 24 hours and in that time I imagined the worst: that the movie was over. But when I spoke to him the next day he said it was a false alarm: a battery had overheated and exploded and covered everything with soot, but nothing was really destroyed. All was ok. And onward they go with the movie: he's having a blast. And I wish I could be there but I have my book stuff to tend to. And he'll be back in three weeks anyway. But in the meantime, I'm Mopey McMopeypants. I need some cheering up. Can't someone kill a cow for me and give me its flesh to cook? They can? Yippee!...
