How to Ruin a Perfectly Good Steak

In six easy steps.
Beef, Food, Red meat, Animal product, Pork, Carmine, Animal fat, Meat, Maroon, Ingredient,
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I'm going to go out on a limb and say that you, or someone like you, is planning to do some grilling this weekend. If you haven't broken out the tongs yet, this would obviously be the time to do so, particularly those of you who, like me, live in the gray and frigid Northeast.

In light of that, however, permit me to offer a cautionary tale. I had intended to grill a couple weeks ago for the first time since the weather broke. On such an occasion, I figured, nothing will do but a bone-on rib steak. The King of Steaks. I had it all planned out as I went to Ridgefield Prime, a superb butcher shop in Ridgefield, Connecticut. Yes, it was all mapped out: a hi-low grill, multiple flippings, bourbon-wood fuel from Bourbon Barrel Foods, a chimichurri baste—all this and more, down the last flare and drizzle.

But then I changed my mind.

The rib steaks were perfectly acceptable, but the strips were outrageous. Seeing what I saw, only the most blinkered dogmatist would be dumb enough to stick with the rib plan. So I called an audible. I asked Ridgefield co-owner Eddie Bistany about the great-looking strips and he told me, "You think that's good? You should see what I have in the aging case in the back!" Look, when a good butcher says he has a trophy loin, dense and soft and aged to coppery piquancy, you follow him to the aging case in the back. Which is exactly where I followed Eddie, where he showed me a strip loin of such exquisite marbling that I practically had no choice but to buy it and bag the original plan.

Remember your mission: to cook amazing meat for people you like. They couldn't care less about your plan, or whatever quirky cooking project you have in mind. You need to get them the best stuff you can find. If the beef looks merely good and the pork looks great, get the pork. If it all looks so-so, make spare ribs. The point is to deliver.

Which, sadly, I wasn't able to do—or at least not to my satisfaction. I am here to tell you that the self-proclaimed "Maharaja of Meat" came this close to destroying one of the best pieces of strip steak you ever saw. I did just about everything wrong I could think of.

How I Screwed Up a Great Steak

1. Eddie suggested he cut me a steak. But I was all wrapped up in my own trip, and waved off his expert advice. I would have been wise to listen. Steak, as I've written before, needs to be cooked hot and fast. The accumulation of wood flavor and burnished butter from the basting mop need time to accumulate. So something has to give, and that something is thickness. (More than two inches, though, is too much, no matter what your cooking conditions. At some point a steak becomes a roast.)

2. I planned to do the Adam Perry Lang "high-low" method, in which you raise the grill off a very hot fire so you have more control of the browning process. I forgot that you need a second grate for that, though. So it was straight up grilling over a (too) hot flame.

3.I was determined to use that bourbon wood, but the piece I chose was itself the size of a strip steak. It burned in one place with an infernal flame, and very close indeed to the grate, owing to the bed of coals upon which it sat. This, too, caused my fire to be far hotter, as well as far closer, than the steak would have wanted. This steak was so lushly marbled that it was bound to create multiple flare-ups even with a gently smoldering fire—which this wasn't. and why? Because...

4. I was impatient: always a harbinger of doom. I wanted to get the steak cooked so I didn't wait for that wood to burn down to a manageable ember.

5. My impatience betrayed me in another way, too: I started cooking without having assembled the guests, and without waiting until somebody put out plates, forks, side dishes, and all the rest of it, not to mention containing the children in some way. As a result, I took my hot, sizzling steak off the fire long before anybody was ready to receive it. And guess what it did while I was waiting? It kept cooking! Which meat does, as everyone knows.

6. And that's not the worst part! The worst part is that I, being impatient, compounded my folly by cutting the thing up, dressing it on the board, and setting it out. It thus became slightly cold, a condition I could remedy only by flashing the pieces on the grill. Which, predictably, overcooked them. A tiny bit, but still.

One thing I did do right: I had Ridgefield's master butcher, Phil Longobardi, grind me up three pounds of chuck roll. The hamburgers were cooked and served a good hour before I started in on the steak, so I had a hunger-and-happiness cushion in case anything went wrong.

And the end result of all my failures and failings and seething and shame over the steaks? A huge table filled with happy, appreciative people gorging themselves on delicious meat. Of course, that's what it looked like from the outside. My final mistake was getting so wrapped up in my own perceived failure that I couldn't see how invisible it was to everybody else. Somebody was cooking them well-seasoned, wood-grilled, delicious prime dry-aged steak! What could be better?

So the last point to remember is this: Don't be an anal-retentive, life-hating buzzkill because the steak didn't come out exactly as you wanted, and don't impose stupid apologies on people who, really, are having the time of their lives. Do the best you can, but don't stress out about it. Eddie wouldn't want you to do that.

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