The Best Steak You'll Ever Make (Restaurant-Quality) | Epicurious 101

- I'm Frank Proto, professional chef and culinary instructor, and today I'm gonna show you the best way to make steak, Frank style. We're talking how to go from a sad, gray, flabby piece of meat, to a perfectly seasoned, perfectly cooked, happy piece of steak. This is Steak 101. My perfect steak is a really nice marbled piece of meat with some fat in it. It's seasoned and crusty on the outside and it's soft and juicy in the middle. There's two secrets to getting your steak right, seasoning it properly, and then cooking it to the proper temperature. Well, I want you to take a second, relax, be patient, season your meat right and you're gonna get it right. [gentle instrumental music] In front of me, I have a beautifully marbled New York strip steak that's cut to about an inch and a half. This cut and this size is where you're gonna get the maximum amount of juicy inside and crunchy outside. You're not gonna find that in the shrink wrap in the shelf or in the cooler. You have to go to the butcher and ask them to cut it this size. Most butchers will not charge you extra to custom cut it for you. Before we cook this, we want to season it, and I'm gonna show you what I feel is proper seasoning. I like to start out with salt and pepper. I go light on the pepper. You'll notice that I'm seasoning high up. When I season higher, I get a better dispersion of the pepper. Don't forget the top and the sides of your steak please. I like to go light on the pepper 'cause it tends to burn, so I'm not gonna put too much on, I just want a little bit of that flavor there. And then I have kosher salt here. People will say, "I use table salt." I think that that's horrible. I think that table salt is too salty, believe it or not. So I get a nice handful of salt, go up high and I want to get a beautiful kind of like... It looks like a lightly snow covered field. Make sure that we get all the sides. I'm gonna season the outside generously, but none of that salt gets inside the steak. So I'm gonna get a nice salty crust on the outside, the inside is basically unseasoned, so when I take that bite of the crusty outside and the juicy inside and it mixes in my mouth, the seasoning turns out perfect, it's not gonna be salty. I tend to be a minimalist when it comes to seasoning my steak. I don't really do any rubs or marinades with my steak. For me, I spent the money on the steak, I want to taste the meat. Steak is seasoned, it's time to cook. [gentle instrumental music] I have a cast iron pan here and I have it on medium heat. I am making sure I have everything I need within arm's reach. There's a lot of differing opinions about what temperature the steak should be when you put it in the pan. I feel like if I let my steak sit out for 15, 20 minutes before I cook it, that's the perfect amount of time. Once we start cooking the steak, everything happens quickly. I have a little vegetable oil in my pan, I'm letting it heat up in medium high heat, and then I'm gonna wait until I start to see a little wisp of smoke, and then I can put my steak in the pan. You can use cast iron, you can use stainless steel, it's all up to you. The only thing that's gonna change is the amount of heat that you have on the pan. My steak has been sitting over here. If there's any moisture there, I like to get it off of the steak. Moisture is the enemy of browning. I'm gonna drop it in the pan away from me so I don't get splattered with oil. [steak sizzling] I see smoke here and that's okay, I just don't want to see billowing smoke. If I start to see the smoke like really getting and overtaking the room, I have to control my temperature, lower my heat, and all I really want to do is start to get this caramelized on the one side. Most novice cooks start to get nervous, they start moving things around. Take your time. It's gonna take at least three or four minutes on one side. After a few minutes, if you want to check on your progress, you can always just lift it lightly and see where you're going. We really don't have any color yet, so I let it go and get some color on it. The only thing I might do is move is it around in the fat so that the fat is touching the bottom of the steak, so that we get nice browning on that side. It's good three or four minutes on this side. One thing that most people neglect is this nice fatty side, and that fat cap has a lot of flavor, but you don't want to eat fat that is not cooked enough, you want the fat to kind of get crispy, 'cause fat that's just warm is like chewing a fatty beef bubblegum and you don't want that. I'm just gonna hold it on the fat cap side before I put it down on the opposite side. If you look at this side of the steak, it has a nice brown crust, it's not burned, and that salty crust is what's gonna make our steak delicious. And at this point, while the steak is cooking, I can get my aromatics ready. I just get maybe two or three cloves of garlic, and this is what you see chefs do in the restaurants. I just want to break the garlic so that we get some of that garlic scent. It adds flavor, but it doesn't overpower it. I have some sprigs of thyme. The butter goes in the pan now, the reason we don't add the butter at the beginning is because it'll totally burn and it'll be black butter, not brown butter. Brown butter has really nice flavor. I'm gonna lower it to a medium heat, start taking my butter and start basting my steak. Sometimes you'll see there's bald spots or light spots on your steak, baste in that spot. That's what this is for, not only for flavor, but it's gonna aid in browning on those bald spots. It smells delicious, my butter is nice and foamy. You'll see that I'm tilting my pan, my steak is not sitting in the butter, the butter is down at the bottom and I just baste as I go. You can see that my steak is nice and golden brown, and that's what I want. I'm gonna temp my steak now. A lot of people will complain, "You should never stick meat with anything sharp, all the juices are gonna flow out." As a great man once said, "It's a steak, not a balloon." A couple of pokes with a thermometer is not gonna ruin our steak. Right now at the center point, we're at about a hundred degrees and you'll notice that when I take a temp, I'm not taking it on the ends, I'm taking it right in the center of the steak. I'm not sticking into the fatty parts, fat gets hotter faster than the meat does. For a finished medium steak, I want it to be about a 140 degrees. Give it like another minute and then I'm gonna take it out and let it rest. Let's take our steak out. It's golden brown on all sides. It's nice and crispy, we have a nice crust on it. We're gonna take it and put it on our rack to rest. We don't want the steak to sit in the juices. If it sits in its own juices, it's gonna steam in its juices. When the steak rests, the juices can drip off, and we have to let it rest for about five to seven minutes. If you don't let it rest, your steak is gonna be bleeding everywhere, all the juices are gonna run out and you're gonna have a dry steak. The other concept I like to talk about is carry over cooking. Even though it's on a resting rack, it continues to cook right? And usually it cooks up about five more degrees, so if I want it to be about 145, I'm gonna take it out at 140 and let it rest. So we're gonna give this about five to seven minutes to rest and then we're gonna slice it and plate it up and eat it. [gentle instrumental music] My steak's been resting, but before I cut it, I wanna talk about a couple of tools that I have. This is just a standard plastic cutting board. It's got two separate sides you can work off of. This is a flat side and the flat side is mainly for chopping, but what most people don't know is that the other side has this groove, and this is called a juice groove, it's actually for slicing meat. If any juice flows off of your meat, it gets caught here and it doesn't go all over your table. And then I have a slicing knife. You can tell a slicing knife, because it has these little scallops on the side. A slicing knife has these scallops so that the meat won't stick to the knife. Without further ado, let's slice our steak. I got a nice plate. Now with certain cuts of steak, you have to be really mindful of how you slice it. With a cut like maybe a flank steak or a skirt steak, there is a very visible grain, a grain in which the muscle grows. And with those steaks, you want to cut across the muscle so the muscle fibers get really small. Whereas with a New York strip, it's kind of the top of the animal, it doesn't get used a lot, so it doesn't have a very defined grain, so you have to worry less about how you slice it. I'm just gonna slice it so that it looks good on the plate. So I'm gonna go at a nice steep angle. It's got some nice red juiciness going on, love it. I use my knife as my spatula and I'm just gonna kind of fan it out a little. We can see that it's still nice and juicy on the inside. Look at that. It's a little more on the medium rare side, but that's fine. Just a few thyme leaves around. And then I have a nice coarse sea salt. This is just to give it a little crunchiness. If you want, you can add a sauce now or have a sauce on the side, and this is how I cook the perfect steak at home. Time to taste. Let me get a nice slice off of the end over here, it cuts super easy. It's juicy on the inside, but it's got that really nice salty crust on the outside. Because I cooked it medium, it has a nice chew to it. It's not rubbery, it's not bouncy. I'm not sitting there for a half hour trying to get through it. Cooking steak can be intimidating, but with proper technique and practice, you can be just like a restaurant chef.