Somehow over the years, ownership of the imagery of steak was claimed by the grill. Live-fire cookery is fashionable these days. But in the case of steak, when someone wants to get your mouth watering, whether in a food magazine spread or a television commercial for Outback Steakhouse, the image inevitably is of wisps of orange fire crackling under a glistening steak branded heavily with grill marks.
Not that there’s anything wrong with that, but using live fire to cook your rib eye is the easiest way to ruin the meat. While a little smoky char from wood coals can be nice, we’ve all seen how hard fire can be to manage: The steaks get overcooked or, even worse, burned because the fire’s too hot or dripping fat causes flare-ups that scorch the steak.
The solution to this problem is simple, elegant, and convenient: I give you the heavy steel pan. Compared to the open flame, with proper cooking technique in a pan, you can get a superior crust, never have to worry about burning, and not have to take the time or effort to fire up the coals or get the gas grill hot. A good pan can make a cheaper cut taste better, and it intensifies the savor of great beef.
With regard to cooking with fire, I don’t mind the flavor of a little smoke now and then. But if I have a really great piece of meat—which I always do—I want to taste the beef as intimately and intensely as possible. The pan amplifies this by a factor of degrees.
People worry most about the interior doneness of a steak. And while cooking a steak to desired temperature is important, just as crucial to great-tasting steak is the exterior—the crust. Think about it. The crust is where the salt infiltrates the meat, creating synergies of salty beefiness. It’s the toasted, crunchy contrast to the tender meat inside. And it’s where the real flavor complexity resides thanks to the Maillard reactions that cause the browning. The diagonal or crosshatched grill marks advertisers like to use to make their steaks look succulent? They are tasty. But if the grill marks are the most delicious part of the meat, why have just a few of them? Why shouldn’t the entire surface of the meat be browned? It should.
People call the browning of meat “caramelization,” but that’s not the whole story. Caramelization is what happens with sugar. When you have substances that are not foremost composed of sugar—such as the protein in meat—the reactions that cause the browning are known as the Maillard reactions, after the French scientist who studied them around 1910. Thanks to the presence of substances like amino acids with the naturally occurring sugars, Maillard reactions produce complex, meaty flavors. The reactions start to occur in the relatively low temperature range between 250 and 330 degrees F and speed up with higher heat. Getting a good crust on your meat doesn’t depend on ridiculous amounts of heat, but higher temperatures speed up the evaporation of water and accelerate the browning reactions.
As you cook a steak in a pan, one thing that’s preserved is the meat’s fat, which quickly melts or renders due to the heat. Over charcoal, the rendered fat drips out of the meat into the fire and either flames up and can burn the meat or is otherwise lost. The great side benefit of cooking the steak in a pan is that the fat is preserved in the pan and becomes part of the cooking medium. You end up cooking the meat in its own fat, doubling down on the beefy goodness, while preserving the meat’s juices. Of course, you don’t consume this fat—it is left behind in the pan when the steak is finished—but it becomes a powerful agent in building flavor.
There are few things more annoying than a bald, underdone splotch on the otherwise wonderfully dark, roasted crust of a steak. One of the challenges of fully browning a piece of meat, whether on the grill, in a pan, or in the oven, is to get that spot brown. The various solutions usually involve pressing down on the meat or laying something heavy on it to get that area of the surface in contact with the heat source. Chefs trained with classical technique have another method. It’s not hard to master and is a beautiful way to finish a steak. The French word for it is poêlé (pronounced pwuh-LAY), which simply means to cook in a frying pan. But the word has evolved to refer to pan basting.
The technique is easy and only requires a spoon. After a few minutes, the meat will be sizzling in a shallow pool of its own fat. Or at this point, a French chef will classically add a hunk of butter and some aromatic seasonings like a few sprigs of thyme and a clove of garlic. The action is simply to tilt the pan enough for the hot fat to pool in the bottom of the pan and to spoon it over the meat. It crackles for a second and then runs back down into the bottom of the pan. Repeat this rapidly over and over to finish cooking while sizzling the uneven surfaces of the meat in the flavorful butter or fat. It’s a great way to attack those pesky spots that haven’t browned on their own.