Outside the dugout: What's cooking?

You are probably thinking about a beef pastrami that uses a beef brisket. It is not so hard to do, but takes a lot of time for the brining. You can google some decent recipes. You probably won't save that much money with a DIY, but you will get the satisfaction of doing it yourself and if you keep at it you can fine tune it to taste exactly the way you want it.

Someday I will try and go very old school and make some goose based pastrami. I bet that is a delight and not readily available.

 

Making green (tomatillo based) pozole with chicken thighs tonight. Good hearty stuff for a cold and wet day.

 

A few days ago I needed one celery stalk for my yellow rice pilaf so I had a lot left over.

Today I made celery soup (celery, onion, Yukon Gold potatoes, butter, chicken stock, dill, and cream) and have a beer can chicken on the grill. Also the remnants of the yellow rice pilaf.

Tomorrow is 2" thick rib-eyes that we got as a Christmas present. We froze them and then thawed two of them yesterday. We got four huge steaks and each one could easily feed two persons.

I don't usually cook steaks so thick and I don't like them very rare and prefer medium rare. So it will be a low and slow first stage with lots of flipping to get the internal temperature up and then a fast and furious second stage on high heat to get a good char on the outside. I figure that a salt rub about 40 minutes ahead of time is also in order. I find that seals the juices in pretty well.

 

Heal up!

 

Steaks are almost done.

 

Steaks done!

OMG! They are perfect.

 

Dinner was late, but nice for a winter's day. It was a pork loin roast roasted with red cabbage, carrots, onion, caraway seed, garlic, beer, molasses, and beef stock. Also made oven roasted redskin potatoes with butter, lemon juice and zest, garlic, and rosemary.

And left over pork roast for escarole soup early this week. Yum.

 

There are so many ways to do this.

First of all it varies greatly with thickness. I won't go into excruciating detail, but I will hit the main points. For a thinner steak I don't want to bring it to room temperature first. I prefer it to be at refrigerator temperature. There is some engineering going on here. When cooking a steak the inner meat has to come up to the required temperature for how well you want the steak "done": rare to well done. One must also get the outer layer up to a high enough temperature to kill any bacteria. I find this easiest to do with thin steaks that go on cold by just getting the outer layer hot enough. A few minutes of resting before serving seems to get the internal temperature high enough for my taste (medium rare).

But this does not work with really thick steaks. If you put them on a medium high grill cold, by the time the outer part is cooked properly the inner part is still cold and raw. Here for 1" thick or so steaks I first bring them to room temperature and grill a little hot. That seems to work well. I am just now experimenting with really thick steaks because I got some for Christmas. Bringing them to room temperature first, then cooking on a low to medium flame slowly with lots of flipping followed by a few minutes of high heat worked like a charm.

As for surface prep that all depends. On a really thick steak I will give it a light salt rub to dessiccate and seal the outer surface because the cooking time is longer and I don't want too many juices to leak out. Sometimes I rub a slight amount of sugar on the surface as it gives a nice carmelization crunch. Sometimes I prepare a cream cheese, shallot, serrano pepper, rice wine vinegar topping. Sometimes I marinade for an hour or so with olive oil and flat leaf parsley. There are lots of different ways to surface prep and they are all good.