Cooking a Steak – Chef Daniel

by | Healthy Eating

steak

Hey everyone! Welcome back to Chef Daniel’s World Famous Backyard. I love a good steak. There’s nothing nicer than a good steak, but what we need to learn how to do is how to cook it right. 

Now, I see a lot of these clips around on how to cook it right. This is my way of cooking it the best way, because well, I enjoy it that way. So I’m going to show you how to do it. 

Prepping Your Steak

So first of all, we have an amazing piece of meat. This here is called a sirloin steak. You can go and get a rump steak, you can get an eye fillet, or you can get scotch fillet. You can get whatever you like. This is just basic steak cooking. It doesn’t matter if you’re cooking it on the barbecue or in a frying pan. This is how we’re going to teach you how to do it. 

First trick is to make sure that you pull your steak out of the fridge. Make sure your steak is at room temperature before you start cooking it. The reason for that is all of this is only but a muscle. Throw it into something cold, that muscle freaks out and goes really, really tight and really, really tense. The whole idea is you want to bring it back to room temperature, so it relaxes and it’s nice and chilled out, because when that goes into the frying pan, it’s going to get nice and relaxed, it’s gonna cook from relaxed and not actually cook from tough. 

Steps to Cooking A Great Steak

So when we’re cooking our steak, we’re going to make sure our pan’s nice and hot. We’re going to put in a little bit of olive oil. Not too much. And then we’re going to place our steak into the pan. If you’re going to do this on the barbecue, my advice, get a little bit of a bowl with some oil in there and a paper towel and just wipe the grill of the barbecue. 

Now this steak, barbecue or frying pan, you gotta place it in the pan or place it on the barbecue. Don’t just throw it in, right? So what I mean by that is start off here and then layer it down. By layering it down, you’re going to get every single part of that piece of steak in the pan or every single part of that steak on the barbecue, giving you nice, beautiful, even cooking. Leave it alone. Make sure it’s nice and hot. Make sure you’re hearing that sizzling sound. It’s the difference between stewing and frying. the difference between flavour and no flavour, and more importantly, the difference between tough and beautiful tender. So this is what we want to make sure we do. 

Seasoning Options

At this point, once it’s in the frying pan salt it with some salt and some pepper. Now I season it when it’s in the pan and I season it when it’s on the barbecue. I don’t season it beforehand. As soon as you put salt onto a steak, it’s going to start dehydrating. You want to keep all that juice in the meat. It tastes better, right? 

So we’ve got that wonderful, beautiful colour all over that steak. We seasoned it with salt and pepper on either side. So we’re gonna go again with some salt. I’ve already gone with a little bit of pepper and this is the part where it’s going to be all that wonderful, juicy flavour. 

Rare, Medium or Well Done? How to Tell

How far do I cook it? Really simple. If you open up your hand and make it really, really floppy, right? Get your index finger to the other side and simply fell the ball part of just underneath your thumb. Don’t squeeze any fingers together. That’s basically what a rare steak feels like. If you go into your index finger and your thumb, you tap it again. That’s what a medium rare feels like. Your rude finger and your thumb again, medium. Then you go to your jail finger, your wedding ring, right, that’s medium well. And then you go to your pinky and there we go. That is nice and well done right there. So always touch your steak. Know where it is. 

Final Step

The most important parts of this action here now is also taking it out of the frying pan and letting it rest. Always rest it for about 20% of the time that you cooked it for. I can guarantee you, you’re gonna have a cracker steak every single time.