What's the Beef ?

[Lachlan09]

1) What's your favourite cut of steak and why ?

2) Do you marinade or not ?

3) Do you add a sauce or not ?

4) What's your favourite accompaniments with your steak ?

[Kilted in Maine]

Easy (since I just ate one!)

Rib-Eye, rare, grilled over charcoal (if you prefer propane may I suggest using a welder's torch!...lol) prepared with just fresh ground pepper and kosher salt.

As a side, Baked Potato finished on the grill with butter and sour cream.

[azwildcat96]

Agreed, keep it simple...lightly rubbed with olive oil, coarse sea salt and fresh ground black pepper, grilled (medium-rare to medium) over open fire (not gas).

As far as cut...I prefer wild game (elk, venison, buffalo, etc.), over farmed beef! As long as it is prepared well, I like every cut. If you make me select, I would go with a bone-in porterhouse. It has the best of both worlds: a New York strip (loin) for it's size and flavor, and a tenderloin (filet mignon) for it's "melt in your mouth" tenderness.

Accompaniments? With a slab of protien like this, does it really matter? Baked potato, fresh salad, beans, corn, whatever. To really bring it all together, how about a nice bottle of red wine!

Now I'm hungry! What time is dinner?

(Note to moderators - we still need that little smily with the toungue hanging out drooling for posts like these!)

[Freelancer]

Definitely a porterhouse. Rub it with a mixture of sea salt, freshly ground black pepper, olive oil and a wee bit of mashed garlic. Then grilled. A good red wine and some crispy baked tatties.

[CDNSushi]

gaaaah! Not fair! It's only half past nine in the a.m.... Lol. I guess we already talked about the taters so now it's time to take care of the steak.

1) Good ol' fashioned T-bone steak. Not just any steak you get from a supermarket, but the kind you get from buying it at a meat packer's where you pay them to hang the side of beef for an extra week longer than usual and then custom cut it to your desired thickness.

However, having said that, since moving to Japan I've developed a taste for the local cuts, which are very different. (Japanese people like steak but they cut their cows differently here so you cannot get T-bones). You can get sirloin though. It's not lean like in N. America, but marbled. (Kobe beef is a bit overrated BTW). I prefer the LOCAL local beef -- it's called ワインビーフ (wine beef). Since we live in the wine-producing region of Japan, some farms specialize in feeding the cattle the grape residues from wine production at local vineyards. Although not quite as well known as its Kobe cousin, Yamanashi Wine Beef is gaining a reputation as being very tasty all across Japan. Japanese sirloin takes some getting used to if you come from the West, as the meat is all heavily marbled.

In fact, if you do a Google image search in English for "sirloin" you get lots of images that look like this:



However if you do a Google image search in Japanese for the equivalent keyword (サーロイン) you get lots of images that look like this:



The taste is quite different. Before I moved to Japan I would never even consider buying such a fatty cut of meat, but when it's grilled properly, the steak is extremely soft and tender (you could cut it with a fork) even without any sort of marinade, and it tastes very buttery. It takes some getting used to and many of my N. American friends aren't fond of it at all.

2. Personally, I DO marinade (only lean cuts of steak -- I do not marinade Japanese sirloin, for instance). I don't have one particular recipe I'm fond of -- I've marinaded in beer, in wine, in other sauces and spices...

3. I LOVE me some homemade BBQ sauce that I brew up using good Kentucky bourbon, mesquite, steak spices, garlic, and Heinz ketchup.

4. Corn on the cob with butter, baked beans with molasses, Russet baked potato with EVERYTHING on it: butter, sour cream, chives, bacon bits, cheese.

[BoldHighlander]

(Note to moderators - we still need that little smily with the toungue hanging out drooling for posts like these!)

[Tobus]

Ribeye for me too - rare to medium rare. The marbling of the ribeye gives it lots of flavor, and cooking it to medium rare preserves good flavor. Nothing's worse than overcooking a nice piece of meat.

Marinade and sauce has no place on a decent steak. If the meat needs that stuff, it's a poor quality meat or a poor cut! All it does is hide the real inherent flavor.

I even eat the fat. Most Americans cut it off and shove it to the side as if it were disgusting. Not me. If there's fat to be trimmed off, I cut it into small pieces and eat it with the meat for more flavor. Sometimes I even melt a little butter on top of the steak too. It's delicious!

Baked potatoes are OK, but I like thick-sliced steak fries with mine. And a dark ale.

[thescot]

1) What's your favourite cut of steak and why ?

2) Do you marinade or not ?

3) Do you add a sauce or not ?

4) What's your favourite accompaniments with your steak ?

Well, due to health concerns--gout, high cholesterol, etc.--I don't eat red meat as often as I would like. (Even beer is bad for gout! There is no justice in this world.) But I do eat a steak about once a month--pretty rare and only about a 6-8 oz cut. But when I do eat meat, I want it to be the best around. But, the following is what I would like to have:

1. A T-bone because it's the best of both worlds: rib eye and strip all in one . . . on a bone . . .and it's real good!

2. I rarely put anything besides salt and pepper on a good steak. I have been known to put some Worchestershire in olden days, but not now.

3. I never put any kind of sauce on a good cut of meat. Doesn't need it. If you scorch the outside then throw it ona really hot fire and take it off while it's still mooing in the middle, it's perfect.

4. I am very basic: baked potato, asparagus, onions.

[Lachlan09]

I’m still on my far-burning soup (no-fat/bread/sugar) diet as it’s become a habit and I’m still wanting to shed a few more kg/lbs. I’ve lost 18kg so far, even though the diet allows 2 meat days. One of those is a steak and tomatoes day, where you can eat up to 20oz of leanish steak plus tomatoes in some guise. My 15 and 12 year old kids have joined my diet for a short time and they like steak day too.

We have tenderloin (imported Australian or NZ beef tenderloin) which I get the butcher to cut into about 450gm steaks/mignons (about 2 inches thick) and like you, we do them simply with sea-salt and pepper on our ribbed/slotted grill. I smear the grill first with peanut oil then my son grills them at high heat to colour the outsides and give that criss-cross pattern. Then they go into the moderate oven for a few minutes to cook inside a little, then they’re taken out to rest for a few minutes more.

Meanwhile, I do a sliced plum-tomato/fresh basil/low-fat mozzarella/thin-sliced white onion/basalmic vinegar/extra virgin olive oil salad, with fresh-milled sea-salt and pepper. Plus some French Claret for me.

I can relax from the diet sometimes, so then we do the steaks a little different – last week they were cooked the same way but sides wrapped in bacon and steaks served with a choice of 3 thin reduction sauces – fresh mushroom/cream/beef stock/sauce, pink and green peppercorn/cream/beef stock/sauce and red wine/redcurrant/beef stock sauce.

We topped each steak with a butter-sautéed sliced Portobello mushroom, topped with an artichoke base filled with a spoon of onion/garlic chutney (made by Baxter’s), a bunch of young asparagus on the side, tied with a chive “string” and twice-cooked alumettes potatoes.

It’s good fun to play around making things !

[piperdbh]

I went vegan almost 4 years ago, but I remember a very good marinade consisting of bourbon, brown sugar, a little black pepper and just enough olive oil to make it interesting. I don't remember the proportions, but it would be hard to mess it up. Marinate the flesh as long as you can stand it, then grill or pan fry. I used to boil the leftover marinade for a minute or so and use it as a pan sauce over the steak or baked potato.