The Secret To Steakhouse Steak At Home.

Since having a baby, going out for date night has been difficult, but that doesn't mean we can't do it right at home. Now if there's only one meal that you should know, it's a nice steak dinner. One, because it's a lot cheaper to make it at home than to go to a restaurant and buy it. Two, because it's a lot easier than you probably think. And three, because if you can nail a steak dinner and learn these sneaky little techniques, I guarantee you that it'll make you a better cook, not just on this recipe, but a wagon full of other recipes. Now starting off with our steak, but more specifically, picking the right steak. One of the mistakes I see a lot of people make, including myself, is going to the store with a specific cut of steak in mind. For instance, today I went to the store looking for New York strip. Instead, I bought ribeyes, because when I was looking in the case In the case of the New York strips, they didn't look They look great. They were very lean. There wasn't really any extra marbling and they were cut a little thinner than I wanted. So because of that, I ended up going with the ribeyes because they were cut how I wanted it and had a little bit more intramuscular fat. Those are the little white bits of fat that are running throughout the red parts of the meat. That part especially is really important because it helps to add extra flavor to your beef as well as make it more tender. So when you're going to the store to pick out those steaks, definitely check out the cuts that you like, but also don't be afraid to try a different cut because it may just be a better quality beef. The last thing you want to do is spend good money on a steak and then be disappointed because the quality of that steak wasn't up to par. But once you have your steaks, we can go ahead and prep them. I have two boneless ribeyes. Otherwise, cut it about an inch to an inch and a quarter thick. And the first thing I'm going to do is actually tie them up. You don't have to do this step, but it is going to help your meat cook more evenly. Especially if you like it a little pink in the center. By tying up our steaks, we're going to go ahead and squeeze them together. So they, one, hold their shape. But two, they add a little more thickness. These two steaks were cut to the exact same thickness. And right away, you can already see the one we tied up is a little bit thicker. And you don't need anything fancy to tie these up. Just a little piece of butcher's twine if you got it. Making sure it goes around the center of our cut. And then cinch it tight with a knot that would make it evident that you were not a Boy Scout. And now from here, we're gonna go ahead and season. So we're gonna very graciously cover all sides of our steaks in salt. These are thick steaks, so we wanna make sure that we're getting good coverage because we want that salt to go all the way through and soak into every fiber of the meat. Now, if you wanted to, you could also do a steak rub. There's nothing wrong with that, personally. I just like simple salt and a little pepper. Now, once our steaks have been salted, the actual best practice is to throw them back into the fridge and let them sit overnight. However, guess who's got two thumbs, a new baby, and completely forgot to do this last night? This guy. So instead of letting it sit in the fridge overnight, we're actually going to let it sit on our countertop while we cook all of our sides. And if you're my doctor watching this, just know I'm not eating that whole steak in one sitting. I'm going to break it up because you asked me to cut back on the red meat. Don't worry. I'm doing the thing you asked. Now moving right along to our sides, we're making two today, charred asparagus and onion and mini Hasselback potatoes. And this is what's going to take our meal from being like just steak on a cutting board to, oh, a full steak dinner, like a nice fancy schmancy candles and wine type of deal. But I don't really like wine and my wife's breastfeeding, so no wine for her either. Sorry, was that TMI? What I'm trying to say is it just makes it a nice, full meal. And so to start with that, we're going to be working on our asparagus. Now with something like asparagus, I like to go more simple than complicated. There are lots of great recipes out there that do cool, fun tricks and techniques. But truthfully, there's a few simple things you need to know to make it fantastic. But first we have to prep them. So for asparagus, what you're going to do is you're going to bend them and you're going to find that breaking point where it kind of goes from hard to soft. And from there, it should snap. This one actually snapped a little bit closer to the tip than I wanted it to. So if we go down here, there we go. Like that and that's going to kind of tell us where abouts we should cut the rest of our asparagus. You also could just snap each one of these individually. There's nothing wrong with that. However, this takes a long time and we're already going to use a knife so like why not just cut them all. We'll go ahead and cut off what for me is about the bottom like two and a half inches of our asparagus and placing those stems or stalks to the side. Technically speaking you can still use these but I'll be honest I don't really know what else to use them for aside from like boil them down and feed them the dog. I don't have a dog. I've got cats. I'm a cat guy and a baby guy. But my aunt has a dog, so I'm gonna save these for her. Also, as far as the amount of asparagus you're gonna need, roughly somewhere between like 14 to 20 stalks, depending on how much asparagus you wanna eat. But the way that I see it is like this. Dinner for two people, one bundle of asparagus. Dinner for three people, one bundle of asparagus. Dinner for four, two bundles of asparagus. It's pretty scientific. Now, for our red onion, that's even more scientific. We're gonna cut that in half, cut off the tip. That missed the trashcan. We'll peel back the skin, cut off the root. We did not miss the trash can. And then from here, I'm just gonna go ahead and cut around the radius of the onion, giving us nice thick slivers. Something like this is absolutely perfect. And that's all of our prep. Now to cook our asparagus, it's actually really simple. Today we're using a 12 inch cast iron skillet, but really you can use whatever pan you want. I do recommend a cast iron because then you're also gonna use it to cook your steak later, and so that's one less thing to wash, but whatever you wanna do. You wanna get this preheated on medium high heat. And for me, because we're using cast iron, I wanna make sure it's really preheated and not like it's been sitting there a couple of minutes, like give it five, 10 minutes to really fully preheat. But once we are preheated, we're going to go ahead I'm gonna go ahead and add in a nice glug or glizzle, or if you wanna be specific about it, two tablespoons of olive oil. Nope, I need a thing, it's hot, it's hot. Why did I think that I was gonna do that? I was like, oh no, it's not gonna be too bad, I can hold it. No, I can't hold it, it's hot. But once that oil is nicely coated all around your pan, we can go ahead and drop in our asparagus, as well as breaking up our onion pieces, because we don't want it to be one giant onion chunk, we wanna make sure we're broken up. throughout it. Once these are all in here and getting nice and toasty, we're going to get a nice sizzle. We want to make sure everything's spread out and we want to make sure we're getting as much contact as possible. We actually don't want to move this too much because we want this to char. So we're going to make sure everything's got good contact and we'll let that sit for three or four minutes before we actually move anything. Sorry, I won't do it again. I promise. You know, while we wait for this to char, it'd be a good time to like, comment, subscribe, share it with a friend. Only if you've been enjoying it. I don't want you to do it if you haven't been. If you're like, man, this guy sucks, then like, don't do it. But like, if you really enjoyed it, it'd be cool if you did those things. Now it's been a couple minutes and we're starting to get some nice char and blistering on our asparagus as well as our onion. Just perfect, that's what we want. We've still got nice bright green but with that nice little char to help build some flavor. We lost an onion and from here we can just go ahead and give these a toss. We want to make sure that we're getting a new spot on our asparagus and onions so that way we're not double charring. And we're getting these to cook all the way through. Now my asparagus, not that thick, they're pretty thin. If you have asparagus that's thicker than mine then you can also add in a couple splashes of something like a chicken stock, a beef stock, or even just water. Cover it up and let it steam for 30 to 40 seconds and that'll help to make sure it cooks all the way through. But in most cases, especially if asparagus is out of season, then you're not gonna really run into that issue of having super thick asparagus. Now that these have been cooking for I've been cooking for about five-ish minutes We're gonna go ahead and salt them. Now the reason we salt these now versus at the beginning is the salt doesn't really have anything to stick to in the beginning, it's just kind of gonna fall off. But if we wait till the end after it's got a nice char and that oil has kind of given us a nice little glossy coating, it does a lot better job sticking. And finally, once all your pieces of asparagus are beautifully green, as well as having that little bit of char down the sides, we're finished. You definitely do not wanna let these just sit. Uh in this pan while we do everything else because it will continue to char so we'll just go ahead and remove them Oh, man, what a beautiful plate choice. Look at that spur of the moment, looks great And then while we finish everything else I'm just gonna go ahead and throw this into my oven with the light on just to keep it nice and warm and now for My personal favorite side mini Hasselback potatoes. Oh, wait, hold up my loves. Oh, it's my two favorite girls Thank you my love. Breakfast break. Now before we get into this, I want to give a quick thank you to those of you who are subscribed. Seriously, for those of you who like, comment, subscribe, and share these videos with friends, it helps to support this channel immensely, and I am so appreciative of that. And if you're new here or just haven't subscribed yet, I promise that if you give me a chance and you hit that subscribe button, which is entirely free, I will continue to do everything I can to bring you high quality, great videos every single week, because I seriously would not be able to do any of this without you. Now these mini Hasselback potatoes are one of my absolute favorite potato dishes. One, because food just tastes better when it's fun sized. It's a scientific fact. Just ask Shaq and two because it's one of those recipes that looks like it spent hours and realistically speaking it's gonna take you less than 30 minutes it's so simple it's so easy and once you know how to do it you can then impress anybody in your life with it it's like a potato superpower it makes these small potatoes look like big potatoes I hope you get that reference if you don't get that reference I'm so sorry now it's gonna start with one pound of washed golden baby potatoes which reminds me also wash your asparagus I don't know if I said that but Wash your asparagus. But as for your potatoes, they don't actually have to be these mini baby golden potatoes. You can use whatever small potato you like. Fingerlings are cool too, but I would just get whatever's on sale. Now to get that Hasselback potato look, we're going to need two chopsticks. We're gonna use these to create a guard for our potato, so that way we don't cut all the way through it. Now the key to a Hasselback potato is making sure you're getting nice clean lines and little flaps throughout your potato, but you're not slicing it in half. So we're gonna go ahead and use the palm of our hand to hold our chopsticks in place, then using our fingers to hold our potato. And then we'll go ahead and just cut straight down, giving us nice flaps. This should give you a nice flappy Hasselback potato look in petite form. For some of these bigger potatoes, you can go ahead and actually cut a little flat spot on your potato that'll help it sit nice and flat. So that way when you're cutting, it doesn't roll around on you. Now that right there is Hasselbacked. It sounded cooler in my head when I said it, I'm gonna be honest. And now once we have all our potatoes cut and nice and flappy, which now that I say that out loud is maybe not the best descriptor, we're gonna go ahead and add them into some boiling water. A hefty pinch of salt, because we wanna make sure that our potatoes are salted all the way through. And then we'll carefully drop those in. And we'll let these boil for about five to six minutes. And this is gonna do two very important things. The first is it's going to reduce the amount of time it takes to crisp up in the air fryer, or in your oven too if you're gonna do it that way. If you were to skip boiling and just cook it in your oven or just directly in your air fryer, it would almost double the amount of cook time time it would take. Why? Like, why do that? The second thing that it does is it improves the inside of our potatoes. Boiling in the salty water helps to season the inside of the potato, but it also helps make it nice and fluffy. And while we give that a couple more minutes to boil, we're going to go ahead and use that time to chop up our chives. I don't know why I said it like that. That was weird of me. I apologize for that. Now we have a whole bush of chives here, and that's because we're going to top our potatoes with it, but we're also going to top our steak with it. Adding chives to things is just like an easy way to make it feel more fancy. But you can also use green onions too, because I know chives are more expensive than green onions. So if you want to use green onions, use those too. Still great. There's one thing that I'm actually really bad at cutting up, it's chives. There's just something about it that I'm really bad at getting it uniform and even. So tiny and delicate that I just end up making it look bad. So, like, it looks great at a distance, but if you zoom in on this video later, you're gonna be like, oh, those chives suck. But that's okay, because they taste exactly the same. Now, these potatoes have been boiling for about six or seven minutes now, so we're gonna go ahead and remove them. We definitely don't want to overboil these, because then they're just gonna turn to mush. And then once they're removed, we're actually gonna go ahead and place these down in our sink to let them completely steam off. If you want these to be as crispy as possible, you have to let all the steam evaporate. You have to, have to, have to. Steam and moisture and all that kind of stuff is the enemy of crispy, and so we need to let it all... Evaporate away and when we wait for that it is a perfect time to show you what is new on the wall Now if you're new here You may not know but this used to be this really weird empty blank wall until a couple weeks ago My wife said hey Why don't we get a mailbox and then people can send stuff in like art or pictures or recipes or really whatever you want to Send in and we can hang it up on the wall because this kitchen is just as much my kitchen as it is your kitchen Because it wouldn't be anything without you guys So I wanted to show you some new additions Remy Raina Rosie and Liam sent in this really cool pie picture Technically it's more than just pie, but like it's a pie shape. Tiffany sent in a photo of her purple peppers. Sarah sent in her garlic bread recipe. Eileen sent in this really cool musubi postcard. My friend Matt drank this milk and put it on the wall. Naomi sent in this photo of her late cat church. And Kristen sent in this drawing of the original food loop. It is so cool to see these things all hung up on the wall and it's really coming together. So if you would like to send something that gets hung up in the background of like literally every video, feel free to send it right here. Now after a few minutes, our potatoes are completely steamed off. As you can see, they're looking nice and dry. So we're ready to season them. Check it out, guys. I got these little rubber stopper things that you're supposed to put under a wobbly chair. But also, now you can see, two tablespoons of olive oil, a tablespoon of garlic powder, half a tablespoon of onion powder, two teaspoons of smoked paprika, two teaspoons of dried oregano, two teaspoons of dried parsley. I also just got this dried and ground jalapeno powder. So I'm going to use a teaspoon of that just to give it a little kick. But it's totally optional. And then, of course, a nice pinch of salt and black pepper. And now, if you didn't want to do all that, you could also just use a pre-made spice rub. That's going to work just fine for something like this. If you have one you like, then go for it. You just want to toss it all together I'm going to mix it all together to make sure it's nice and evenly coated. I did not toss my potatoes in the oil before adding all my spices. I should have. But I didn't and because of that we've got these nice little patches of seasoning which is not evenly coated or distributed So instead I now have to throw a glove on and I'm just gonna make sure everything gets nice and spread out entirely my fault I should have coated with the oil toss it around still gonna taste good though do as I say not as I do But on the flip side now that I'm using my hands I can actually go ahead and push some of those seasonings within the crevices of my Hasselback So it's kind of like a lose-win and now that I have fixed my mistake and you've hopefully avoided it We're ready to air fry now. You don't need an air fryer for this You can absolutely just do this in your oven that said this is going to be faster and more crispy. So if you have an air fryer, use the air fryer. Now we're going to set this to 400 degrees. If I can find the button. And then we're just going to let it preheat. Once we're preheated, we can go ahead and pour in our potatoes. Sick. Could you also tell that I accidentally poured them in before I pressed record on the camera? Because I did that and I had to pour them out and re-poured them in. But once they're in we're going to go ahead and let them cook for about six minutes. And now after six minutes we're going to go ahead and pull these out and give them a nice little shakeroo. Truthfully if your air fryer is as wide as mine is then you probably don't need to do this shakeroo thing because there's not really any overlapping. But I feel like for most air fryers everything's going to be kind of overlapped so definitely want to give it a good shake. And then from here we Here we can just go ahead and place these. Back inside and let them cook for another nine-ish minutes, give or take. You really just want to check in on it after about another five or six minutes, see where it's at, see if it needs more crisping, depends on your potato, depends on your air fryer, a lot of different factors. But generally speaking, total cook time you're looking somewhere between 12 to 15 minutes. Now I let mine run the full 15 minutes and because of that my potatoes are nice and crispy. But also remember that it may be different for your potatoes. It may take a little more time, may take a little less time, just depends. But either way, once your potatoes are done and plated, we're gonna go ahead and top them with a mountain, or at least a generous layer of Parmigiano-Reggiano. Mountain was not the right descriptor because I'm not gonna put a mountain of cheese on this thing. I wanna be able to see the potatoes because I worked hard on them. And then we can follow that up with a nice sprinkle of our chives. Voila. Now bringing it back to our main event, the steak. But before we can cook it, we actually need to finish prepping the rest of it. Now to cook our steak, we're gonna need about four cloves of garlic that we're gonna use to butter baste with. Well, technically not using the garlic to butter baste, but the garlic will be in there when we butter baste. And so for those cloves, all we're gonna do is simply just give them a good mash and remove the peels. But we're also going to be making a sauce. And for that, we're gonna need a shallot as well as some more garlic. Now there are tons of different types of steak sauces that you can make, specifically pan sauces, but today I'm gonna show you the easiest and simplest way to make a pan sauce. Very simple, simple, simple peppercorn sauce. It is a very good trick to have in the bag because if you ever overcook your steak and it becomes dry, a sauce can help to alleviate that. Now for our shallot, we're going to go ahead and cut this across in little flat planks. We want to do this because we want our shallot to be minced as finely as possible. It's going to go ahead and just try to melt away into our sauce. Once we've slivered horizontally, we're going to go ahead and cut straight down into nice long slivers. Again, we're doing this as thin as possible, and then we'll just rotate this and finely dice. You want to cut this so small and finely that the shallot is basically transparent. Or is it translucent? I forget. Not the one where you can see through it, but you can't like see through it like a window, but you can see through it like frosted glass. Now once we have our half a shallot diced up, we're gonna go ahead and move back to our garlic, and we need another four cloves. And similar to before, we're gonna go ahead and smash all these. But this time, once we remove the skin, we're gonna continue to macerate it into a garlic paste. If you happen to own a garlic press, this is one of the very few times that I feel like it's actually super useful. Because you want this to be really as fine and as small as possible. I'm also using the wrong knife for this. Hold please. Here we go. Much better. Using a knife that has a nice round belly is gonna give you the ability to rock over your garlic, making it a lot easier to chop it up. Now after you've rocked over it a few times, we're actually gonna take our knife and we're just going to press and pull towards us. This is gonna help to really break up all those fibers and allow us to make it even finer. Then after a few times of repeating that, our garlic is ready. And now for our steaks, it's time to give them the final prep. Now because we gave our steaks time to sit with that salt, all that salt has dissolved into our meat. As you can see, there's really no salt left on the surface of our meat, but it is very damp. And that's because as that salt pushes in, it displaces the moisture out, which isn't a bad thing. Generally speaking, if you can let it sit in the fridge overnight, the steak will actually reabsorb that moisture. But in our case, I didn't have time for it, but really it's not gonna affect it. So instead, we actually are going to need to pat our steaks dry. And I mean, as dry as you possibly can get them. Because again, moisture, water, those sorts of things are the enemy of crisp crust. And I don't know if you can tell just how glossy that is on camera, but it's damp. So we're just going to want to go ahead and remove as much of that dampness as possible. When you give your steaks a chance to sit in the fridge overnight and it reabsorbs that moisture, it actually will dry out the outside for you, but in our case, we have to do it ourselves. And now the last thing I wanted to talk about before we cook our steaks is our pepper. Now there are two options here. You can absolutely pepper your steaks, throw them in your cast iron and grill them up, or you can do what I prefer, which is to wait until the end and add it after it's cooked. There are pros and cons to both, and it's really more of a personal preference. If you like to pepper your steak before you cook it, then it's better to use a coarser ground It helps to create a better crust and prevent it from getting bitter. One of the issues with using your pepper beforehand is if your pan is too hot, you can run the risk of burning your pepper. Then it's no longer going to be like nutty and floral and citrusy, it's just going to be It's bitter and gross. But if you don't burn it, you get this nice deep roasted nutty flavor that forms a nice rich crust on the outside. Absolutely nothing wrong with that. For me personally, I just prefer the taste of fresh cracked black pepper. Now to cook our steaks, we're again using the same 12 inch cast iron pan that we were using before, but you don't have to use a cast iron. You can use a stainless steel or a carbon steel. I would recommend against non-stick because it's to get it hot enough to really get a good sear. You then start releasing stuff and it's not good and you shouldn't overheat non-stick because like chemicals and stuff, but I'm not a scientist so I really don't know all the facts about it, but I would just avoid it. Non-stick is great for eggs, but not steak. But no matter what pan you use, just make sure you preheat it on medium high. Once it's preheated, we can go ahead and add in our oil of choice. Now you can absolutely use a neutral oil, nothing wrong with vegetable oil or canola oil or anything like that. However, I have some beef tallow, which is just rendered beef fat that I'm gonna use to go ahead and just coat my pan. Once it's nice and evenly coated, I'm gonna go ahead and pat dry my steak one more time before carefully laying it into our pan. And if you have some sort of weight or press, go ahead and use those. That's just gonna help us get the best contact we can from our steak to our pan. Now after about three minutes on that first side, we're gonna go ahead and flip these over. Oh yeah, that's a crust I'm happy with. Placing those weights back on top, and then we'll let them sit again, undisturbed for another about two minutes. And then after those two minutes, our second crust has set, and we can go ahead and turn our heat down to medium-low, adding in about four tablespoons of unsalted butter, as well as our crushed garlic. And then from here we wanna just go ahead and baste our steaks. This is gonna give them a little extra flavor as well as keep it nice and juicy. After basting for a minute and a half, two minutes on the first side, we'll go ahead and flip. And we'll continue basting on the second side. Now depending on how you like your steak cooked is going to determine when you take your steak off the stove. So for me, I like mine to be on the rare to medium rare side. So I wanna pull mine right around 225 internal. Mine are right around 115, so I still got another minute-ish to go. But if you like your steak cooked a different way, then you can go ahead and use this chart to tell you when to take your steak off the stove. Mine are ready for me to pull, so I'll go ahead and take a fresh sheet tray, place those steaks on top, and then take all that goodness, all the butter and all those juices, and pour that right over top. And then we'll just need to let those rest for about 10 to 15 minutes, or while we'll make our sauce. Now for our pan sauce, it's very simple and easy, but it's gonna make the difference between that steak that you make at home and that steak that you get at like a nice steak house. It's gonna start in your pan on medium low heat, adding in about a teaspoon of whole peppercorns, as well as that garlic and shallot. Now we're gonna go ahead and keep all this stuff moving around, making sure nothing's getting burned. And then after a couple minutes of stirring around, we're going to go ahead and add in 3 fourths cup of beef bone broth. And we're going to want to make sure we're really scraping the bottom of our pan here to get all the fond that built up, all the little steak bits, off and incorporate it into our sauce. And now as you've been stirring this and letting this simmer for the last few minutes, our sauce is starting to thicken up. And so now we can go ahead and add in one cup of heavy cream, mixing that all together. And it's important to make sure we keep this moving as it simmers. And then after another couple of minutes and we're starting to see it thicken up again, we'll add in two tablespoons of cold unsalted butter, a nice pinch of salt, as well as some more fresh cracked black pepper. The butter is gonna mount our sauce and give us a nice silky texture, while the fresh black pepper at the end is gonna give us a nice bright and citrusy note versus the toasted nutty note from the whole peppercorn. And then once that's all mixed together, our pan sauce. It's done. The consistency you're looking for is to coat the back of your spoon. Delicious. Now one final thing to note here before we cut into our steaks is that for your sauce you have two ways of serving it. You can serve it like this with the little bits of shallot and garlic and peppercorn in it or if you prefer a smoother sauce you can go ahead and run it through a fine mesh strainer and get it nice and silky smooth and remove all the bits. Either way is fine. Some people like it one way some people like it the other. I'm gonna leave mine in but it's totally personal preference. Now for the moment of truth our steaks have been resting. We are ready to cut them open. If you were worried about cooking your steak perfectly, I just want you to know I have overcooked Plenty of steaks, so many so, that my confidence on cooking a steak to the temperature that I'm looking for, it's pretty low. So let's find out. I swear to you, I'm not peeking. I just wanna slice all of it at one time. I'm going for the middle. How'd we do? Oh, baby. It's not perfect by any means, but I'm happy with it. I don't know about you, but I like my steak nice and pink in the center, very juicy, very drippy. So for me, this is a beautifully cooked steak. And now finally, we can plate. Our perfectly-ish cooked steak, charred asparagus and red onion, our super cute and delicious Hasselback potatoes, finishing off our steak with the peppercorn sauce, and a line of fresh chives. And could you blame me for adding a little bit more parm? Cheese, cheese. You just gonna stand like that the whole time? Oh, don't you have things to say? I know, but this. And with that, thank you so much for watching. I really hope that you enjoyed it. I really hope that you learned something. Here's some videos I think you'd like to watch next. Here's a photo of baby pygmy the platypus, and I'll see you next week.