Gustavo Tosta - aka Guga Foods - has a channel on YouTube where he does a lot of experiments with cooking steaks. Some of them are crazy $1,000+ steak recipes. Some of them are literal dollar store steaks cooked in a pan. They don’t always work out, but if you REALLY want to know how things change when you cook steaks in different ways, this is a really fun resource to follow.
Bacon fat is great stuff for steak searing. Plus it is an excuse to cook large amounts of bacon. I guess you can buy it, but then you don’t have bacon.
The simplest is to just lower the heat. Set the steak in there and let it get its crust by letting it… sit there.
Don’t keep flipping it. A good sear comes from good, even heating and the time+temperature. Lower the temperature and increase the time.
The caveat to that is it may come out slightly more well done. Especially particularly thin cuts. To solve that, instead start with canola and add butter after the sear. (Sear one side, reduce temp, add butter and cook the other side without flipping.)
What about a mixture of butter and oil? There seems to be mixed information as to whether this actually yields a higher smoke point, but even if it doesn’t, it will effectively dilute the burnt flavors.
I would generally agree, though I’ve found extra virgin can work if you keep the temp just high enough to sear.
I pretty much only use olive oil, but I keep a couple others around in case I do need to crank the heat.
The challenge is most oils that tolerate heat also have a very poor Omega 3:Omega 6 ratio, so are not great from an insulin standpoint (nor health in general).
Grape seed oil handles temp well, and is at least better than corn oil or canola if I remember right.
Lol the down voter… Hey buddy, come cook in my house, where there’s 60+ years of combined experience, with over 300 recipes, and we make 2 new recipes every month.
America’s Test Kitchen (especially the old shows, they delve into the how’s and why’s of everything).
For anyone just learning to cook, the ATK show and especially their cookbook are fantastic. You can find the cookbook all over for about $20, and every recipe explains how and why it works.
I think Alton did a remake of the original steak recipe using a reverse sear method. So OP make sure you arent watching the 90s version, for this particular thong anyway. Most of the old advice from good eats holds up though.
I pretty much never do reverse sear, or even sear-then-oven as it’s only needed for thick steaks (1" or more), and well, that’s an expensive cut so I rarely have it.
I find for thinner cuts it’ll cook through to medium-rare in the time it takes to sear.
Yeah thinner or cheaper cuts I go with Ramseys method. If I have time, even with the thinner cuts, I’ll salt it and leave it in the fridge for like 8 hours though.
Altons new method for the sear involves leaving an iron pan on the oven for 10 minutes just to heat the pan, 600° if you have an infrared. 45 second sear each side, so that might fix the sear problem if you did want to give it a shot.
Sear it in oil. Once the crust is formed you can ease off the heat, add the butter (garlic and herbs too, if you want) once it's safe, and baste. Basting might cause it to carry over cook a bit more, so be conservative with the core temp.
Best of both worlds is to sear in a high smoke point oil like avocado or canola and then butter baste at the end until the butter is nicely browned. Add some whole aromatics on the steak (garlic, rosemary, thyme etc.) during the butter baste for some nice flavour too.
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