Since before I can remember, my parents have referred to me as "The Carnivore." They particularly love to tell friends and family--and even the occasional friendly stranger--about the time when I was eleven and I ate three strips of bacon, a sausage patty, and a leftover bratwurst from the night before for breakfast. So of course, I'm a steak lover.
As a kid, I never needed to know how to cook my favorite dishes because Mom did that for me. But as a college student, I don't get to enjoy Mom's cooking as often as I'd like. For that reason, I felt it was about time that I buck up and learn to make steak for myself.
After stopping off at Walmart to pick up an inexpensive but hearty-looking pair of small sirloin steaks, my boyfriend and I went back to his apartment and set the packaged meat down on his breakfast bar. We looked at each other. Now what?
First, my boyfriend called a good friend of ours from back home who happens to be a very experienced griller, especially for someone our age. He recommends that for inexpensive meat like the sirloins we bought, soaking it in italian dressing for anywhere between 20 minutes and 24 hours would work just fine. Seeing as it was already 6:00 in the evening at this point, we settled for marinating the meat for about 30 minutes. What our friend could not tell us, though, was how to cook the steak in a skillet. He's been spoiled by always having access to fancy grills.
Naturally, the next person I called was my mom. We told her we didn't have a grill and planned to do it on the stove, but we just didn't know how. She was quick to get off the phone, in the middle of making her own dinner and that of my dad and two younger brothers as well, but also informative: use butter in the skillet, not Pam (for whatever reason), and cook each side for up to four minutes on medium-high heat. Sounds simple; it wasn't.
Once the steaks were all marinated, we did it just like she said, butter in the skillet, medium-high heat, four minutes on each side. Perhaps the key phrase in her instructions was up to four minutes on each side, because when we went to flip our test piece of steak (luckily, this was just a small experimental piece we had cut off, not our actual dinner yet) it was charred black on the cooked side, and when we cut it open the inside was still ruby red and bleeding.
Now, we like our steaks medium rare, and neither raw nor charred really fits into what we had been picturing for our yummy dinner. I was a little embarrassed; it felt weird that my mom could be wrong, and I felt dumb for not noticing that the meat was not only charring, but really starting to burn. I attributed it to being lost in the smell of melted butter and my eager chatting with my boyfriend about what we could have as a side dish--vegetables or potatoes. It was obvious that our procedure needed to be amended.
Monitoring their progress closely, this time around we set the burner to medium heat, and after about 3 minutes and 30 seconds on each side, give or take, our dinner steaks had turned a soft shade of tan. For the final test, we plated each one and started to cut into them: they were both a lovely bright pink on the inside.
We decided on steamed vegetables as our side, and the whole thing was pretty decent. We each had a beer with dinner as a little reward to ourselves for figuring it out (plus, we were out of wine).
All in all, we reached a few conclusions about what it takes to make good steak out of cheap sirloin:
- Italian dressing makes for an incredibly easy and delightfully tangy marinade, even if you only marinate the meat for 30 minutes right before tossing it into the skillet.
- Monitoring the meat is apparently important! Now I've recently read that you're not really supposed to move the steak as it fries, but for us, peeking under it occasionally as it cooked to see how it was doing was what worked. Maybe this was just a fluke, but I guess I won't know that until I try again sometime.
- I think it was the thickness of our steaks that messed us up in regards to how long and on how much heat we should fry them. Had they been thinner, my mom's instructions would have probably worked beautifully.
- And, I will definitely be making steak again in the future.
How was the final product? Better than mediocre, good even, and now I can say I've done it more or less by myself (at least without my mom being physically present). I can only hope that my next mistake in the kitchen ends this fortunately.
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