Fang Food: How To Grill A Steak

We here at Fang Food strive to put up our articles regularly and on time, but when we fail at one, we will at least put them up once a week. To that effect, I'm putting up what might be our simplest (or maybe fanciest) recipe yet. How to grill a steak perfectly. Every time.

Ingredients:

• Steak (I prefer rib eyes, but New York Strip is also a fine choice)
• Oil
• Salt and Pepper

Directions:

1. Grilling steaks is almost completely about timing. Thankfully, that's pretty easy to learn. I'll be giving the times for steaks about 1 inch thick, but if they are thicker or thinner, the times will need to be adjusted probably about 20 - 30 seconds, plus or minus
2. Whether you're using charcoal or gas, the BBQ needs to be hot. Very hot. Before you grill them, though, you should cut off any extra fat. You need to leave some, since that's where a lot of the flavor is, but if there are big globs of the stuff, just quickly remove them with the nearest knife. Rub them down with oil and sprinkle them with the salt and pepper. Take them to the grill.
3. Place the steaks on the grill. This is where the timing part comes in. For medium, my preferred temperature, you cook them for six minutes on the first side and four on the other. For rare, five and three. For mid-rare, five and four. For medium, five and five. For well-done, eight and six. Now, you never flip a steak more than once. As soon as you do that, you lose most of the juices, and thus the flavor. Once you take them off the grill, cover them with aluminum foil to let them rest for ten minutes and lock in the flavor. Then enjoy as is, or with your favorite sauce or glaze.

There you have it. Fang Food's version of an I'm sorry dinner. Now, I don't have any pictures for this recipe, but if you interested in some that I took when I posted this recipe on my blog, the link is here. Enjoy!

[Jim adds] Of course, the great thing about steak is that it is great, both by itself [Atkins diet FTW!] and accompanied by other things, so I'd like to hear what you think are the ideal accompaniments, both in terms of sauces and sides. I like a nice peppercorn sauce, with garlic mashed potatoes. And there are many different varieties of steak, from New York strip through to filet mignon, though they're all pretty good. I can't think of the last time I had a "bad" steak, though the concept of "well-done" is foreign to me. For me, if it has stopped mooing, it's over-cooked...

Bizarrely, I wasn't a great fan growing up: my mother usually cooked steak by stewing it, rather than grilling, and the results were...variable, shall we say. But it's something I developed a taste for, once I realized what it was like when properly prepared. One of my greatest ever experiences was back in 1997, on the same trip where I visited Phoenix for the first time, when I had a delicious (and massive!) sirloin at the Bright Angel Lodge, over-looking the Grand Canyon. That may have been one of the things that inspired me to move out to the States. Feel free to share your favorite steak experiences as well.

Fang Food is a series of weekly baseball food articles written by prwhitaker1 (Whit), imstillhungry95 (Blake) and Turambar (Patrick). Check out the archive of past articles! Questions, comments, suggestions, concerns? Email us at fangfood@gmail.com or contact us on Facebook.