This page serves as my collection of different cooking notes and recipes. I thoroughly enjoy cooking, and find it a relaxing, meditative, and also scientific experience. My main cooking inspiration is Heston Blumenthal; he approaches cooking with scientific precision, and his methods conclusively show which techniques work, and which don’t. I have not yet attended The Fat Duck, Heston’s restaurants, but am planning on doing so in the near future.
1 Scrambled Eggs
2 Omelette
3 Glazed Carrots
4 Steak
Having to endure and chew through an overcooked steak - an abomination. The technique I present is due to Heston Blumenthal, who showed via experimental evidence that his techniques outperform others.
What you will need:
- A good quality piece of steak - can be anything, fillet, T-bone, sirloin, ribeye - whatever you prefer. Ensure that the steak is no less than 2.5cm thick, do not buy thinly cut steaks. Any less than that, and you will not be able to get a tasty exterior without sacrificing and overcooking the interior.
- Oil. Again, this is up to personal preference, but remember to chose an oil with a high smoking point; any type of olive oil will not do. Grapeseed oil has a high smoking point and will do well. Otherwise, standard vegetable oil is also fine.
- A cast iron pan. You will not succeed with a steak using standard non-stick Teflon pans that are so prevalent nowadays. I have tried it, and after heating up the Teflon pan for some time on maximum temperature, it started releasing a weird odor, which then seems to have permeated through my food. Teflon pans are simply not suited for such a high temperature job that cooking a steak is. I have the De Buyer Carbone Plus frying pan, and while very heavy, it is a pleasure to cook a steak with - highly recommended, and cheaper than the enameled alternatives from Le Creuset.
- Thermal meat probe. You can get either a digital or an analog one, I prefer a digital one. This is to check your steak’s internal temperature, which is the only foolproof way of measuring when the steak is done to your liking.
- Salt.
- Tongs (for flipping the steak).
Having acquired the above, the steps to cook a steak are as follows:
- Take the steak out from the fridge around 3 hours before you are planning to cook it. This is so it can reach room temperature. Otherwise, when you put it on a pan, the outside will burn and inside won’t cook too well.
- Apply some salt to the steak, and rub and pat it into the steak. Wait around 3 hours (or until the steak is room temperature) until proceeding.
- Take the cast iron pan, and put it over full heat. Wait around 5 minutes, the pan needs to be as hot as possible. Add enough oil to cover the surface of the pan with 2mm cover. Wait until you see the oil start to smoke. This is an indication everything is as hot as it should be.
- Grab the steak with the tongs, and place it on the pan. Watch out for hot oil.
- The core of the technique lies in flipping the steak every 15 seconds. Heston Blumenthal demonstrates with a thermal imaging camera, that when a steak is one side, the other side very quickly loses temperature. Hence, start counting off 15 second segments, and flip the steak at the end of every segment. Depending on steak width, among other factors, you will want to do around 6 flips before the temperature measuring part, described in the next point.
After you feel your steak is getting closer to your desired state (rare, medium, well-done), you need to use the thermal probe. After each flip, insert the probe into the steak at its thickest point, and ensure that the probe ends up in the middle of the steak. A temperature guide is as follows:
- 45 degrees Celcius - Rare
- 55 degrees Celcius - Medium
- 65 degrees Celcius - Well-Done (abomination)
The above are final steak temperatures. Due to the fact that after taking the meat off the heat, the core will continue heating up due to residual heat, you must take the steak off the heat around 3-5 degrees Celcius below the value stated above. If you want your steak medium, I found it good to stop at 50 degrees Celcius.
- Per the above, take the steak off the heat as soon as it reaches the required temperature, and place it on a warmed plate. Leave the thermal probe in the steak if you would like to see how the temperature climbs up. The steak needs to rest 5 minutes now, do not touch the steak before that.
After the resting phase, the steak is ready to be eaten. Enjoy.
Praxis over teoria, or practice over theory, is the school of thought I subscribe too. It won’t be perfect the first time you try it even though I laid out the theory; simply practice more, and you will get a fantastic steak every time at a fraction of the price you would pay in a restaurant.
5 Assorted Notes and Tips
- When being served a dish, do not put salt, pepper, or any other available spices before tasting the dish.
- When squeezing a lemon, put a fork into it, that way the lemon juice will not squirt everywhere