10 ms·
Turn $5 steak to $50 steak with salt
- houseabsolute 17y agoStupid question: does this work with chicken? I tend to prefer the white meat.
- rms 17y agoThe article says one of her influences was a chef that did this with chicken.
- Alex3917 17y agohttp://www.nytimes.com/1982/07/07/garden/getting-the-most-out-of-meat-by-cooking-in-salt-bed-or-pastry.html http://www.nytimes.com/1982/07/07/garden/getting-the-most-ou... This works really well with fish too. My favorite catalonian restaurant cooks its fish on a slab of salt, with excellent results.
- colonelxc 17y agoI'm having steak this weekend, will have to try this out. Educational and tasty (hopefully)!
- PebblesRox 17y agoLet us know how it turns out!
- colonelxc 17y agoIt turned out well! I didn't make a control sample, but both my girlfriend and I enjoyed it (for both steaks last night, and steak burritos today for lunch). As the author suggested, we also added garlic and rosemary to the salting process. I'm kinda new to cooking steaks, so I don't have a lot of experience to measure this against, but I think I will do this again next time.
- dgordon 17y agoI tried this once -- it was very salty, which I don't mind, but it was nothing special as far as tenderness.
- mousebender 17y agoSeconded. I salted a one-inch-thick steak about an hour ahead of grill time, with a rinse and pat-dry just before grilling. It still tasted too salty. Furthermore, even with 5-10 minutes' rest time after grilling, the steak still lost too much juice upon cutting. This method works: Preheat grill to 500 deg F. Lightly salt and pepper the steak just before grilling. Grill for 4 minutes per side per inch of thickness. Remove, call the guests in, and serve. Yum.
- encoderer 17y agoYou missed a step. Remove, [let rest for 5 minutes], call the guests in...
- mousebender 17y agoUnderstood. But by the time the guests are in, it has probably rested for 5 minutes already. Any more than that, and the steak will have cooled off too much. Hey, that's the way it works for me.
- ErrantX 17y agoI've tried this a couple of times. It's nothing special. Your better off finding locally sourced fresh meat - it's usually as cheap and you will be able to find one you like. (also, incidentally, I'd say a good steak is as much about taste as texture. This sorta sacrifices one for the other)
- garply 17y agoWhat good does local sourcing do? Is it freshness? I'm not a meat expert, but I would guess that a big company with an economy of scale would be able to produce higher quality meat for a lower cost. Also, if you're sourcing locally from non-big brand names, don't you have concerns about their cold chain?
- ErrantX 17y agoYou'd think so. But I have found you get better quality for very little premium. And even the cheap stuff is better than supermarket schmuck. My aunt rears poultry for several markets. Her supermarket produce is usually additionally processed in a variety of ways by an intermediate to increase it's sale value (with poultry it is usually water plumped). It might take a while but there is sure to be a local butcher or farm shop nearby where you can buy more directly. Edit: also I personally don't think meat is a Market that benefits from economy of scale :-) I usually find supermarkets a false economy.
- garply 17y agoI had no idea about plumping. Do you know what percent of the revenue her supermarkets take?
- ErrantX 17y agoNot sure but it's a fair whack. She makes a little more on direct & local sales but mostly that is because she also gets some of the retail markup too (which the supermarkets soak up). EDIT: here is some info on plumping. http://voices.washingtonpost.com/all-we-can-eat/food-politics/-plumped-imposters-at-the.html http://voices.washingtonpost.com/all-we-can-eat/food-politic... My Aunt's produce isn't modified all that much (because it is marketed as premium and local produce by the supermarket - they buy from numerous small producers in local regions and distribute to that region). However most of the generic chicken you see in stores will be plumped in this way. Im not sure of the exact water content but I recall watching a TV show once about it that suggested 70% water content (including what was already there)
- char 17y agoI'm pretty excited about the prospect of eating a delicious steak for only a few bucks! I also enjoy that this person has the same method of cooking as I do, which is to create a recipe and then iterate on it several times within the span of a few weeks before it eventually tastes amazing.
- weaksauce 17y agoOK. Sous Vide looks more interesting to me that overly salting a piece of meat. tptacek care to weigh in? I am about 23 hours away from buying a rice cooker + pid controller to make this happen. I do the pid part at work so it is interesting to me from a work point of view too. Edit: If you have not seen sous vide cooking: http://amath.colorado.edu/~baldwind/sous-vide.html http://amath.colorado.edu/~baldwind/sous-vide.html It looks amazing to me.
- ecuzzillo 17y agoI really want to do sous vide, but basically everything I've read says you get bad results unless you have a serious-dude vacuum chamber packer sealer $4000 thing, which seems mildly impractical. Especially, you can't do the spectacular compressed stuff without one of those. You can get sous-vide-like results sometimes without said equipment, though; Thomas Keller's Ad Hoc at Home book contains a lot of unstated backports from sous vide techniques. For instance, he has you blowtorch a big prime rib roast and then cook it at very low temperature in the oven (275 F) for two hours. It reliably comes out with the uniform-pink-almost-all-the-way-to-the-edges effect. Presumably not quite as close.
- tptacek 17y agoI call shenanigans on the $4000 SV rig stuff. Commercial kitchens will spend $4000 on an immersion circulator alone, and that's before the cryovac or whatever they're doing to seal food. If you want to (a) make watermelons with the texture of a strip steak or (b) cook SV in huge volume, you need to investigate high end equipment. Otherwise, the concept behind SV is extremely simple. Precisely controlled temperature over long cooking time. The $120 PID controllers do that job just fine. What have you read that says you need a cryovac to do SV well? The Baldwin guide actively endorses the ghetto setup, and there are numerous blogs of people succeeding with it. The Keller sous vide book isn't a home cookbook any more than the Alinea cookbook is. You're not making French Laundry food at home no matter how you equip your kitchen.
- ecuzzillo 17y ago
- jasonwilk 17y agoFinally a Hacker News article I can share with my Mom!!
- josefresco 17y agoJust don't share it with your wife .. she may take offense.
- jobu 17y agoHah! My wife was the one who told me about <a href="http://www.google.com/search?q=March+14th>March http://www.google.com/search?q=March+14th>March 14th</a>. This will make it even better.
- dzlobin 17y agoprotip: salt all meat 10-60 minutes before cooking, depending on size. Don't do this with fish. alternative: brine all your meat.
- euccastro 17y agoWhy not on fish? Around here (SW of Europe) it's customary to salt mackerel and sardines the morning before cooking. Even the whole day before, if they're going to be boiled.
- ecuzzillo 17y agoSalting things a while beforehand so the salt penetrates it is a good idea in general. You're supposed to do that to basically any savory food, including chicken, meat, eggs. For big things, like prime rib roasts, you salt it a whole day ahead. So, this guy compared wrongly-salted expensive steak to correctly-but-very-heavily-salted cheap steak. Unfair. Also, in general, expensive steak isn't expensive because it's aged. Aged steak is expensive, but the difference between cheap and expensive is more commonly just which part of the cow it is. Filet mignon is a happy tender fatty underused part of the cow. Also, not very much of it per cow. A good recipe for chicken: Turn your oven on high (450 if you have ventilation, 425 if not). Coat a 3- or 4-pound chicken with coarse kosher salt so that you have an appealing crust of salt (a tablespoon or so). Put the chicken in a pan, stick a lemon or some onion or any fruit or vegetable you have on hand into the cavity. Put the chicken in the oven. Go away for an hour. Watch some TV, play with the kids, read, have a cocktail, have sex. When an hour has passed, take the chicken out of the oven and put it on the stove top or on a trivet for 15 more minutes. Finito. From http://blog.ruhlman.com http://blog.ruhlman.com
- d_c 17y agoHow would you do that with eggs?
- aarongough 17y agoEggshells are actually very porous. Putting eggs in very salty water will see the salt get absorbed through the shell and into the white and yolk. 'Salty eggs' are often used in Chinese food...
- ecuzzillo 17y agoIf you're frying or baking them, you salt them before they set, rather than after they go on the plate. If you're poaching, you salt the water. If you're doing the crazy poach-in-the-shell stuff, I imagine you do something with the shell porousness, like the sibling comment.
- dzlobin 17y agoruhlman is the goddamn man.
- wooster 17y agoThis is basically the method I use when cooking steaks. Also see this post which discusses the effects of flip intervals on cooking time and evenness of steaks: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1117296 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1117296 Also, some other simple tips: 1) In general, the more marbling the better. You want lots of veins of fat in the muscle of the cut. Big chunks of fat don't count, and leaner meat won't have as much flavor. 2) Hard white fat is good, spongy yellow fat is not. 3) Don't overcook your meat.
- taitems 17y agoMy mum came along for a trip to the market a few weekends ago and had me looking for well aged porterhouse. She told me to look specifically for the yellowing fat as its a sign of age. She grabbed one that looked sickeningly yellow but I can confirm that this was one of the most tender porterhouses I've had.
- wooster 17y agoYellow fat can indicate a lot of things, most of them not good: 1) The animal was old. 2) Worst case: the animal was losing weight when it died. This will make the meat taste sour (as best I can describe). 3) Best case: it's grass fed and not grain finished. This fat will usually be hard. If you're in the UK (guessing because you said "mum"), that's probably what you got. 4) It's dry aged beef. The outer layer will turn a bit yellow, but otherwise the fat is going to be whatever color it was before aging. Temperature and duration of aging has a lot more to do with how tender the cut is going to be. Really, it's the spongy feeling stuff you want to avoid. If you're in the US, and it's not marketed as grass fed, it's almost certainly from an old dairy cow or an animal which was sick when it was slaughtered (and losing weight).
- rms 17y agoI think you could use less total sodium when doing this if you substituted some MSG for salt.
- logicalmind 17y agoA more natural way to achieve the same result would be to wrap the steak in kombu and allow it to rest in the fridge for a while. The Japanese use this technique for some fish preparations. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kombu http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kombu
- JshWright 17y agoOk, that's just not cool... It's 8:30 in the morning, and now I _really_ want a steak...
- tptacek 17y agoWhat you really want to do is move to Argentina, where an 8:30AM steak is perfectly normal.
- tptacek 17y agoLiberally salting your steak is a fine idea, but where is this person finding choice ribeye for $5? Choice isn't "cheap". The $15/lb ribeye at Whole Foods is choice, as is pretty much every other steak you buy outside a specialty store. There's nothing at all wrong with it. This article never gets specific, but I get the impression the author doesn't really know what "prime" means: how well marbled the cut is with fat. Salt isn't going to change that (although, again, it will improve your steak). If tenderness is all you're after, you can use a jaccard on the meat; Google it, they're cheap. They put tiny little cuts in the meat to break up the fibers. When people say "cheap steak" they usually mean skirt or flank. Can you even get prime skirt steak?
- elblanco 17y agoI usually just put a liberal coating of garlic salt on and grill at a low temperature, rotating every 2 minutes or so until the meat looks visibly moist. Turn the heat up to high at the end for the final 2 rotations and done. I've had people fly cross-country (twice) for these steaks and it's really not all that hard. But it makes for an expensive summer season with lots of entertaining on my deck. One guy was mystified as to why I wasn't using the popular Morton's method of high heat and turn once. Then he had one, came back the next weekend unannounced "just happened to be in the area" and tried to bribe me with a bottle of Santa Rita Reserva Cab (I know cheap wine, but good). Too bad I was out of steaks. And yes, I usually get the on-sale cheap steak at the local grocery. So long as it's decently marbled it doesn't really seem to matter much what I get so long as it's not skirt or flank.
- tptacek 17y agoI cook steak in a vacuum-sealed bag submerged in a water bath held with a PID controller at precisely 131f, then sear them in a cast iron pan with just-barely-smoking peanut oil for about 30 seconds a side. Nobody has flown cross-country for my cooking, but the Chicago HN'ers should do a dinner sometime.
- logicalmind 17y ago"Chicago HN'ers should do a dinner sometime" Sounds like a good idea to me. I cooked a 15lbs kobe beef brisket last weekend and had more meat than people to share it with.
- narendranag 17y agoDrool. Drool. Drool. Hacking = coding for food.
- Groxx 17y agoWater dissolves salt, and some of it gets sucked back into meat via osmosis WTF is wrong with people and osmosis? This is diffusion. Osmosis is diffusion of water and nothing else. Also, "table salt tastes like shit" is quite true. I've been buying an unrefined sea salt for a while now, the difference is incredible. Flavor in foods, where before was mere saltiness.
- jackfoxy 17y agoCut her some slack. She did confess to sleeping through chemistry and otherwise wrote and illustrated a good article, while pounding bourbon.
- Groxx 17y agoIt's not the article writer in particular, the article is basically fine in other respects, it's people in general. I see far more people using "osmosis" more often than "diffusion", despite almost never using it correctly. For example, those "Learning through osmosis" signs in libraries, articles, shirts, etc. absolutely abound. It clearly isn't working if you think that's osmosis. Or there are tons of services with quotes like this: http://www.languagetutoring.co.uk/LearningThroughOsmosis.html http://www.languagetutoring.co.uk/LearningThroughOsmosis.htm... Evidently they aren't tutoring science. Osmosis vs diffusion is not difficult to understand. It just seems people use it to sound smarter, and thus fail miserably 99% of the time.
- glhaynes 17y ago"Osmosis vs diffusion is not difficult to understand. It just seems people use it to sound smarter, and thus fail miserably 99% of the time." They fail 99% of the time with you, but if the vast majority of the people don't know the difference (as you said they don't), then the misusers aren't failing with the vast majority of listeners. :)
- Groxx 17y agoIncorrect statements are incorrect, whether or not anyone's around to hear the tree fall in the forest. I'll accept ramchip's explanation through simile, but quite literally that's the first time I've heard it (I may live under a rock in that, though). Are you then implying that anything that the majority believes - heck, lets make it 99% - is true, and should be accepted? Lets put it in geek-friendly terms, dating it back a number of years, so it strikes a chord with yc users: "Windows is the only operating system."
- grandalf 17y agoAlternate title: Lure redditors to HN with steak.
- gcv 17y agoYou can also break down collagen (the tough protein) by braising, or a couple of other simple slow-cooking methods. The meat will have different taste and texture from grilled steak, but in no way inferior. Braising can easily turn a $5/pound cut into something that tastes better than 95% of the dry-aged porterhouse steaks out there.
- Edaname 17y agoSous vide is great for braising at the exact temperature that you want. Braising is still high heat cooking and you don't have precise control over it. Sous vide allows one to braise with moisture intact and preferred "doneness".
- antidaily 17y agoJust tried it - it works!! best steak I've ever cooked for myself. picture (that adds nothing, but I took it anyway): http://i48.tinypic.com/2nkulfn.jpg http://i48.tinypic.com/2nkulfn.jpg boneless beef ribeye 3/4in thick - I used a grill pan since it's too cold to grill outside. maybe 2 minutes a side, and another 2 to finish. I added some garlic powder an that was it (no additional salt). I let it rest for a good 10 min. One end was a little too salty, which was probably my fault for not washing it better. But overall, it fantastic. I've always tried to salt generously when cooking meat, but it never really worked like this. Great tip.
- Edaname 17y agoI don't know why you guys keep pushing Auber controllers, most professionals use SousVideMagic controllers and now the people at Fresh Meals Solutions have the latest 1500D with better accuracy and many safety features. Free shipping too!
- computerofmeat 17y agoI tried this about a year ago. It works pretty well. It's not a complete substitute for a great cut of steak but it's a good way to save money on meat.