
Turn $5 steak to $50 steak with salt - maxklein
http://steamykitchen.com/163-how-to-turn-cheap-choice-steaks-into-gucci-prime-steaks.html
======
ecuzzillo
Salting 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>

~~~
illumin8
A great way to cook a steak if you have good ventilation is to use a cast iron
skillet and heat the skillet in an oven to 500 degrees. Brush the steak with
olive oil ahead of time, and make sure it is room temperature (not fridge
temperature). Pull the skillet out of the oven, put it on the stove. Turn the
burner up on the stove, and cook the steak for 30 seconds on each side, then
put the entire skillet back in the oven for 2 minutes on each side.

The steak will be tender and juicy, since searing it at such a hot temperature
locks in most of the juices, similar to the way a wound is cauterized.

I only recommend you do this if you have a VERY well ventilated kitchen, as
the amount of smoke generated will surely set off any smoke alarms in your
house otherwise.

Sidenote: Why is it that a lot of modern kitchens don't have properly
ventilated hoods that actually vent outside? It seems ridiculous that most of
the hoods over stoves nowadays just recirculate the air back inside. When I
want to cook, I want to cook, damn it!

~~~
logicalmind
Your instructions provide a perfectly reasonable way to cook a steak, but the
theory on searing locking in juices has been proven false (see Good Eats or
America's Test Kitchen). The purpose of searing steak is to invoke the
Maillard Reaction which dramatically increases flavor:

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Searing>

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maillard_reaction>

~~~
tptacek
The step he's missing is resting the protein after it's cooked; over 15
minutes, the juices redistribute themselves throughout the meat.

Here's a fun article on cooking beef: Bob del Grosso, from the Culinary
Institute, losing his shit over how Mark Bittman writes up his technique for
the NYTimes:

[http://ahungerartist.bobdelgrosso.com/2010/01/minimalist-
of-...](http://ahungerartist.bobdelgrosso.com/2010/01/minimalist-of-
skill.html)

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jasonwilk
Finally a Hacker News article I can share with my Mom!!

~~~
josefresco
Just don't share it with your wife .. she may take offense.

~~~
jobu
Hah! 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.

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tptacek
Liberally 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?

~~~
gleb
USDA beef grading is assigned to the whole carcass, so you can get any part of
the cow in prime. Only cuts where USDA rating correlates with quality are
typically marketed as prime/choice, typically just loin and rib-eye. You do
see things like "prime skirt steak" but it's uncommon, because there won't be
any difference in marbling or tenderness on that cut. For other cuts like
chuck, prime is actually too fatty for many applications (e.g. try chuck @
Schaub's @ Stanford -- not good for moist cooking, could be good for
hamburgers I guess).

Whole Food beef is select not choice. I can only speak for Bay Area
definitively, I haven't checked out WF meat counter in Chicago. I doubt it's
any different because Whole Foods has a nice high-margin gig going on what
they call "natural" beef, which is USDA Select sold as a premium product on
the strength of Whole Foods brand. It's a store brand with premium pricing,
great gig if you can pull it off, good for Whole Foods.

~~~
tptacek
When the steak in front of me is labelled "USDA Choice", it's choice. I would
be surprised to find out that any of the steaks at Whole Foods are "select". I
think you're just wrong about this.

Yep, you can probably get "prime skirt" at Schaub's. Someone fedex me a Fred
Steak, please. I'll send italian beef back in reply.

~~~
gleb
Interesting, must be a Chicago vs SF Bay thing, definitely no choice meat in
Whole Foods here.

~~~
tptacek
S H E N A N I G A N S. I just called Whole Foods SOMA, and they have not one
but one hundred and three POUNDS of prime ribeye roast, and prime ribeye
steaks cut on display. Yes, the rest is choice.

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weaksauce
OK. 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>

It looks amazing to me.

~~~
dzlobin
I was cooking at a two Michelin star restaurant last year where a large
majority of proteins and vegetables were cooked sous vide. Don't underestimate
the importance of a good salting, but sous vide will make everything you cook
perfect, and consistent.

There is a better home option now than the rice cooker + pid timer( which does
not circulate water and leads to uneven cooking.
<http://www.sousvidesupreme.com/>

This is as good as you can get without buying a $995 dollar immersion
circulator(which you should buy if you can).

Pick up the more expensive foodsaver, if you can't afford a commercial unit. I
cook at arazorashinyknife.com these days, and our commercial unit which costs
$5000 just died on us, it cost $1000 just to have a guy look at it -.-

[http://cookingissues.wordpress.com/2010/02/02/coming-soon-
so...](http://cookingissues.wordpress.com/2010/02/02/coming-soon-sous-vide-
and-low-temp-primer/) Here is a primer on sous-vide cooking, which by the way
can can be done the ghetto way by sealing a sturdy ziplock bag almsot under
water, to get as much air out as you can. Then you can leave a large pot of
water running under the hot water tap until you can get the water to the
temperture you need.

~~~
ars
Aren't you worried about the plasticizers from the bags?

~~~
illumin8
Sous Vide sounds interesting, but I don't relish the though of eating known
carcinogens that are leeching into my foods. BPA is a serious risk, and the
FDA so far has refused to take much action on it.

It seems that corporate profits trump safety these days. How much rocket fuel
is safe to drink in our public water supply? What are a few deaths against the
right to corporate earnings?

~~~
tptacek
You're not crazy, but if you're serious, you basically need to avoid all
commercial meat, both because nobody's guaranteed that things like BPA haven't
leached into your food before it arrives on the shelves, and because
commercial meat is exposed to worse things than plasticizers.

------
Groxx
_Water 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.

~~~
tptacek
You're noticing the difference in the texture of the salt, not the flavor of
the salt. You'll do just as well with kosher salt, which is significantly
cheaper than sea salt (and, more importantly, comes in bigger containers).

I have a small bag of fleur de sel (we call it "crunchy salt") which I use to
finish things, but again, it's for the texture. I wouldn't say I've found any
_incredible_ difference in salt flavor.

~~~
Groxx
No, the flavor. Unrefined salts tend to carry loads of random minerals from
the source, which lend their flavors to whatever you use it on.

I'm not a big salt-flavor fan, so I effectively _never_ have salt pieces on
_anything_. The texture doesn't exist in any salt I use, as it's all
dissolved.

edit: finally found it. Redmond RealSalt, all the big grocery stores near me
carry it. ~6.50 for 26 oz, so for my uses that's 6.50 for a _year_ of salt
usage, if not more.

~~~
evgen
Unrefined salts carry a miniscule amount of trace minerals from the source and
this small amount of contamination is almost imperceptible. If you do not
actually salt after cooking (and all of the salt is therefore dissolved into
the food) then you are not tasting the so-called "flavor" of the salt, it is
all in your head. A specialty salt can be mildly effective as a finishing
agent but if you are adding it to the dish more than five minutes before it
hits someone's mouth you are wasting your money.

In the case of the salt you mention this is just kosher salt with a particular
bit of marketing spin on the package. What makes kosher salt the go-to choice
for most chefs is the size of the crystal -- it is large enough that you can
use a "pinch" in your fingers and get some control over distrbution and these
large crystals also take a little while to completely dissolve so it is much
better than standard table salt when you are doing something like salting a
piece of meat prior to cooking. Another reason you may like it (given your
stated aversion to salty flavors) is that because of the large crystal size a
given volume of kosher salt has only half as much actual salt in it compared
to table salt. If you have a recipe that calls for one teaspoon of salt and
you use one teaspoon of kosher salt you are actually only putting in a half
teaspoon of NaCl (the other half of the teaspoon is just air.) This is not bad
for most cooking, but you should go out an get a bit of regular table salt if
you do any baking at all, that is one area where cutting down on salt can ruin
a recipe if you don't know what all of the other components in the recipe are
doing and compensating appropriately.

~~~
Groxx
_Try_ some unrefined salts before claiming it's identical to table salt. In
the stuff I have, there are _clods_ of red & grey minerals. Sticking your
finger in & tasting a bit, you can extremely easily taste a difference.
Dissolving it in water, you can see the precipitates, and easily taste a
difference. Double-blind in all cases, compared against two other kinds of
"regular" salt. I'm careful with what I eat. It's even easily detectable in
clear soups.

It's the flavor. Really. There _is_ a difference. There's a definite marketing
spin to try to sell it, but that doesn't imply there's _no_ difference.

~~~
tptacek
Mass-market sea salt and kosher salt are the same thing. Buy whichever is
cheaper. You're right that it's better for cooking than table salt ( _except_
in baking, where you cannot use it). This is otherwise not worth arguing
about.

------
ErrantX
I'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
What 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?

~~~
dzlobin
Locally sourced meat tends to be grass-fed or at least grass finished. It also
tends to have WAY better living conditions than any commercial plant. A happy
animal is a tasty animal.

I highly suggest you watch Food inc. :-)

~~~
jff
I grew up on a cattle farm. Is 3,000 head a "plant"? Was it evil because there
was an "Inc" on the end of the name?

A happy animal is indeed a tasty animal. That's why we raise cattle in dry
pens (away from predators) with abundant fresh water and feed them carefully
formulated food twice a day. Our cattle get better dietary planning than I do;
they don't eat pure corn (as the term "corn-fed" might lead you to believe),
they eat a mix including alfalfa, grass hay, corn, barley, silage, cannery
surplus apples, oats, molasses, and other ingredients. The fact is, big or
small, any cattleman is going to try and keep the conditions as good as
possible. If your animals are standing in 2 feet of mud and eating moldy hay,
they're not going to produce and you're not going to make money. Also, nobody
goes into the livestock business hating the animals--we who grew up on farms
probably have a better understanding and empathy for livestock than your
average city-dweller, and we want to act kindly toward them.

As for grass feeding, you want to know something? One of the biggest grass-fed
beef producers back home only eats corn-fed beef. Corn-fed beef is more
extensively marbled and more tender. Like organic produce, grass-fed beef is a
niche market for people who think something tastes better because it has a
crunchy image and damn the price/scalability/sustainability.

~~~
illumin8
Call it what you want, but it's still a factory farm. Cattle are fattened on a
corn-based diet to a point where they have extreme problems like heart disease
and obesity that would normally kill an animal if it wasn't destined for the
slaughterhouse already. Your beef still has to be treated and bathed in an
ammonia solution to kill the E. Cohli that is everywhere due to the cattle
living in their own excrement.

Or how do you deal with the problem of manure in the pens? Surely you can't
keep an animal confined in a cage it's whole life and expect it to shit
somewhere else?

Watch Food Inc. You will never want to eat "corn-fed" beef again.

~~~
jff
You deal with the problem of manure in the pens by clearing them out
regularly. The pens are large; just bring in a tractor and scrape the pen,
then give the manure to some farmer for his fields. We also keep a large
"mound" of dirt in the middle of the pens so when it rains, the cattle have a
place they can stand out of the mud.

These aren't cages, they're large pens, starting at about the size of a
football field and going up.

A grass-fed animal is still going to be walking in, sleeping on, and eating
manure; in fact, grazing cattle often look dirtier than ours.

I'm not exactly sure how watching a sensationalist film is going to erase the
18 years of animal husbandry experience I've accumulated. I've assisted in
slaughtering cattle, sheep, and pigs, I've shoveled every kind of manure
imaginable, I've birthed sheep (starting at about age 5), I've hauled the
inevitable dead animals, I've assisted in various basic surgical and
veterinary operations. I've been to numerous other feedlots and dairies, and
having observed all these things I am quite happy and secure in eating beef
and drinking milk.

------
antidaily
Just 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>

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.

------
wooster
This 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>

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
My 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
Yellow 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).

------
dgordon
I tried this once -- it was very salty, which I don't mind, but it was nothing
special as far as tenderness.

~~~
mousebender
Seconded. 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
You missed a step.

Remove, [let rest for 5 minutes], call the guests in...

~~~
mousebender
Understood. 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.

------
colonelxc
I'm having steak this weekend, will have to try this out. Educational and
tasty (hopefully)!

~~~
PebblesRox
Let us know how it turns out!

~~~
colonelxc
It 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.

------
JshWright
Ok, that's just not cool... It's 8:30 in the morning, and now I _really_ want
a steak...

~~~
tptacek
What you really want to do is move to Argentina, where an 8:30AM steak is
perfectly normal.

------
houseabsolute
Stupid question: does this work with chicken? I tend to prefer the white meat.

~~~
rms
The article says one of her influences was a chef that did this with chicken.

------
gcv
You 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
Sous 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".

------
char
I'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.

------
rms
I think you could use less total sodium when doing this if you substituted
some MSG for salt.

~~~
logicalmind
A 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>

------
Edaname
I 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
I 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.

------
dzlobin
protip: salt all meat 10-60 minutes before cooking, depending on size. Don't
do this with fish.

alternative: brine all your meat.

~~~
euccastro
Why 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.

------
narendranag
Drool. Drool. Drool.

Hacking = coding for food.

------
grandalf
Alternate title: Lure redditors to HN with steak.

