Best of the Best, Day Four: Pan-Seared Thick-Cut Steaks

In honor of the Olympics, we’ll be sharing the keys to one of our gold-medal worthy recipes every day until the closing ceremonies on August 12th.
 

Cooking a standard supermarket steak is easy: Just get an oiled pan smoking hot and slap in your steak. A flip and a quick rest before serving, and you have dinner. But try this method with a thick-cut strip steak—we’re talking almost as thick as it is wide—and you run into some problems, like a burnt exterior, a raw center, and an unappealing grey band of chalky meat connecting the two. We found a two-step cooking method that gave the steaks the tender treatment they deserve.

WHAT MAKES THIS RECIPE A WINNER

• Meat won’t brown if its moisture comes in direct contact with the pan because this reduces the rate at which it heats up. The only way to get crusty, juicy steaks is to start with dry meat. To get our steaks as dry as possible, we dabbed them with paper towels, then cooked them in a low oven until their surfaces looked like desiccated lunar landscapes.
• Searing the meat quickly prevents the meat directly under the crust from turning gray. And with our steaks already starting to cook thanks to their stint in the oven, we could develop a beautiful brown crust in only a few minutes, while the rest of the meat stayed pink, juicy, and tender.
• Using our tongs to stand the steaks upright, two at a time, when searing the sides cut down on time and gave our steaks a perfect crust on every side—not only the top and bottom.

Want to try it out for yourself? Here’s our recipe for Pan-Seared Thick-Cut Steaks for free until August 12.