The Best Steak Tips

• When you order a steak at your favorite restaurant, it comes to the table big, thick, juicy and still sizzling. Recreating this experience at home can prove difficult if not impossible. How can you recreate that restaurant steak experience at home? Here are some of the best steak tips to help you achieve steak perfection.

Selecting a Steak

• There are several grades of meat which are determined by the USDA. Restaurants often use prime, which is the top grade offered by the USDA. Prime comprises around 2 percent of the meat available on the market, so finding it in your local supermarket is unlikely. Your best option is to visit a local butcher and ask what grades are available. Choice is the next best grade under prime, and would be a good choice for you to cook at home if prime is unavailable.

  Two things you should look for at the supermarket or butcher is thickness and marbling. The ideal thickness for a steak is one to one and a half inches. Going any thinner than this can lead to steaks drying out easily. Marbling is simply the distribution of fat throughout the piece of meat. Look for steaks that have fat distributed fairly evenly throughout the cut.

Steak Cuts

• New York strip, filet mignon, sirloin, porterhouse, what does this all mean? It's simply common names to identify where the particular cut came from on the cow. The more tender and well marbled cuts come from muscles that are less used and is generally the lower back area. Tenderloin is mild in flavor and is the most tender. The New York strip is a little less tender and has more flavor than the tenderloin. The ribeye is somewhere in between the two. The porterhouse and the t-bone contain the tenderloin on one side and the strip on the other with the bone separating the two. Using any of these cuts will give you excellent results in the home kitchen.

Steak Cooking Tips

• When everyone in the restaurant notices your steak coming to the table still sizzling, it is because they cooked it under very high heat, which is one of the best tips for cooking a good steak. To achieve this at home, use your broiler, a very hot pan or your grill with the heat turned all the way up. High heat creates that nice brown crust on your steak, which is where a lot of that great flavor is created. This process is known as carmelization, which is the natural sugars in the meat going through a chemical process, caused by heat, to make that wonderful crust. Notice that these are all dry heat cooking methods. You don't need to use liquids when you cook quality cuts of steak. Save that for cooking tougher cuts, such as for stew meat.

  To season your steak, simply use ground black pepper and kosher or sea salt. Be careful to salt at the last second before you cook the steak, or add the salt after it's cooked. If salt is added too soon before cooking, it can draw out moisture and prevent the browning process, resulting in a grey, less flavorful steak.

  Make sure you take the steaks out of the refrigerator well before you're going to cook them so they can warm to room temperature. Cooking steaks when they are cold can lead to it contracting when it hits the heat, causing it to toughen, leading to a much less enjoyable steak eating experience.

  Don't be the guy standing at the grill poking his steaks full of holes with a fork. Use tongs; poking your steak full of holes will lead to loss of moisture and those flavorful juices. Another way to preserve the juices is to let the steak rest for 10 or 15 minutes after you're done cooking. The juices will be reabsorbed as the meat cools slightly so it stays moist and juicy when you start cutting into your perfect steak.