Ribeye Steak in an Old Jersey City Apartment
I’ve been cooking steak at home for many years. Consequently, I’ve gotten pretty good at it as many dinner guests will attest. So you can only imagine the frustration I felt when I tried making a steak for the first time in my Jersey City apartment and ended up with a steak that was overcooked on the inside yet without a sear on the outside and I ended up annoying my neighbors by tripping my quite sensitive smoke alarm.
The big difference between my current apartment and the other apartments I’ve lived in over the last five years is in the kitchen heat source. My current apartment’s stove is gas-fired whereas most other apartments I’ve lived in had electric resistance coils. The exception is the last apartment I rented in Ithaca, which was a new building that came with stoves that pulsed electric through glass.
Gas stoves have the advantage of control. If I’m making a sauce, I want to bring the sauce up to a boil, cover, and then drop to a simmer. A gas flame can change instantly. At the same time, the largest gas burner on my stove outputs less heat at the highest setting than the largest rings did on the electric stoves I used to cook on. Of course gas stoves come in all shapes and sizes. That said, you’re not going to find a very powerful stove in a recently-renovated rent-controlled apartment that was originally constructed in 1923.
Why is this important? The principle of cooking a steak (or searing meat in general) is to blast the outside with very high heat, and then use more gentle heat to cook the inside of the steak the rest of the way. The classic way to grill a steak in a barbecue is to set up a HOT and a WARM side by banking the flame, and get the initial sear by grilling the steak directly over the flame, and finish cooking it on another part of the grill that is not directly over the flame.
Of course, a brawny exhaust fan and a less sensitive smoke alarm would also help.
This is not the best steak I’ve ever made, but it’s the best steak I’ve been able to pull off given the constraints of my apartment.
Recipe
Ingredients
For Oven-Roasted Potatoes and Carrots: See the recipe I wrote up here. I decided to mix it up by including baby carrots with 1 red potato, but the recipe is otherwise exactly the same.
For Ribeye:
1 bone-in ribeye
Salt and pepper
Avocado oil
1/2 cup sliced baby bella mushrooms
1/4 cup dry red wine (an Australian shiraz works great)
1/4 cup chicken stock
1 Tbsp butter
Method
Start by taking the steak out of the fridge at least an hour before you intend to cook it. This will allow the steak to come up to room temperature.
Make the potatoes and carrots using the recipe I prescribed earlier. Once again, this will net you both a tasty side and a piping hot cast-iron skillet for your steak.
As the potatoes and carrots cook, season the steak with salt and pepper so liberally that Tucker Carlson will rant about it one night. Be sure to pay extra attention to the fat cap.
Rub a thin coating of avocado oil onto your steak. Avocado oil advantageous for steak because of a high smoke point.
Even with a high-smoke oil, once again be sure to run your fan out your window so you don’t annoy your neighbors by tripping your smoke alarm.
After the carrots and potatoes are cooked, plate them and start heating the same cast iron skillet over the high side of medium-high heat. If you are cooking a thick steak (like a tomahawk ribeye), keep the oven on. Heat the cast iron until you see smoke.
Holding the steak with tongs, first sear the fat cap.
Then place the steak down on its side.
Then flip the steak over after 30 seconds.
You will notice the steak has no color. That’s ok. Keep flipping the steak every 30 seconds until you get the best crust you can. Monitor the temperature of the steak using a probe thermometer since neither you nor I value our ego over the quality of our steaks. For a thicker steak, get the crust formed, place a probe thermometer into the thickest part of the steak, and place the skillet with the steak in it into the oven. Pull the steak out of the oven when it is 10 degrees Fahrenheit cooler than your intended doneness as carryover heat will finish cooking the steak as it rests.
At this point, the steak got to the medium-rare that I like. Take the steak out of the pan, leave it on a clean cutting board, and set aside. Meanwhile, drop the heat under the skillet down to medium, and drop your (washed) mushrooms in. Sautee them until they are noticeably browner and smaller.
Pour in the wine and allow it to reduce to a syrupy consistency, scraping the drippings from the pan with a wooden spoon.
Follow up with the chicken stock and allow that to reduce by half.
Once the stock reduced, turn off the heat and stir in the butter. Allow the sauce to cool and thicken.
Turning our attention back to the steak, start by cutting the bone out. The color of the meat on the bone indicates the bone did its job by acting as a heat shield, preventing the steak from getting overcooked.
Next, cut the bottom triangle and the cap from the eye of the steak.
And slice the steak on a bias.
Plate the steak by the potatoes and carrots. Notice how sensitive the steak is to lighting. The steak looks a little overcooked under the cooler fluorescent lamp that is my kitchen’s main light, but it looks nice and medium-rare under the warmer light above my stove.
Pour the pan sauce onto the steak.
And enjoy with a glass of the same red wine you used to make the pan sauce!
