I am often asked how to cook the perfect steak. I’ve cooked a lot of steak. I’ve also seen a lot of steaks cooked at events like Meatopia, and I’ve eaten a good few in my time, too.

I’ve asked other cooks and chefs how they like to cook steak, and I’ve had some surprising answers, including being told that you can’t cook a good steak on a Big Green Egg and that you need a Weber to cook a steak. Needless to say, that cookery school owner is a brand representative for Weber.

What is the perfect steak?

This is going to be very personal. Think about the best steak you ever ate. What was it about that steak that made it the perfect steak for you? Once you understand that, you’ll then know what you’re aiming for, and you’ll be able to apply a few techniques to replicate it.

Maybe you have several perfect steaks, I do. Here are some of mine:

• Steak tartare – I love uncooked steak, served with a raw egg yolk, cornichons, capers, shallot and some Dijon mustard. Maybe even a splash of Tabasco. It’s a guilty pleasure to have one of these on a skiing holiday. I know the thought of raw beef and a raw egg is too much for some.
• Entrecôte frites – it’s got to be eaten in a cafe in France, and the chips need to be salty. The Entrecôte will be served blue. I think my all-time favourite was at a local café in Versailles, while I was in Paris on a training course. My second favourite was at a café at the Auchan hypermarket in Calais while on a one-day booze cruise.
• Picanha – our favourite steak to cook at home. We cook one in every standard class we do. Reverse seared and served rare with some mini roast potatoes, slaw and a glass of wine!
• Rib-eye with a full surface sear cooked in a pan – if I can’t justify cooking a whole Picanha, then a rib-eye is a very good substitute. It has to be well-aged and cooked to medium with a great crust.
• Dirty skirt or bavette – a great midweek steak is how I describe it. Cheap, but tasty, especially when cooked straight on the coals.

So what makes these steaks so good, they’re all so different? Part of it has to be where you are eating them and the memories they create. Secondly, it has to be the quality of the meat. I use three different butchers and each has their speciality. The butcher from whom I buy my skirt steak isn’t the butcher I would buy my rib-eyes from, and is different again to the one I would buy my Picanha. Most importantly, though, it’s how you prepare them, then cook them and finally to sit down and enjoy eating them.

Steak science

Those of you who’ve met me will know I look at cooking from a scientific background. I’ll question why we’re told to do something when a recipe or chef dictates it. Some of these questions apply to what we’re told about cooking steak.

Steak myths:

• Take your steak from the fridge and give it 30 minutes to come to room temperature as it will cook better – go grab your Thermapen, and you’ll find in 30 minutes, a steak’s internal temperature may only rise by 3 or 4°C. The other layers will rise more, though, and to above 5°C where bacteria start to thrive. Personally, I prefer my steak straight from the fridge.
• Sear your steak to hold in moisture – the searing process doesn’t make your steak waterproof. Searing allows the Maillard reaction to take place, where amino acids and sugars are caramelised to create the perfect crust, developing the flavour we all love.
• Bone in steaks taste better – sorry but there is zero transfer of flavour to the steak from bones as far as I’m concerned. A bit of melted bone marrow though is another matter.
• Season you steak ahead of cooking – salt yes, but absolutely not with the pepper. Pepper will burn at a lower temperature than you’re hopefully searing at, turning acrid. Add the pepper afterwards.
• Don’t oil your steak, the oil will burn – the Maillard reaction (where the outer layers of the steam go nice and crusty) takes place between 140-165°C. The smoking point of oil vary from 200-270°C. If you’re burning the oil on your steak, chances are you’re really ruining your steak anyway.
• Wagyu is the way to go – Wagyu translates to ‘Wa’, Japenese, and ‘Gyu’, cow. Only one of the four Wagyu breeds has incredible marbling. Supermarket Wagyu is unlikely to be that great. You’ll get a better steak from a butcher that’s been selected and aged well.

Tips to cooking a great steak:

• Season your steak with salt before cooking and pepper after – salt will help dry your steak, meaning you’ll get a better crust on it. Don’t leave it for 24 hours with salt on, you’ll start curing it.
• Oil your steak, not the pan – oil will help your steak cook and shouldn’t burn as it’s in contact with a cold steak.
• If it’s a really thin steak, cook it really hot and quickly (300°C+), if it’s a thicker steak, cook it more slowly (250°C). For a thin steak, you want to get the Maillard reaction fast without overcooking the middle. For a thicker steak, you want to protect the outside a bit while the middle warms.
• Use a reverse sear on steaks thicker than 3cm, and this will help cook the middle perfectly before you sear it.
• Rest your steak – we like to do this, but make sure you remove the steak from the heat 3 to 5°c from your desired target temperature.  The steak continues to cook due to the residual heat (carryover cooking).  While resting, the juices redistribute and prevent dryness when cutting.  We tend to wrap our steaks individually in foil to rest. How close they are to the target temperature determines whether we wrap them loosely or tightly in foil, as we don’t want to overcook them.
• Never wrap your steaks together or stack them up; they’ll cook each other while they rest.

Where to buy your steak

I can’t remember eating my first steak, it was obviously not that great. I can remember being a teenager and eating steak that had been machine-tenderised, and it was still tough stuff. It was from Sainsburys, no doubt, and was in a vac-packed polystyrene package with a meat nappy, the piece of material supermarkets put under a steak to mop up the juices of an underaged steak.

I remember eating my first good steak. It was in a small village just outside Montpellier in France called Vallergues. I used to stay with a French family each summer, and they treated me to some amazing food. I’m pretty sure the first amazing steak I had was an entrecôte cooked blue, and it was incredible. The same family also served me horse steak, and that, too, was amazing. Each of these steaks was collected from a butcher. Care and time went into every single meal in terms of buying the ingredients and then cooking them.

Steak should be a treat, and as such, I think you should buy the best you can. I’m just going to say it straight up, meat from a supermarket isn’t as good as meat from a butcher. I’ve never bought a supermarket steak and thought that it was incredible, I certainly have from the butcher though. Put the effort in and find yourself a good butcher, even if it’s an hour round trip to collect your steak. 

Only this weekend I bought a rib-eye from a local butcher, Remi’s at Franks Farm. When I arrived, it was the first piece of meat that caught my eye. I asked Remi what he would recommend, as I always do, and he suggested the rib-eye. We bought it as a single, thick-cut steak to share it. It was just over 300 grams. It turns out I had picked the over 30-month cut (referring to the age of the cow at slaughter). The age of the animal, along with the post-slaughter ageing of the meat, meant the steak was succulent with incredible flavour. You just don’t get this from a supermarket 21-day aged steak as the majority of supermarket steak is wet aged.

You can get terrible steak from a butcher. Sadly, my local butcher has a small shop in a large village. I had some rib-eye from them on two occasions, and both times it was tough and chewy, definitely not aged. When I let them know, the response was that they knew but didn’t have the space to age their meat. The only meat I buy from him now is his bacon (which he buys in already prepped). 

Ageing a steak?

Meat is normally aged in two ways, wet ageing and dry ageing. Ageing is about letting the natural process of enzymes in the meat break down the proteins and tenderising it. At the same time, flavours in the meat can intensify.

But not all meat needs to be aged. The French butcher their animals differently and some of their cuts benefit from being cooked hot and fast, and eaten rare as they’ve not been aged.

Dry ageing

This is the traditional way of ageing. A butchered piece of meat is hung in a controlled environment, normally an ageing cabinet. This allows the enzymes to start breaking down the proteins.

With dry ageing, as it hangs, moisture is drawn from the meat, often using blocks of pink Himalayan salt at the back of the cabinet. Drawing out moisture will intensify the flavour within the meat.

During the process, mould may form on the outer layers of the meat. This isn’t harmful to us as long as it’s the right mould. This mould will be trimmed off. If you’re worried about this, then just think of salami and parma ham. Both are aged and have this white mould on the outside.

The downside of dry ageing is the weight loss of the water drawn off and the trim that must be removed. This effectively increases the price per kilo of the meat, as weight is lost.

Wet ageing

With wet ageing, the meat is left to age in a sealed vacuum bag. There is nowhere for juices to go. The enzymes still break down the proteins, tenderising the meat. However, there is no flavour intensification as the juices all stay where they are.

You can often get a gamey flavour to the juices, not something I like.

So why wet age? Simple, the meat will weigh very much close to what it did when it arrived and so is cheaper kilo to kilo against dry ageing. Supermarkets wet age on the whole as they make more money and it’s a cheaper process.

So which way of ageing is best?

Whether a piece of meat is wet aged, or dry aged, it’s a good process and the meat will be more tender.

Be wary of the stated length of the ageing process, just passing a piece of meat through an ageing cabinet means it aged!

Ageing too long, especially dry ageing, will draw out more and more moisture, leaving your steak dry before you’ve even cooked it. I got to eat a 180 day aged steak, it was OK, but nowhere near the best steak I’ve eaten.

For me, steak needs to be dry-aged, usually for around 28 days. The flavour and texture are on point, usually at this age. Supermarkets won’t do this normally, so I avoid them for steak.

The perfect steak?

There is no right answer and is down to you.  In your quest to discover the perfect steak, why not try sourcing your meat from different butchers, try different cuts and most importantly of all, have fun cooking them using different techniques.

Often, it’s not necessarily the food we’re eating but the fun of cooking and the joy of sharing food with others and seeing them savour your food, that’s what makes the perfect steak.