How Adam really cooks steak (usually)

Hello, I'm Adam Ragusea, and I fear that I have been living a lie. About five years ago, I made a video about a very particular way that I used to make steak, and for some reason, 20 million people or so have watched that video so far, and as a result, a lot of people have kind of wrong ideas about how Adam Ragusea likes to cook his steak, which, to my surprise, is a topic that people on the internet seem to have opinions about. And one reason that steak with board sauce method worked so well for me back in the day is that I was poorer back in the day. I didn't have any YouTube money yet — thanks for that, by the way — and I was really buying lots of cheap beef from the grocery store, and the board sauce method is a really good way to make a cheap piece of meat taste pretty good. These days, I can afford nicer beef, and I try to only buy nicer beef because I've come to the conclusion that there's really no interest being served when I eat crappy beef. It's not great for my diet. It's really not great for the environment. So when I eat beef, I generally really treat myself, and that involves going to really great local butcher shops, like Jesse's here in Knoxville, Tennessee. Hi, Jesse. And whatever he's got that's special is what I'll get. If there's some wagyu, I'll get that. If there's some grass-fed, 100% grass-fed, I love how that fat tastes. Here's just some good old American prime beef. So within the mainstream beef system in the United States, this is about as good as it gets. And this is a ribeye. I do usually cook ribeyes when I want steak in particular, as opposed to some other beef dish. I mean, there's a million amazing cuts of beef, but, you know, ribeye is the classic fancy cut for a reason. It's got this very tender eye muscle in the center, and then it has this cat muscle, the spinalis dorsi, on the other side that is one of the best tasting cuts on the entire animal. And I look for ribeyes that have a particularly big chunk of spinalis on their cap. It's also called ribeye cap. These days, I also usually go for thicker sticks. As you can see, this is over an inch thick. This is because I no longer live in my old house, which had a really, really powerful electric stove. I moved to this new house that has a gas stove, and gas is lovely for all kinds of reasons, but in general is going to be less powerful than a modern electric stove. And when you have less heat, it actually pays to go with a thicker steak because it'll cook more slowly. It'll also give you more time to really brown the outside before the inside is overcooked. Get the paper away from here, and then I'll turn on the heat under this pan. I'm actually going to use both of these burners side by side to get some more heat. And to prep the steak itself, I just do a very thin coat of oil on the meat. This is really just to kind of get the steak started before its own fat starts to melt out, and it can cook in that. And the reason I coat the meat and not the pan is that less of it burns typically on the meat, I think. Now, when I make steak with board sauce, like I did in my old video, there's just no reason to put salt on the outside because I slice it really thin and then I toss it in a seasoned sauce. But with this, I'm actually going to cut some thicker pieces, and therefore having some seasoning that penetrates to the inside of the meat is not terrible, but it's also not a huge priority for me, as I really like finishing salt. Which is why I usually don't bother to salt my meat in advance. You know, I just sort of do it right before I cook, usually, and it's fine. But not that much salt, because I really like to have most of my salt be a finishing salt that's crunchy at the table. And pepper is fine on the steak. I like the cooked pepper. I like the raw pepper on top. I usually do both. OK, now over here I've got my pan heating, and this is a tall-sided pan. It's actually a saucepan. Slightly taller sides will mitigate some splatter, which happens a lot when you're cooking something so fatty at such a high temperature. And here we go. Layer in there nice and flat. Get rid of all this stuff. Turn on the ventilation so you can see. And at this point I'm pretty convinced in the flip constantly method, or close to constantly, every 30 seconds or so. I think it's actually pretty well established at this point that this gets you a better crust, faster cooking, more even cooking through the meat. Flipping constantly does. And people have published stuff about it. Somebody did a mathematical model explaining why this heat transfer is more efficient if you're frequently flipping. The main reason I like to flip a lot is that it makes it so that there's no surprises. You're not sitting there, like, wondering what's happening on the underside of that steak as you are following the dogmatic steak bro logic that says you must always only flip the steak once and only once. You can flip it really frequently, the crust will build gradually, and it probably comes out even better. And I can kind of keep parts of the pan from scorching, move it around, all that kind of stuff. Hey, did you notice the pan? This pan is from Made In, sponsor of this video. Made In partners with the best raw material providers and multi-generational family owned manufacturers in the US, France, UK, and Italy. That's where these things come from. And I love all kinds of pan materials, but stainless steel remains tops in my book. It's the easiest thing to care for and clean, looks beautiful, lasts forever. And the Made In stainless collection has actually some sandwiches of different types of metal in it to help it conduct heat better. And the pieces are still very, very heavy. They hold the incredible amount of thermal energy necessary to really blast a steak. I'm so impressed by the handle design. They stay remarkably cool during cooking, and they're very ergonomic. The balance is really nice. And one of the best things, really tight fitting lids. Check out the stainless collection and Made In's other cookware by using my link in the description to save on your order and to let them know Ragusea sent you. That'll be good for me and you. Thank you, Made In. At this point, I might give the steak a poke, even though I know it's raw on the inside, but just to give myself a sense of what it feels like when it is raw. Once I feel it getting a little stiffer than this on the inside of the steak, then I know it's done. Medium rare means basically just the least amount of possible cooking to affect the muscle tissue. So whenever you feel the inside starting to stiffen at all, that's probably an indication you're at medium rare, which is the doneness that people generally prefer for a reason. It's the doneness at which the fat on the interior of the steak is just starting to melt, but has not melted all the way out yet. This tall pan is really containing the splatter nicely. We've been cooking about 10 minutes now, and when I've got a crust that's about where I want it, this is when I'll throw in everything else. Smash some garlic cloves, throw those in. Kind of oily, resinous herbs like thyme and rosemary and sage usually work best. And then an obscene amount of butter. And the butter will allow us to kind of provide omnidirectional heat for the steak. We're gonna melt it, and then just toss it around in that butter until it's done. And the butter kind of wraps the whole steak. It's like finishing the steak in the oven, which you often do for a thick steak. Same effect. Omnidirectional heat to really finish it all off. And the reason you wait until the end to drop the stuff in is that you don't want it to burn. Butter burns, garlic burns, and so since I've got the crust I want on the steak, if anything starts to burn, I can just turn the heat down. It'll be fine. Now it feels very sexy to take a spoon and then kind of just like a spoon over the basting juices. Oh, looks pretty, feels nice. Sometimes I do it just because I feel really classy, but for what it's worth, I've found that flipping the steak constantly in the butter does the exact same thing. And I don't care that all this violence is causing the two or three main muscles of the ribeye to separate from each other, because I like to separate them on the board, you'll see. All right, have a poke. Yeah, I think we're about done. So I'm going to kill the heat. Out you come, you steaming hunk of Jesse's meat. I'm just going to let that rest for a second. Now one thing that I do differently now is I used to throw away this butter like right away. I'd pour it away to keep it from burning and stinking up the kitchen, but now I just take it off the heat. I save it and I let it cool down for a little bit. All right, we can kill the ventilation. Though honestly, when you cook a thicker steak like this, because you do it a little bit more slowly, you don't need to get the pan crazy hot, you're less likely to make a bunch of smoke and set off the smoke alarm, which is a real problem when you try to cook a steak at home. So the reasons people give for resting meat before you carve it, some of them strike me as a little bit questionable, like redistributing the juices. I'm not really quite sure what that means. What I know happens for sure is that the juice that's inside of the meat becomes more viscous as it cools, and therefore it'll cling in a more thick layer to the meat as you drag meat around inside those juices. It's a way of helping the meat to, in effect, absorb more of its own juices that will inevitably spill out over the course of the cutting. Because they will be thicker and more viscous when they're cooler, they will cling to the surface of the meat in a nice, thick, luscious layer. The way that I carve has not changed very much. I like to separate the muscles, go around, trim out the really big blubbery bits of intermuscular fat. Over here on the interior of the cat muscle, there's some gristle that I'll carve away. Over here, there's a lot. Now I've got these nice three pieces of pretty clean meat. Move it over here. Now what I'll do is just chunk this up, the spinalis muscle here, which is my favorite, nice thick pieces. And then over here on the eye muscle, I'll do thick slices. And I try to keep the slices together just to retain heat and also keep the pink coloration from oxidizing. Medium rare meat can be actually medium rare, but you can't really tell either because the color of the light is too blue or because the slices have been allowed to oxidize a little bit and that pink color has gone away. And then to finish, what I like to do is take this butter that I saved from burning. It's now been infused with all of the garlic and it's got beef fat and stuff in it. I'm just gonna drizzle this right on over kind of like a sauce. Oh yeah. Fresh pepper. I like that too. And then whatever kind of cool crunchy salt I'm into that week. This week it's this, but there's so many cool salts in this world to be had. We'll get a nice thumbnail while we're at it. And I just love the heterogeneity of having little sparks of salt, crunchy salt on top as I eat my meat. Sometimes I don't season it at all before cooking. I have all of my seasoning in post. And then rather than toss the steak in all of these juices like I used to, I just kind of leave it. And then as I eat it, I drag the pieces through the juices on the board. That keeps everything warmer. And yeah, I totally just eat it off the board or me and Lauren will just share it off the board. Would you like that, hon? Is it a fatty piece? Oh, that's a fatty piece. Here, I'll eat this one. Here, I'll take this one. Now, when I get 100% grass-fed beef, I usually don't use this much butter because with grass-fed beef, you get more of the short-chain fatty acids in the fat that actually have flavor, smell, aroma that really enrich in the experience of eating the steak. With a grain-finished kind of standard American beef like this, fattened on corn, has its benefits, makes a wonderful texture, makes a very kind of clean, standard flavor, but it doesn't have many of those short-chain fatty acids that give it flavor. So I supplement them with dairy fat. Dairy fat butter has tons of shorter-chain fatty acids. And honestly, if you're looking like all of the great classic steakhouses, their secret is pretty much butter. All right, so there you go, Internet. If you want to argue about this steak recipe, go ahead. Just leave me out of it. I'll be here.