Two-Zone Ribeye Steak, Charcoal Charred and Butter Braised

Rib-eyes are one of my favorite steaks, mainly because they have a dynamic range of muscles in one steak, which I really, really like. They've got this longusimus in the middle, which is basically the loin or the New York. And then you have a cap here. They've got a tail. And I always forget what this little guy's called, but you only get it in the chuck side. So the first three, four, five big thick steaks on the rib roast have this guy too. Super, super, super yummy, super tender. I like rib-eyes generally cooked. Like a medium, you know, some lean meats, even if they're tougher, but some lean meats, you want like almost rare or raw because the more you set the proteins, the drier they get. With the rib-eye, if you undercook them, they tend to be a little bit chewier and gristly. All this fat inside needs to be softened and broken down a little bit. And it actually eats more tender if it's cooked to a little hotter temperature. Rib-eyes, because there's a bunch of different muscles, as it cooks, they can start to kind of fall apart on you a little bit. Like the spinalis, which is this cap here. If you were going to grill a ton of steaks, for a lot of folks, you got a bunch of them and you'd be moving them around all over the grill. You might want to trust them. That way they don't start to fall apart. But these guys are going to be good just the way they are. All right. First thing I got to do is I've got charcoal set and we're lit. I dumped a bunch of coals where I'm supposed to stand. So make sure you do that. For a two zone, you don't often want like equal parts, hot and cold. I like a third hot and two thirds cold. Rib-eyes, when you grill them, they're almost always going to cause flare-ups. So I need a lot of cold zone to hang out, to let them rest, to get them off of fire. So they're not feeling all, or not tasting bitter later with a bunch of soot. First thing for me, for this technique, butter goes in the pan. It's a lot of butter. It's fine. They're rib-eyes. But you basically want the rib-eyes after they char to be submerged in warm butter. Not hot butter. We're not frying. It shouldn't be boiling. It shouldn't be bubbling. The butter is going to be like 140 degrees or 155 degrees. Basically the temperature or 10 degrees hotter, you want your steaks. And that's what's going to mellow out the fat in the rib-eye, make them super succulent, and they're just going to hang out. And I might flip them or move them around, but I'll make sure the pan never gets that hot. And I'll monitor, not necessarily even the steak temperature, which I'll check, but I'll actually check under the steaks, which I'll show you in a second, because that's where the heat's coming from. So lots of seasoning. I like to push the pepper in too. I like to add my herbs to the butter a little bit later. The longer they cook, the less fresh they are. So I'll do butter and then steak, and then I'll add lemon and herbs while they're kind of hanging out. Because if I add them now, they just cook more and more and more, and I like fresh herbs. So I'll just wait to add the herbs. Nugget of fat. You don't have to have this, but we just trimmed rib-eyes, and this comes off the tail like this of the rib-eye. And this guy, you can use just a... Rib-eyes are so fatty. It's not super critical. But you can keep these too, and keep it in a jar and throw it in the fridge for later too. See how it's already catching on fire? Rib-eyes are fatty, and that's just a chunk of fat. Hot zone right here, really hot. Butter's melting. And I'm gonna have a little bit of extra cold zone here too, and I can even move this away. So I have some landing zone for my rib-eyes. So these go on, and they're gonna start flaring up. That's normal. It's okay. It's kind of good. So these rib-eyes are so robust that you want deep char flavor, and that's what I like this technique. I get this charred, pyrolyzed fat, super black and dark, and it also has this bright, herby lemon. So as this flare-ups start to pick up, I just move the steaks. Also grill marks. You know, it's really easy to get super nice grill marks, but I don't really like them. It reminds me of like 90s commercials. So I move them around a lot, and get like grill marks all over the place, you know? It's just a visual thing, but I want more like black char, not just like a couple little lines personally. So our flare-ups pretty good right now. You want this like mellow smoke, but again, we're not cooking the rib-eyes. We're searing them and charring them. So I like to rotate them, flip them around, and as they start to warm up, they're gonna start pouring fat off of them, rendering, and there will be more flare-ups, and that's why you want this zone over here. If you ever are cooking steaks, especially rib-eyes, and you start to get that black smoke and big fire, and you see that the steaks are turning black, that's really like a bunch of soot that's gonna be really bitter on the steak. You get them all black, you know, you turn around, and you're like, oh crap, I've got all these flare-ups, but the steaks aren't done. You can actually run inside and rinse them under a little warm water, and it'll make a huge difference. So I'm just gonna keep flipping and rotating, and they're gonna start to get a little bit more greasy and fiery. Meanwhile, I'm watching this butter. You see it's not totally melted yet. That's good. That means it's not frying. So this should be melted all the way pretty soon, and it'll be a nice landing zone for my steaks to kind of hang out mellow. You're just searing super hot until they're charred, and they look charred, but they're gonna be super raw and still ice cold in the middle, and you can even feel when you have steaks like this that they're, like, when they're tender or warm, like, they're still rigid, you know, because they're ice cold, and I just wanna have a lot of real estate to land steaks on if they start catching on fire, basically. We're gonna start to have more and more flare-ups as these start to render, but you have a spot over here that's not over the coals, you know? So they can hang out over here, they can drip, and they won't have a flare-up, and then you let this fire burn out over here. If you really wanna char the sides, like, a good way to do it is, like, to stack them, and just, I try to stay away from this. This is your deckle, you know, the really tender piece. These are gonna eat really, really nice. If you did leave big hunks of fat on it, you'd have more flare-ups, and you'd wanna render it, too. So you're gonna have to deal with it later if you leave big hunks of fat on it. These ribeyes have plenty of fat inside and hanging around. I don't need, like, one-inch chunks of fat in addition to that. If you grab this, you're gonna start to rip the steak apart, you know? So it's kind of how you're handling, or you can come under it, you know, and make sure you're grabbing the whole thing and just treating it more gently, because as it heats up, the fat's gonna render, the connective tissue's gonna start to break down, and your ribeye's gonna rip apart or fall apart as it warms up if you're tugging on it, you know? The tail, that super fatty nugget versus this deckle, this deckle, I like a little more rare. So sometimes you can just, the heat's over here, right? I can cook just the tail, too. And keep this deckle or the cap in a cooler area. You can kind of cook little localized spots on the steak more if you want. And that's the nice thing about having a focused heat source, too. So these are pretty much how I like them. Normally, I would just go right into the butter, but I'll pause for a second so we can look at these. But they're very raw, very rare on the inside. I'll probably go, like, 135 or 140, and that way you get a more tender ribeye, not a chewy, gristly, fatty one. That's even maybe a little hotter than I want, 170. But I'm gonna put the steaks in and we can pull it out. And this side's probably a lot hotter than that side. I'll probably just keep rotating this thing. Basically, this is what you do. You char them, looking really good, then they go in the butter. You guys ready for this? Let's do it. So I basically want a pan that's about the volume of my one or two or three or four steaks. And so I can put 10 ounces of butter in here and they're basically submerged in butter. You might wanna rotate the steaks a little bit, you know, because the bottom is gonna be hotter and that's okay, but you're gonna wanna move them around a little. If you have a wire thermometer, I actually don't put it in the steak yet. I put it under the steak. That's gonna tell you, am I cooking them too hot? And that's what you really wanna monitor. Right now it says 168. That's a pretty good temperature. I'm happy with that. That'll get me at one inch steaks or one and a half inch steaks. It'll bring me to probably a 140 degree steak temperature in the next 15 minutes, you know? So I got a hot side, right? And it's cold over here. And this is what I wanna monitor. So that's hot. I was just rotating over here. I just wanna make sure I'm either moving the steaks or moving the pan. So rotating a little bit, you know, because if I got a hot spot over here, this is just like a long rest. And this is where they're actually cooking. Start getting my fresh herbs in there. I like a lot of bay leaf. I'm just gonna shove rosemary in here. So your job here is just to make sure these cook as gently as possible. It's like a butter braise now at this point. These guys are, again, they're just gonna hang out until they're nice and ready. And the other thing I like about this is this cast iron pan. You can take it out, slice it, which we'll do in just a little bit, and put it back in the pan. And if you're outside hanging out or at the table, you can just serve it in this pan and it keeps them warmer, hotter, more succulent longer as a serving technique, which I also like. We'll check some steak temperature. We haven't done that yet. If you don't know where the center is, here's a good way to find out. You put your probe in and you watch what it says, and you'll see it's going hotter, hotter, hotter, hotter, hotter. And then if you pull it out, you can find a center. So that's at the bottom of the steak all the way through. And if I pull it out, it's getting cooler. Even by traveling the probe, you can see a range of temperature. And the lowest temperature is gonna be the middle of the steak, you know? So these are looking really good right now. I like a lot of lemon. You notice I didn't put the lemon in yet. Two reasons I found in this technique, the brightness of the acid, it'll start to deteriorate too, and it just sits at the bottom of the steaks. But also the lemon oil I really like. I don't like to cook it too long, just like the oils and the fresh herbs. I just like them fresher. But we're getting towards the end here. Put the whole nuggets in there. I also like to add chopped up parsley or whatever. It's like the ultimate charred, charcoal, lemon-peppered ribeye. Super yummy. You should be able to touch your pan handle all the time here. If it's too hot, the steaks are too hot, and you're probably frying them or cooking the heck out of them. This is full of fat. You don't wanna flip it into the coal, so maybe take it over here when you're checking the steaks. I'm just gonna give these guys another little rotate. And you can see all the butter whey all coating the whole thing, so I just give it a little rotate. I'm rotating for flavor, but I'm also rotating for heat and temperature. And you could have a much bigger pot with a lot more butter and have the whole thing circulating, but this is the minimum amount of butter, so they're totally covered. Probably getting to be about done. 120, this is like the temperature you'd pull in New York. A ribeye, I like it a little bit more because it eats better. At medium, just gonna be more tender and more succulent. So again, if you were wondering, you can put the bro under the steak. It says 168, it's probably cooler. Over here, see, that's 155. Watch this, this is gonna be real hot probably. See, 190, and that's it. Just hang out and let it rest. So probably a few more minutes. We could even go inside because there's enough heat energy in this pan and the butter that if I just leave it in here, it's gonna keep cooking and keep cooking for another 10, 20 minutes or something, so I don't really need any more of this heat. As long as they don't go over temperature, they're gonna get better with a longer hangout where all the little fatty cells are gonna start to break down, so they're just gonna get more and more tender. I'll do one last little check to see where we're at here. Very centers, you know, 123, 124, 125, and watch where I push it more. That's to the bottom of the steak. That's 140, which I like for a ribeye. We're looking good. We can eat, we can relax. It's a nice technique. Our ribeyes are ready. They've been hanging out, mellowing. Oh, yeah. We've got all that whey and butter on them. They're hot. These are gonna be like medium, you know, which I like for a ribeye. They're gonna eat better. I'm gonna just take this stuff out, carve the ribeyes, and put it all back in, because this is so nice and warm. We've got our longissimus major, our loin here. This is the eye of the rib. Ribeyes used to just be this cut, and this was a rib steak, and this was a rib eye. Now, if you just do this, it's called a spencer, but it's really just a tiny New York. I just like to separate out all these little nuggets. It's really four nice pieces of muscle here. Slicing muscle grain on all these is straight down, so I usually go a little bit at a bias. It just makes it even more yummy. Also, I don't do a bunch of thin slices. For some of these, I'll do, like, nuggets. So, I like a nugget for this spinalis, the cap, so I don't stress about perfect thin slices. I think they eat better in, like, these morsels. So, I'll slice them like that. I'll make them look pretty in a second so you can see, but I'm gonna put them back in a pan. See that temperature? That's what I like there, too. But this is our, you know, happy 145, which I think is great for a rib eye. It's the best. This main loin, the eye, maybe I'll do, like, a little bit more strips or slices for that. I'm going a slight bias because you will cut through the grain. Okay, that's one steak. So, this is what I like. Some of these pieces I'll just flip over. This guy can go right back like this. This guy, same thing. Flip them over. Everybody is gonna be very happy about that. Okay, and then we repeat. Same thing. Do, do, do, do, do, do, do, do, do, do, do. This guy, slices, but still bias. Again, just cutting through that muscle grain a little bit. If I cut straight down, that's not gonna happen. So, okay, and this guy's nice and hot still. It looks fatty, it is fatty, but there's a lot of acid in the bottom, too. And then some of these guys I'll just, like, tuck back in. I liked Kevin's move, too, the last couple days of the, once it's cooked, you can get rid of the stem on the rosemary and you can just put some rosemary back in there. But that's it. This is the rib eye. Super hot zone, charred, build up that carbon and get some pyrolyzed fat and some char going and then a nice rest in the butter that's nice and mellow. And I can serve it like this. This'll stay hot longer. So all these pieces of fatty meat, they're just like, not cold and getting all chunky on you, you know? Most foods we eat, on average, we like seasoning of like 1% salt by weight to the food. Fattier foods can often be up to 2% salt because the fat is a real salt suppressor. So fatty rib eye, you might want more salt. You know, lean filet, you can get away with very little salt. So I just tasted these. I think it needs a little bit more salt. I don't know where my salt went, but I can salt it at the table, too. That's our rib eye. That's the technique. It's a rib eye, which is fatty and dynamic and it's got multiple muscles and lots of extra fat and that fat merits a longer kind of rest and cook, a little bit higher temperature. I paired it with this two zone that's like hard char and a nice mellow rest. And I just have it with a bunch of fresh herbs and lemon and pepper, just to kind of mellow out all that fat and char. It's a really, really beautiful recipe and technique. You can do it with other hunks of meat. It'll work great for all sorts of fatty, cheap pieces of meat, but that's our two zone rib eye. It's kind of like a charcoal lemon pepper. It's really yummy stuff. I'm gonna eat it now. Normally, rib eye would be like already congealing and getting cold and greasy, but this is like so succulent. It's like falling apart. That's because it's sitting in this warm mass. It's gonna stay hotter longer. Mm. Oh my God. That's fricking good. I love a rib eye. Let's try a duckle nugget or a spinalis nugget. Mm. Oh my God. That's my favorite muscle. Mm. Yum. Subscribe to our channel and visit chefsteps.com for more tips, recipes, guides, and tools to help you level up in the kitchen.