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Hacking = coding for food.
Turn $5 steak to $50 steak with salt
51–60 of 144 posts
Re: Turn $5 steak to $50 steak with salt
#52Water dissolves salt, and some of it gets sucked back into meat via osmosis
WTF is wrong with people and osmosis? This is diffusion. Osmosis is diffusion of water and nothing else.
Also, "table salt tastes like shit" is quite true. I've been buying an unrefined sea salt for a while now, the difference is incredible. Flavor in foods, where before was mere saltiness.
Re: Turn $5 steak to $50 steak with salt
#53Finally a Hacker News article I can share with my Mom!!
Just don't share it with your wife .. she may take offense.
Re: Turn $5 steak to $50 steak with salt
#54Salting things a while beforehand so the salt penetrates it is a good idea in general. You're supposed to do that to basically any savory food, including chicken, meat, eggs. For big things, like prime rib roasts, you salt it a whole day ahead. So, this guy compared wrongly-salted expensive steak to correctly-but-very-heavily-salted cheap steak. Unfair. Also, in general, expensive steak isn't expensive because it's a…
A great way to cook a steak if you have good ventilation is to use a cast iron skillet and heat the skillet in an oven to 500 degrees. Brush the steak with olive oil ahead of time, and make sure it is room temperature (not fridge temperature). Pull the skillet out of the oven, put it on the stove. Turn the burner up on the stove, and cook the steak for 30 seconds on each side, then put the entire skillet back in the oven for 2 minutes on each side.
The steak will be tender and juicy, since searing it at such a hot temperature locks in most of the juices, similar to the way a wound is cauterized.
I only recommend you do this if you have a VERY well ventilated kitchen, as the amount of smoke generated will surely set off any smoke alarms in your house otherwise.
Sidenote: Why is it that a lot of modern kitchens don't have properly ventilated hoods that actually vent outside? It seems ridiculous that most of the hoods over stoves nowadays just recirculate the air back inside. When I want to cook, I want to cook, damn it!
Re: Turn $5 steak to $50 steak with salt
#55I'm having steak this weekend, will have to try this out. Educational and tasty (hopefully)!
Let us know how it turns out!
Re: Turn $5 steak to $50 steak with salt
#56Earlier quoted context omitted.
I was cooking at a two Michelin star restaurant last year where a large majority of proteins and vegetables were cooked sous vide. Don't underestimate the importance of a good salting, but sous vide will make everything you cook perfect, and consistent. There is a better home option now than the rice cooker + pid timer( which does not circulate water and leads to uneven cooking. http://www.sousvidesupreme.com/ This i…
Aren't you worried about the plasticizers from the bags?
Sous Vide sounds interesting, but I don't relish the though of eating known carcinogens that are leeching into my foods. BPA is a serious risk, and the FDA so far has refused to take much action on it.
It seems that corporate profits trump safety these days. How much rocket fuel is safe to drink in our public water supply? What are a few deaths against the right to corporate earnings?
Re: Turn $5 steak to $50 steak with salt
#57Salting things a while beforehand so the salt penetrates it is a good idea in general. You're supposed to do that to basically any savory food, including chicken, meat, eggs. For big things, like prime rib roasts, you salt it a whole day ahead. So, this guy compared wrongly-salted expensive steak to correctly-but-very-heavily-salted cheap steak. Unfair. Also, in general, expensive steak isn't expensive because it's a…
A great way to cook a steak if you have good ventilation is to use a cast iron skillet and heat the skillet in an oven to 500 degrees. Brush the steak with olive oil ahead of time, and make sure it is room temperature (not fridge temperature). Pull the skillet out of the oven, put it on the stove. Turn the burner up on the stove, and cook the steak for 30 seconds on each side, then put the entire skillet back in the…
Your instructions provide a perfectly reasonable way to cook a steak, but the theory on searing locking in juices has been proven false (see Good Eats or America's Test Kitchen). The purpose of searing steak is to invoke the Maillard Reaction which dramatically increases flavor:
Re: Turn $5 steak to $50 steak with salt
#58I've tried this a couple of times. It's nothing special. Your better off finding locally sourced fresh meat - it's usually as cheap and you will be able to find one you like. (also, incidentally, I'd say a good steak is as much about taste as texture. This sorta sacrifices one for the other)
What good does local sourcing do? Is it freshness? I'm not a meat expert, but I would guess that a big company with an economy of scale would be able to produce higher quality meat for a lower cost. Also, if you're sourcing locally from non-big brand names, don't you have concerns about their cold chain?
If you buy local you're much more likely to get beef that is grass fed, and not factory farm raised beef that is fed corn and lives in their own filth. You know in order to kill bacteria in ground beef, they actually use an ammonia bath, and they can only guarantee it will kill 99% of the bacteria? Somehow, the FDA thinks this is safe. What's the harm in 1% E. Cohli, after all?
Watch a documentary called Food, Inc. and become enlightened.
Re: Turn $5 steak to $50 steak with salt
#59Earlier quoted context omitted.
Locally sourced meat tends to be grass-fed or at least grass finished. It also tends to have WAY better living conditions than any commercial plant. A happy animal is a tasty animal. I highly suggest you watch Food inc. :-)
I grew up on a cattle farm. Is 3,000 head a "plant"? Was it evil because there was an "Inc" on the end of the name? A happy animal is indeed a tasty animal. That's why we raise cattle in dry pens (away from predators) with abundant fresh water and feed them carefully formulated food twice a day. Our cattle get better dietary planning than I do; they don't eat pure corn (as the term "corn-fed" might lead you to believ…
Call it what you want, but it's still a factory farm. Cattle are fattened on a corn-based diet to a point where they have extreme problems like heart disease and obesity that would normally kill an animal if it wasn't destined for the slaughterhouse already. Your beef still has to be treated and bathed in an ammonia solution to kill the E. Cohli that is everywhere due to the cattle living in their own excrement.
Or how do you deal with the problem of manure in the pens? Surely you can't keep an animal confined in a cage it's whole life and expect it to shit somewhere else?
Watch Food Inc. You will never want to eat "corn-fed" beef again.
Re: Turn $5 steak to $50 steak with salt
#60Liberally salting your steak is a fine idea, but where is this person finding choice ribeye for $5? Choice isn't "cheap". The $15/lb ribeye at Whole Foods is choice, as is pretty much every other steak you buy outside a specialty store. There's nothing at all wrong with it. This article never gets specific, but I get the impression the author doesn't really know what "prime" means: how well marbled the cut is with fa…
I usually just put a liberal coating of garlic salt on and grill at a low temperature, rotating every 2 minutes or so until the meat looks visibly moist. Turn the heat up to high at the end for the final 2 rotations and done.
I've had people fly cross-country (twice) for these steaks and it's really not all that hard. But it makes for an expensive summer season with lots of entertaining on my deck.
One guy was mystified as to why I wasn't using the popular Morton's method of high heat and turn once. Then he had one, came back the next weekend unannounced "just happened to be in the area" and tried to bribe me with a bottle of Santa Rita Reserva Cab (I know cheap wine, but good). Too bad I was out of steaks.
And yes, I usually get the on-sale cheap steak at the local grocery. So long as it's decently marbled it doesn't really seem to matter much what I get so long as it's not skirt or flank.