No-Bull Steak Advice

There’s been no foodblogging in far too long. It’s time I did something about that.

So here’s TD’s recipe for the One True Steak. You won’t find any revolutionary new insights in the paragraphs ahead; instead it’s a synthesis of tips and techniques picked up from a variety of sources. It’s what I’ve found to WORK, more reliably and deliciously than any other method. Not only is it a sure-fire way of making an astonishingly good steak, it’s also cheap, easy and simple. Yes, really.

Let me start off by saying that in my world, steaks are filets. I have nothing against a good Porterhouse (which is about 1/3 tenderloin anyway) or strip steak, but when you can eat the very choicest cut with very little fuss and without breaking the bank, why eat anything else? Also, steaks are rare or blue rare, full stop. There are times when compromise and moderation are virtues, but this is not one of them. If you disagree, the “back” button is up at the top left of your browser window.

Now that the heretics and mental defectives are gone, here’s the whole process, from meat market to plate.

First, you want to buy a whole tenderloin and learn to trim it yourself. Buying “filet mignon” from the supermarket is a sucker’s game. Around here it goes for $18/lb, and about $12 of that is paying for the name. I get whole tenderloins for $5.50/lb and trim them up myself. If you don’t know how, watch Alton Brown’s “Good Eats” episode on tenderloin; it did a great job of explaining where and how to trim. Aside from the silverskin, there’s basically no waste; I use the chain meat and trimmings for stir-fry. Whatever won’t be eaten in a few days gets wrapped and frozen.

I like my steaks about 1 1/2″ thick, though there’s nothing wrong with 2″. Go thinner and heat management becomes a little trickier, and why would you want a thin steak anyway?

When you’re ready to cook, let the steak warm up to room temperature. A cold steak will need more time in the pan, and you’ll overshoot and end up with a medium or medium-well abomination. A wrap of prosciutto around the perimeter is optional, but a really nice touch.

Grab a 12″ cast-iron skillet, properly seasoned, and park it on top of your large burner at full heat for at least 5 minutes. You want that pan HOT, as hot as you can get it.

Thoroughly, and I mean thoroughly, pat down the steak. Get all the juice off of the surface. Water becomes steam when it hits the pan, and you want that steak seared, not steamed. Grey steak is not good steak. When you’ve got it as dry as you can, brush a very, very light coat of olive oil on the top and bottom.

The oiled steak goes down in the middle of the pan, still on full heat. Crack a window or turn on the exhaust fan, there’s gonna be a little smoke. Don’t worry about it. The magic number, on my stove with my skillet and my steaks, is 2 minutes and 15 seconds. YMMV. Flip it and cook for another 2:15 on the other side.

When the second side is done, the steak goes onto a plate and gets loosely covered with aluminum foil for 5 minutes to rest.

The finished product will look like this:
wrapped steak
And when you cut it open you’ll see something like this:

rare steakprosciutto-wrapped rare steak

That’s about $4 and 15 minutes of prep time. I really don’t think it’s possible to eat better for such a small investment of money, time and effort.

Computer geekery follows

Life remains hectic as all hell, and it’s only really in the last week that I’ve found time to finish building and setting up the new PC I began in… June? Damn, life really HAS been hectic.

So since I’m not exactly brimming with blogfodder, and since all this stuff is still fresh in my mind, and since a few friends have been curious about the new rig, here goes…

The Hardware

I went AMD for this build; they give you a lot more for your money at the low- and mid-range, because both processors and motherboards are significantly cheaper than Intel’s offerings. Yes, Intel is king if you must have the absolute fastest system in town, but you pay a pretty steep premium. AMD’s also vastly less asshat-ish when it comes to playing market segmentation games with CPU features. And they support ECC on their desktop processors, where Intel forces you to dump mega-bux on a Xeon rig if you want ECC.

I ended up with an Asus AMD 880G motherboard with SATA 3.0 and USB 3.0 support on the board. This is really just a bit of future-proofing; you have to spend cubic dollars to get a drive that actually *needs* SATA 3.0′s transfer speeds, and USB 3.0 peripherals still aren’t exactly commonplace. Still, they should come in handy a year or two down the road.

CPU is an Athlon II X4, giving me performance along the lines of a Core i5 at half the price. It’s sitting under a big, all-copper Zalman cooler, which does its job quite nicely; CPU idles at 33 C, motherboard at 36 C. No overclocking; it’s plenty fast enough at stock speeds, and I like low power consumption and cool running.

Next to the CPU are two 2-gig sticks of ECC DDR3 RAM, running in Chip Kill mode. That level of error correction might seem excessive, but… well, I’m a belt-and-suspenders kind of guy, and my computers basically run 24/7, only getting reboots after periodically recompiling the whole system. So yeah, memory integrity is important to me.

The onboard video is disabled in favor of an ATI Radeon HD 4350, which gamers will note was the bottom rung of the last generation of ATI cards. Why use one in a brand-new system? As a non-gamer, I couldn’t care less about frame rates in Crysis. I wanted dual digital outputs (DVI and HDMI), solid open-source driver support, and low heat and power consumption. The 4350 easily drives a pair of HD displays, has near-perfect driver support in X, and draws about 10 watts. It’s perfect for my needs. Dirt-cheap these days, too.

Plugged into the card are a pair of 23″, 1920×1080 LED-LCD monitors, which look gorgeous and use about as much power as a pair of night lights. Okay, that’s a slight exaggeration, but 25 watts per display is pretty good. And having 4 million pixels in front of me is DAMN good. Ah, the wonders of technology.

The machine boots from an OCZ Vertex 2 SSD, which is just astonishingly quick. Also hellaciously expensive, but… oh my, it’s worth it. So, so worth it. Basically, if you don’t mind paying a 60-fold price premium, per-gigabyte, relative to spinning disks, you get a machine that responds like it’s fucking TELEPATHIC. I think it actually slips up once in a while and runs a command before I finish typing it.

Of course, I’d have to eat dog food to afford an all-SSD system, so there’s also a Seagate 1.5 TB drive crammed full of porn various media files and documents. I have room inside the case for a couple more drives, though I’ll probably just replace this one with a newer, bigger drive when the time comes.

Optical drive is an Asus Blu-Ray reader, along with an external USB DVD burner that I’m carrying over from an old system. The Blu-Ray is, at this point, just future-proofing. I’m in no hurry to start buying my movies all over again. Hell, it might not ever really get used; optical drives are practically legacy technology already. I occasionally burn a DVD for a friend, but that’s really about it.

I put words into the box via my Unicomp Endurapro, which I absolutely love and blogged about earlier. Truly the One True Keyboard. There’s also a Logitech laser mouse on the desk, but it really only gets used for the occasional photo editing session or other task that requires really fine mouse control. Everything else is done via the Trackpoint in the keyboard or keyboard shortcuts. It’s really nice not having to move my hand back and forth from keyboard to mouse all the time.

All told it’s maybe a $1200 system, which is a good step above your typical Best Buy Special but still way below the crazy dollars that enthusiasts often shell out. For what I spent, the performance is just spectacular, mostly because of the very fast SSD. I’ll never go back to spinning disks, at least not for the OS.

And it’s getting late, I guess I’ll break out the software into a separate post…

Content

It’s a-comin’. Shit got hectic.

So much fun, so bloody exhausted.

Next year I will do a better job of planning for Blogorado.

Doing a twelve-day work week right before the trip, which itself consisted of one full day of travel, two days at Blogorado, and another full day of travel back to home, and then going right back to an unusually hectic week at work has left me just completely spent.

Let it be said, the trip was great. FarmGirl and all of FarmFam were wonderfully gracious, generous, and all-around awesome hosts. And damn good cooks. FarmMom’s chicken-fried steak richly deserves its reputation, and the scrappy nibbles are far tastier than calf testicles have any right to be.

The bloggers were all great, too. Every single person there was fun and entertaining and I wish I’d had more time to chat with everyone. We usually had three or four parallel conversations going on, all interesting and worth following, and it was impossible to take it all in. Hell, we could’ve kept going for WEEKS if that pesky “real life” hadn’t gotten in the way.

Sadly, real life came back with a vengeance and kicked my ass all week, so it’s off to bed for me…

We now return to our usually scheduled broadcast already in progress…

Twelve-day work week is behind me, thank $DEITY, and I’m using my days off to prep for Blogorado. Today’s big project was getting my Pelican 1750 ready for the trip. These cases come with three layers of foam inside. The top and bottom are used as-is, but the middle layer is meant to be cut out to accommodate the items you’ll be transporting.

I followed this guide over at arfcom, though I bought a commercial foam cutter instead of making my own. It worked pretty well, too. If I were doing it again I’d affix the template to the foam with double-sided tape or glue instead of tacks, since long thin parts like barrels can get a little wiggly.

The result:
Pelican case
Pelican case 2

The three shiny things are silica dessicant packs to keep the inside of the case nice and dry.

Here’s the templates and trimmings…
foam and templates

If you’re going to do one of these yourself, I’d recommend having a helper on hand to hold everything steady. The cuts are easy at first but get tougher the further you go, since the foam starts flopping around.

Fun and easy? Not particularly. Frankly, I’m just glad it’s done and I didn’t ruin anything.

A Desperate Bleg

Alright, I’m hoping to take a couple of rifles out to Blogorado in a Pelican 1750 case. I’ll be flying Delta one way and Continental the other. I can’t seem to get a straight answer on whether or not rifle cases are exempt from the usual oversize baggage fee. The airlines’ websites aren’t real clear on the issue, there’s conflicting information on the ‘net, and their “customer support” call center people can’t even seem to wrap their minds around the question.

Anyone know the straight poop? Got contact info for a clueful person at either airline? Anything?!? Someone’s gotta know…

Worthless Without Pics

As promised, here’s the .303 Brit.

A rollmark I never thought I’d see…

.303 British

And the .303 next to its big brother, the .450/.400 Nitro Express 3″. A very British pair.

pair of No. 1s

The Nitro Express on top has a 24″ barrel with a medium-heavy contour, while the .303 Brit has a light 22″ barrel. The big gun is also outfitted with a NECG white bead front sight and an NECG peep sight on the rear scope mount base. The .303 will be getting the same sight set-up in the next few weeks.

.303 an .450/.400

.303 Brit and .450/.400 rounds. Few know it today, but the original Cordite load for the .303 was almost a perfect Mini-Me of the standard load for the .450/.400. It drove a heavy, long-for-caliber 215-grain bullet (sectional density .318) at 2050 fps, while the .450/.400 launched a 400-grain bullet (sectional density .338) at 2125 fps, give or take.

I’m hoping to get both guns out to the range on my next “weekend” (two weeks from now) to get zeroed before Blogorado. The Nitro Express just got fitted with a new, slightly lower front sight and the .303′s never been fired, so both guns need some sighting-in work.

I did it again.

I wasn’t going to buy any more guns this year. Hell, the last two I bought haven’t even been shot yet for want of free time to get out to a rifle range. Then Ruger had to go and build something I’ve wanted for about 20 years, and only make one small batch…

2 1/2 years ago, in a post about things Ruger really ought to build, I said:

“And finally, build the No. 1 in .303 British, with a 26″ light-contour barrel, open sights and Alex Henry forend. Well, at least build one gun like that. Just for me. Please?”

Well, Ruger didn’t do exactly what I asked for, going with a 22″ tube instead, but otherwise my wish came true. A small batch of No. 1-As in .303 British was produced, mostly for export to Canada and Australia. Scuttlebutt on the ‘net holds that only 50 of the guns were kept here in America, for distribution by Lipsey’s.

So much for not buying any more guns this year. I dashed over to Top Gun Shooting Sports and asked them to check with Lipsey’s. The .303s were allocated, but fortunately Top Gun was able to snag one for me. Pix will follow as soon as I find some free time during daylight hours.

Frankly, I’m damn surprised that Ruger made these guns at all. The .303 calls for a groove diameter of .311″, vs the .308″ common to American .30 calibers. That means Ruger either had to tool up to make appropriate barrels or order them in from a vendor. Curiously, Ruger’s Mini-30 uses .308″ barrels instead of the .311″ usually used for 7.62x39mm. It’s odd that Ruger wouldn’t make proper barrels for the Mini-30, which has been in regular production for at least 20 years, but apparently they went to some trouble to get a very small batch of .303s right. In any case, I’m very, very happy to finally have my .303.

Relieved

After a few nervous days and $300 in vet bills, Clancy is back to his old self.

Oddly enough, I never could get him to touch his prescription wet food, but he’s taken to a prescription dry food just fine. I’m not sure whether I’ll keep him on it permanently. It’s expensive and only available from the vet, but apparently cystitis is pretty likely to reoccur after an initial episode.

Right now I’m just happy to have my little buddy feeling better.

:-

My little Clancy has feline cystitis. I rushed him to the vet this morning, where he got a bunch of fluids injected under his skin, along with a dose of antibiotics. He’s also going on a prescription cat food, at least for a short time.

Have any of you folks been through this with your cats? What treatment(s) worked best?