How to make a tremendously awesome steak

Summer is here, and thus, barbecue season is here. We have two grilles, a gas and a Weber charcoal... but we haven't been using either. When it comes to making an awesome steak, we've found a method that works far better and more consistently than using a grille. Credit goes to Alton Brown of Good Eats fame for this one -- using a cast iron pan and a combination of a hot oven and a big gas burner.

Here's how to do it. Let the steaks come to room temperature, or thereabouts. Lightly oil the steaks, both sides. Add a nice salt, kosher works very well. You can do the oil/salt when you take the steak out of the fridge, or just before you cook it. Take a cast iron pan (no screwing around here, cast iron is the ticket, and it needs to be properly seasoned) and put it in the oven which you preheat to 500 degrees. Once the oven hits 500 degrees, you pull the pan out and put it on the biggest burner you've got on the highest setting. The key here is HEAT and lots of it. Throw in the steaks, and don't move them for 45 seconds. It's at about this point that you realize the big downside of this cooking method - SMOKE. Better have the windows open and a strong fan.

After the first 45 seconds, flip the steaks, let them sit in the pan for another 45 seconds, then move the pan back into the 500 degree oven. Two minutes later, open the oven, flip the steaks, and wait for another two minutes. At the end, pull the steaks out and put them on a dish. (now is a good time to add some pepper. You can do it before cooking but run the risk of burning the pepper) Cover the steaks with aluminum foil (in a pinch if you've run out, a shiny pan that covers the steaks works like a charm) and let them "rest" for at least three minutes.

Once the steaks have rested, dig in. We always use a delmonico (rib eye) steak, about an inch thick, and wind up with a rare to medium rare steak which is incredibly tender and juicy. And, thanks to the incredible amount of heat we've thrown at it, it's beautifully seared with a nice crust. If you like steaks more well done, I guess you'd probably have to leave them on there longer, but I don't know. Since I kinda see that as a waste of a good steak, I won't be doing any experimentation, either!

As long as your cast iron pan is reasonably well seasoned, you'll have no problems with sticking, and I've found that the more steaks you do, the better the seasoning on the pan. After many, many seared steaks, our cast iron pan is now far less likely to have anything stick to it than even our best teflon pans! This is also a pan which spent several years in our basement, where it developed some pretty nasty rust. I cleaned the rust off, then re-seasoned it, and it's working like a true champ.