How-To Cook Steak in Cast Iron Like a Pro

Do you want to know how your steak from a nice steakhouse is always so delicious? Chances are they are searing and basting the meat with butter, herbs and garlic and using high quality, marbled meats. This is the way that professionals cook steak to serve the most flavorful, tender, and delicious cuts of meat.

Choosing your steak is important for flavor. I personally like grass fed and Choice grade meat. Grass fed meat has a higher protein content, and more flavor, but it can be difficult to get a Choice grade out of a grass-fed cow.

What are the grades of meat?

For USDA grading of beef there is Select, Choice, and Prime. None of these grades are related to quality as you may believe, but are related to the fat content of the meat. Select will be the leanest and Prime will be the most fatty. Choice would typically be the most common grade you will find at a restaurant, with a mix of Select and Choice being the most common at the grocery store. There is also the option for the beef producer to not grade their meat. This would be called No-Roll or Ungraded. This also doesn’t refer to the quality necessarily as there is significant cost involved with the producers/farmers to have the USDA come in and grade, so you may get very lucky and get choice or prime quality beef in a No-Roll package at a lesser price because the cost wasn’t incurred by the producer/farmer.

What is Marbling?

Marbling is the fat that is throughout the muscular tissue in the meat. As stated in the grading, Select would be the leanest and therefore the least amount of marbling while prime will have significant marbling. There is also Wagyu or Kobe beef from Japan that are extremely marbled where there can be more fat in the steak than muscle. These steaks would need to be seared very quickly on high, high heat, so this tutorial isn’t really for Wagyu or Kobe.

Which cut of meat should I use?

For this example, I used a T-bone steak, but you can really use any middle cut meat. Middle cuts come from, you guessed it, the middle of the cow and are typically used for steaks. Things like Strip loin, Tenderloin, and Rib Roast are all middle meats that are the most tender and, typically, the best for steak. Strip loin is cut into steaks known as New York, Tenderloin into Filet, and Rib Roast into Ribeye. A T-bone steak is cut on the bone, with one side being Filet and one being New York. A Porterhouse steak is a larger version of a T-Bone. Usually the weight is higher and the Filet side is larger.

Choosing your skillet is also very important. I like to use a Lodge Cast Iron Skillet, the 10″ size is large enough to fit a couple New York strip steaks or one big Ribeye or T-Bone but if you want a larger pan to fit multiple steaks grab a 12″ Cast Iron Skillet. If you don’t have a cast iron skillet, that’s fine, but you wont achieve the nice crust you get from a cast iron. I suggest using the thickest metal pan you have as a replacement.

Now that you know all of that, you’re ready to get started, so grab your cast iron and get cookin’!

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