THE LOIN IN WINTER
On January 6 and 7 in most of the United States and Canada, we experienced our first “polar vortex”, which is apparently a scientific term for “why did my fingers just fall off?”. It was minus 14 in Detroit, minus 11 in Cleveland, minus 16 in Chicago, and, well, you get the point. Several cities were warmer than the surface temperature on Mars where, unlike Grand Rapids, it didn’t snow.
This leads to a basic question for carnivores: if grilling is not possible, how can you cook that gorgeous steak that you bought on sale when you forgot that your car in the parking lot had two inches of ice on the windshield? The secret, of course, is Julia Child.
Recall that when we cooked the brisket our way, as opposed to Kevin’s, we seared it on the grill first, then finished it in the Gaggenau oven. link With steak, we fine tune that method. Because the steak will take minutes and not the hours needed for the brisket, the Gaggenau’s steam function is less critical.
Before we get into substance, a bit of digression. No one impacted American’s willingness to leave the Betty Crocker Cookbook behind more than Julia Child. She lived a remarkable life even before she made us aware that “pommes frites” were French fries.
Child was born into an affluent California family in 1912. During World War ll, she served in the OSS, the predecessor to the CIA, eventually being posted to Ceylon, now Sri Lanka. There she met a fellow officer, Paul Child, and they married in 1946. Paul was something of a gourmet and taught Julia the basics. When the State Department posted him to Paris, she became entranced with French cooking. She attended the country’s premier cooking school and met Simone Beck, who was working on a cookbook of French recipes for Americans. It was eventually published in 1961 as Mastering the Art of French Cooking. To everyone’s surprise, it sold—a lot. In 1963, the Boston PBS station debuted The French Chef, which won a slew of awards. Fortunately, parts of it can be seen on Youtube. Dan Ackroyd’s parody of Julia, with her screeching voice and physical ineptitude, is a Saturday Night Live classic.
In the book and then the movie Julie and Julia, an American’s obsession with cooking a different Childs’ recipe every day for a year is interspersed with flashbacks to Julia’s life. Trying 365 of the recipes is a bit much, but you should try the Beef Bourguignon, basically beef stew with a lot of character.
Where were we? Oh yeah, the steak.
The assumption is that the steak is thick, 1 ½ inches thick or more. Cooking that in a frying pan is problematic, at best. As Julia puts it:
“By the time a broiled or pan-fried thick steak is cooked through, the inside is dandy but the outside is too often blackened, tough, and dry. The solution is to brown it on both sides under the broiler and to finish it off in the oven. This works nicely not only for 2-inch steaks, but for other pieces of meat not thick enough to require actual roasting but too thick for successful broiling.” The Way to Cook, by Julia Child, 1989, Alfred A. Knopf, page 210
Another digression. Browning under the broiler is one plausible way to do it. I don’t like to broil, because we have always had an oven, and thus a broiler, beneath the cook top. This makes it awkward to check the status. Hence, I simply sear it on top of the stove in a large fry pan. (What I don’t use is a “grill pan”, which is a fry pan with raised ridges running through it. The sole benefit of this is that you have grill marks on the steak. Such pans are almost always over priced and, unless you find grill marks really exciting, not worth the cost. What we are trying to achieve is a seared steak which will seal in the juices and give it an appealing appearance. Beautiful stripes or diamond patterns are way down the list.
The process, as described by Julia, is not difficult. Pre-heat your oven to 375 F. Season both sides with salt and pepper. After giving the meat a good sear or broil (three to five minutes should suffice), finish it in the oven. It should take about 15 minutes for medium rare. Let it rest, of course, for 5 to 10 minutes, carve and serve. If you have a meat thermometer you trust, or an oven probe, you want the internal temperature to rise to 125 before removing from the oven. In the Gaggenau, I usually set the steam for 60%, but that is pure guesswork.
Winter is dreary enough to have to endure it without well- cooked meat. Carnivores of the world, unite! Onward with Julia.