Literally, I know nothing about cooking or grilling.  I always like the fillet when I go to a restaurant so I'm thinking that's what I'll pick up at the store.  What do I do with it once I get it home?  I have a gas grill (wife uses it, lol).  How do I marinade it?  What do I marinade with?  Suggestions for what to put on the steak while I'm cooking?  Just everything, beginning to end of the process???

We just built a really nice fireplace at our pavilion and my ultimate goal is to have friends over and cook them steaks on the hearth of the fireplace, but I figure I'd better learn to just grill one first!

Not much to it.

Heat grill, grill meat.

You can make it more complicated, but that's pretty much it.

A little olive oil, salt and pepper.  Sear at 600 degrees.  Easy peasy.

Lay meat out a couple hours before cooking. Season with garlic powder, season salt and black pepper. Put charcoal on one end of gri and start it. After coals ash over lay steaks directly over Heat until you sear one side then flip. After steaks are seared on both sides move them away from coals and cut all air supply off and wait! Do not over complicate it.

get a cooking grate for your fireplace. get some steaks. season steaks to your liking and let them sit out while you get the fire going(position the fire so that you can have a warm zone and a hot zone on the cooking grate). once the fire is going(or has turned to coals depending on your preference), put the cooking grate in place and wait at least 10-15min for the grate to heat up. after the cooking grate has heated up, cook your steaks. some folks like to sear(form a light crust on the meat over high direct heat) first then finish indirect. some like to cook indirect then sear(often called a reverse sear) just before removing from the heat. either way, after removing steaks from the heat, let them sit/rest for 5-10 minutes before serving. cooking time will vary depending on how thick the steaks are cut, what cut they are and how hot your cooker is.

Lay steaks out and sprinkle liberally with sea salt and ground pepper. Let sit for a few hours to let the salt draw the juice. Heat grill or cast iron to hot, lay steak in pan or on grill for about 10 seconds on each side. Pull meat off heat, let sit for a minute, serve. Blue rare is best rare

First, check for Penis, you may lack one.  Second, learn how to grill a damned steak.  

LOL, I deserve that!  

Thanks for the replies.  I really thought it was necessary to marinade it in some special concoction overnight?

Marinate tough cuts like flank or skirt (flank marinated in italian dressing is nice)

 








 

I recently had a friend get an expensive Sous Vide machine and tried to show off cooking some Eye of Round "Steaks".  Needless to saw what they ended up with looked like a chewy mess.

My number one piece of advice is to learn what steaks (of various cuts) are supposed to look like and how to spot a good one.  I'll give you a quick primer on the steaks you want to be cooking (at least in my opinion).

I'm not a huge fan of Strip Steak but I'll eat it.  Cook it medium rare after letting it rest for a while/seasoning it.  It's mostly about the quality of the cut, seasoning and doneness than it is about what you use to cook it.  Gas, charcoal, cast iron on stove top, etc,....I've had great steaks cooked on everything.  You can't fix and overcooked or a bad cut of meat.

Average NY Strip Steak You'll find at most grocery stores.


T-Bone - Just to get you looking for it steaks are classified according to marbling (which is fat veins that go through the meat and make it more tender and delicious after cooking properly.  This is prime because of the white marbling going through it.  Also I kinda think of a T-bone as a strip, with a T-shaped bone and a little bit of tenderloin on the other side.


Porterhouse - I think of this as very similar to the T-bone but like more because you get more meat and less bone.


Ribeye - My personal favorite cut of meat.  For the flavorful and tender crown of well marbled fatty meat on top.  


Tenderloin - I like tenderloin plenty.  It's fun to cook and eat and considering how lean it is....It's pretty damn tender.  Just expensive.

Always allow a steak to come to room temperature before grilling. Never put a cold steak on the grill.

please dont grill on high heat with olive oil

Not sure if serious?  

Are you saying cook on low heat in water?

Olive oil is no-go with high heat, I believe is what he is saying

http://authoritynutrition.com/is-olive-oil-good-for-cooking/

I use extra virgin olive oil all the time.

Alton Brown says "stay in your fucking lane" amateur.  

http://www.marcelsculinaryexperience.com/alton-browns-cast-iron-steak/

this then let it stand awhile after cooking.. this ain't rocket science

I'm dragging my oven out to the porch next time I try that... I couldn't see across the kitchen last time





 

No marinades.
Super hot fire with lump charcoal.
Let steaks get up to room temp and dry with a paper towel
Do not season with salt until they are ready to go on the grill (salt pulls moisture out and starts to cure outside.)
Salt, pepper, and maybe garlic salt and cayenne
No olive oil for me, gets bitter when you burn it.  Smokepoint is below 400F.
Sear each side to gear grill marks, then rotate 45 degrees to cross hatch.
Pull off steaks, let them rest for 5-10 while you get the fire down.
Place back on indirect heat (400-500F) until 5F below Med-rare.  If they're really thick, I'll finish them on their sides.
Pull it 5F before your desired temp, and let sit for ten minutes.  Top with a little butter.

A lot of high end restaurants do the reverse sear method......bake before sear.  

Here's a good article for you:  http://grillinfools.com/blog/2013/06/20/how-to-grill-the-perfect-steak/

So many things wrong with this post it's hard to know where to start. Won't disagree with the penis remark though...

Listen, Olive oil is great, but it's got to low a smoke point for grilling.

Use vegetable oil.

Don't use garlic.

Use KOSHER salt.

Screw charcoal. You can't get enough temperature or the control necessary to properly cook a steak.

You can't possibly tell someone how long to cook a steak if you don't know the cut, the thickness and prefered doneness to which the person wants it cooked.

Here's what I do.



Buy quality meat. I like Ribeyes, usually prime, but choice is fine too. It's not necessary to buy graded meat. If you can get decently marbled ribeye from the mexican meat market down the street, do it. That's fine.

I like to keep my steaks in the >1" thickness range. Too thin and it cooks too quickly and you have trouble hitting the proper doneness in that short time.

For 1.25-1.5" steaks, which is what I usually get, set them out on cookie or cake racks over a cookie sheet. Season with freshly cracked or ground pepper from your pepper mill. (Or secret: use a coffee grinder to grind peppercorns if you don't have a mill.) Also season fairly heavily with Kosher salt.

Kosher salt has larger salt crystals which don't just disolve into the meat like table salt does. It actually remains on the surface of the meat which IS what you want.

Let the steaks sit for an hour. Flip them. Season the other side. Let them sit another hour.

Get a PROPANE or NATURAL GAS grill upwards of 400-500*F. This is possible with charcoal, but you better be on your damn game keeping that temp up or your steak will cook unevenly.

Use a kitchen towel to wipe vegetable oil on your grates just before cooking.

When you're ready to grill, pat dry your steaks. Take all the moisture off the surface of the steaks. If you don't do this, the moisture will boil off and the heat won't transfer to the meat in order to brown it. You will wind up with steamed steaks rather than grilled. Ever received a grey steak? That's why. Then, drizzle a 1/2 tsp of vegetable oil on each steak and coat it with it. The vegetable oil acts as a conductor of heat and helps you get the sear caused during the Maillard reaction. This is critical. This is where a tremendous amount of flavor is generated. DON'T USE EXTRA VIRGIN OLIVE OIL. It stops being a conductor and starts burning at about 405*F at the very best. That's not hot enough to get the Maillard reaction to happen properly. Your steak will taste burnt even if it's not. Plain canola or peanut oil is better. If you must use olive oil, make sure it's very very light oil. Don't use extra virgin. I like safflower oil or soy bean, but vegetable oil works well. At this point you're ready to grill.

Steaks go on. 1.25" steaks will be at Medium Rare in 11 minutes. You want a 60/40 split of that time. First side does 60% of the 11 minutes, so ~6.6 minutes for the first side, 4.4 minutes for the second. Now, for each one of those sides, split that cook time in half and at the halfway point of each one of those cook times, rotate your steak 90*. That gives you the pretty cross hatching grill marks. (So, 3.3 minutes, rotate 90*, 3.3 minutes, flip, 2.2 minutes, rotate 90*, 2.2 minutes, pull 'em.)

When you pull your steaks, give them another sprinkling of kosher salt (because juices will have left them and run off with some of your seasoning.) Wait about 5 minutes to let the steaks settle and then dig in. Don't tent the steaks with foil or put them in the oven while resting. Leave them on the countertop or on the table. Foil increases convection and you'll continue to cook your steaks if you tent them with foil.

Trust me on this. I spent about 2 years perfecting steak grilling a couple of years ago. I hit on this method and never looked back. You don't need seasonings like garlic salt or cumin or any other stuff. Use fresh pepper and kosher salt. Don't use olive oil. Use a gas grill of some kind. I know charcoal is romantic and awesome and shit like that but it just works better with gas.

/EOT

Appreciate you having a sense of humor about it! :-)  

 

This is the biggest thing for me. I season the majority of my meat (beef, pork, poultry, fish) with only salt and pepper. You don't need all the other crap. It's fine if you WANT it, but don't think it's necessary



Kosher salt is the greatest seasoning known to man. Use it, and not sparingly



 

What kind of crappy charcoal are you using?????

I'm searing at 1000F+ in a Big Green Egg.  45 seconds per side, pull, and rest for 10 minutes while the fire snuffed out.  Put the steak back on at 400F-500F indirect.  This produces a nice seared outside, about 1mm of grey, then a perfectly red center.  No gray->pink->red->purple->red->pink->gray......just gray->red->gray.  Learned the sear-bake (or bake-sear) from the guys at really high end steak places.

BTW, I agree with you on the NOT using the olive oil, but I don't use any oil.  Maybe some to season the grate, but not on the steak.  Tired avocado oil??  That stuff is supposed to have a 500F+ smoke point.  And yes, don't use garlic or garlic powder, it will burn; but garlic salt will be ok.

it's good, but so far, I've found that I prefer coarse ground pink Himalayan salt(for me it has a little more bite than the kosher w/o overpowering the meat). I have a prepackaged grinder of bacon salt set on coarse that I have yet to try(waiting for an occaision to get some good steaks to try it on), but I have high hopes it'll be awesome.

I will respectfully disagree based on my personal experience as well as what I have learned from others.

Yeah. I can easily get 650 degrees at the grate on my BGE.

Ever seen a Himalayan salt block?  A client of mine bought me one--it's fun to play with, but so far all I've really had success with is shrimp and scallops.  Anything that has any fat come render out of it will melt the salt, then reabsorb it.  The picture below looks cool, but it was a failure.  Very salty.  Sometimes if I'm making some really thick filets, I'll sear on each flat side over the charcoal, then slowly roll the side over the 500F+ salt block to give the side a similar effect of bacon.  Never had a better way to make scallops though--it's perfect for that.

Playing with his meat!

no, never had a whole block. only the crystals and grinder I was given.

Reasonable responses to my post. I was sure it would raise some responses. Agree with them all. My discouraging the use of charcoal is because the average duffer doesn't have a BGE that is essentially a ceramic oven that's outside, nor does he had the ability to properly control the temp on a charcoal pit. If you can, more power to you and I respect that. I just suggest propane because it's very very easy and I don't think it loses much in terms of the flavor by going with gas over charcoal.

Thanks for the input guys!

No one mentioned 'never poke your meat"?

Seriously, if you ask 3 men how to grill a steak you will get 4 answers... and most likely NONE of them is right... and none is wrong either... every man has his preferred method, and if you don't agree with him you're clearly inferior and don't know anything.

That being said, I've been grilling meats for decades; I thought I knew how to properly grill a steak. But about a year ago I humbled myself, kept and open mind, and set out to the internets to learn if I really was doing it right. What I learned has produced the best cooked steaks I have EVER tasted in my life. The last year I've been cooking/eating steaks that taste better than high-end steak-houses and most certainly better than what I was doing before.

What is the trick? Thicker cuts grilled utilizing the reverse sear method ALWAYS win out over any other method. If you really want to learn how to cook a real steak then look here

Read that page, read his other pages, then read them all again. You will be turning out some premium quality steaks in no-time if you take that to heart...

Do you even Alton Brown 3 step bro?

1. Buy Good Eats cookbooks
2. Buy meat
3. Profit

On a serious note, olive oil breaks down at extremely high heat and can become bitter, I use clarified butter which, hey, is healthy too. Room temping a steak is an old wives tale.

UPDATE:

I grilled two choice ribeyes Sat. night following Phideaux_2003 outline and they turned out FABULOUS!!!!

Seriously, they were very tasty and it was easy to do.  Had a little trouble with the grill flaming up and I think it caused them to cook a little quicker than they were supposed to but all is well that ends well!

Appreciate all the replies and intend to incorporate some more of the advice in this thread each time I grill.

I will post some pics later tonight.

Here are a couple before and after pics!

As my second/part time job I grill for a high end tent-party organizer, we do million dollar Hampton's lawn parties and weddings, plus smaller equally fancy events and private chef service. Been doing so for 5-7 years now

Here are some observations:

I cook on all sorts of grills, depending on what the homeowner has or what our rental company supplies us. I'll say that having a GOOD grill is the most important non-human factor in cooking (edit: grilled food). To help you towards that end:

-a gas grill is either "good" or "bad" and a good gas grill usually stays that way.
(Edit to elaborate: a good grill has a wide range of heat control, lots of heat retention, accurate thermometer. There are countless bad grills, from lack of maintenance, bad heat control, hard/unsafe to light. Uneven heating is probably the worst, along with the inability  to retain heat.
-weber or viking are usually good to go and will last 10-20 years if taken care of
-if you grill a lot hook your grill into a gas line, the propane tanks can "cool down" over a half hour of use and the pressure loss takes away from high-end heat.
-make sure your grill's thermometer is relatively accurate, if it doesn't work replace it!

-I usually have more problems with charcoal, it is so variable in how it cooks depending on brand, age, moisture content, when it was lit. The flavor can be supreme but you need to have a plan and stick to that plan or your temps will be fucked.

Things I like in a gas grill:
-in a 3 burner, burners arranged front to back. Heats symetrically left to right, and the heat zones can go front to back.
-4 or more burners and left to right is better for setting up different heat zones, just know that in a given heat zone the back will be hotter even though the burner is the same.
-electric ignition if you get a flame out or whatever the electric ignitor keeps you focussed on the prime meat, not finding a grill lighter.
-accurate temperature gauge on the front for referencing
-counter tops are good but if you plan on using them have enough space for raw side & cooked side.
Rotisserie's and other accessories rarely get used... unless you really want to rotisserie chickens on the regular put that money into getting a better grill.

Procedures:
-put the grill where you can see IT, ANY SMOKE and the THERMOMETER, while you're in the kitchen on a cutting board or in front of the stove.
Heat your grill early, let get REALLY hot, and decrease the temperature until you have dropped down to the cooking range you plan on needing. This lets the grill body fully heat itself so now when you add the meat, all of the heating power is going towards the meat, not heating the lower tub of the grill's body. This can take 15-20 minutes.  
-make a plan for x minutes per side at Y heat to result in Z doneness and then follow that plan. Don't change your mind midway and add 2 minutes here, or a minute there, or.... When your cycle is over, if the meat is under cooked you can add time but if you modify your plan, that is where you forget the cook times and overcook the meat. If the meat is fully cooked and the cycle is not over yet, use judgement - meat comes off when it's done, not when the timer says!

Be realistic about what you can grill during one session. I like to cook a whole chicken butterflied at around 300 for an hour with plenty of basting. Sausages like low and slow too. Steaks go high and fast, and when I cook ribs I like to do it for 2 hours at 250 or longer. Shrimp or scallops go low and fast

Point is don't plan on cooking chicken, steaks, shrimp, all on one grill all at one time, you will have to sacrifice one of them for the others flavor/doneness. Only cook things that require somilar temp range and frequency of opening

I won't get into real recipe's, everyone has theirs that they love, it's a ford vs chevy thing.

Oh also get a meat thermometer, learn how to calibrate it with ice or boiling water and use it religiously.

All good advice... but I have to question the below...



LP is regulated to 6 oz/si on a low-pressure regulator (most grills and household appliances)... In order for LP to drop below this level (IE drop the pressure at the burner) the temperature inside the LP tank would have to be approximately -135 degrees F. I've never had this happen and I've even had tanks with a full sheet of ice on the outside from high-use applications that went on for a while... Heck, I grill all winter long, even in sub-zero temps and don't have an problems with the LP except one time I did have a regulator freeze shut on me (heat gun fixed that and once it was flowing I didn't have any problems)...

Maybe the propane tanks are just cheap, I don't know. A common issue I have while working using a random home owners grill is that after heating uo the grill and maybe even cooking a first course, after a while Ihave low flames, with no other real problems. Their tank seems heavy enough that it isn't empty when I go to jostle it but it just wont deliver good flame. When that happens I grab our spare propane tank we always keep on hand, and swapping tanks fixes this problem 99% of the time.

Usually the bad tank is just fine for hamburgers or whatever when it's reconnected sometime later, so my theory was that it suffered some kind of cool-down effect, like a Co2 tank would. The gas plumbed grills never seem to have this issue.

Sounds like an empty tank to me...

Right, except not empty. Come on, I know what an empty tank feels like, weighs, etc. I have also had tanks on my own grill at home that peformed poorly, and with bad pressure but plenty of gas left in them. It's just something i've noticed as an occasional thing. If you take a tank like that back to a place that refills the tank they will know there is propane in the tank still when they put it on their scale.

Good and clean tanks I like to refill, shitty tanks bring to a place that exchanges your empty tank for a full one and try for better luck.

Lets keep this about the food and xooking side of things, if ya wanna really analyze this propane thing PM me lol.

Here are the important things:
1. Let steak reach room temperature first.
2. Cook it on a HOT grill.
3. Don't overcook it.  Once it looks done on the outside, start poking it occasionally.  If it's still soft and mushy, it's very rare.  If it rebounds a little, it's more in the medium range, if it's solid/springs back instantly it's well done.  It will cook a little more once you take it off.

Do those three things, and not much else matters.  I cover mine in salt and pepper and don't add anything else.

When at work I get the opportunity to cook top quality, expensive cuts.

At home, I'm just on a different budget. One of the biggest challenges can be finding good cuts of meat without breaking the bank. A bad cut of meat sucks, if you put garbage in, you get garbage out, it's that simple. However I'm still shopping at stop & shop, and not the local butcher, special occasions aside.

Go early, and go often. Find out when the butchers put the meat out, and go right after that. Look at all of the meat, not just the first packages in each row. Maybe one package is cut a little thicker, or another has really nice marbling, or is discounted extra? Etc. Pick up the packages and look at them thoroughly.

Skip the big, lean cuts. For example my local supermarket has these big london broilers, they are affordable and look alright in the package, but they are ALWAYS tough as shit in my experience.

Consider bone-in. Bone in cuts are just tasty, the bone adds flavor and helps conduct heat, some cuts are even cheaper, but in cheap steaks keeping the bone around helps keep the flavor around.

I like to find thicker cuts when I can, a lot of supermarkets have these porterhouses that are like 1/2 thick... it just doesn't do the cut justice IMO.

I usually try to keep an open mind as I approach the meat case; whatever looks especially good is going to be what's for dinner.  

I didn't read the whole thread.  I find a thick cut and use the reverse sear method.  Check youtube for a few examples.

Filet Mignon, in my opinion, is best served seared/pan-fried on the stove top. If I'm cooking one filet, ill make combine a 50/50 mixture of oil and butter in a small cast iron skillet and get it up to temp, and sear all 6 sides, while spooning the oil/butter over the cut, until proper done-ness. Prep involves tying the filet (to make all sides even) , getting it to room temp before cooking, and seasoning (kosher salt and fresh ground black pepper), etc. I've eaten at some top-notch and world famous steakhouses, and I still think I cook the best filet.