How To Cook Like A Man

Okay, sorry about the retrograde title but the spouse loves it when I do the whole cooking-red-meat-with-fire thing, so it really does fit with what's going to be written. And now that I've got a pretty solid and replicatable technique for grilling steak, I'm ready to share it.

First of all, you're going to need meat. We prefer buffalo, like the meat that gets sold by ranches like this one. It's generally much leaner, more intense and also easier to digest than cattle. We buy our buffalo wholesale, a quarter of a beasty at a time -- which compromises the quality of the meat a bit as we're eating it out of our freezer for quite some time, but overall it's not bad, it saves a lot of money, and is delightfully organic-enough meat.

Besides, never mind the freezer, step two is Improve the Steak with Salt. It's a brilliant little trick that even works. Before you start your grill, lay out the steaks you're going to cook and encrust them with a hefty layer of rock salt. The magic chemistry does wonderful things to the meat. When you're ready to start grilling 25+ minutes later, thoroughly rinse the salt off, pat the steaks dry (or rather less-wet) with a paper towel or somesuch and toss them on.

But we're not ready to toss them on yet because we've not started the BBQ. So let's get some hardwood lump charcoal, a BBQ grill for two, a few eggs' worth of cardboard egg carton, and a chimney starter. You'll also need matches or a lighter, take your pick. Now it's time to play with fire...

• Open the bottom vent of your grill at least halfway. Make sure you can see through it. We need air to get through there to creat a nice updraft.
• Take the top grill off of your BBQ to access the charcoal pit. If there's charcoal already in there, load it into your chimney starter. (I use tongs for that because I don't like getting my paws all sooty.)
• Top off your chimney starter with fresh charcoal. You'll probably want it full or almost full, but that really depends on how big your starter is compared to how small your grill is. I go up to about 90% full on my starter, which is just a cheap little thing that looks like it was made by a high schooler in metal shop -- but it still works great.
• Separate the egg-cups of your egg carton and tuck them up in the bottom of the chimney starter as your kindling. Egg carton works better than newspaper because it's heavier and less likely to blow away, is covered with rather less greasy ink, and has a nice shape to ensure that pockets of air exist for the fire to consume.
• Set your loaded chimney starter vertically in the BBQ charcoal pit, egg cartons at the bottom and charcoal at the top.
• Light the egg carton in several places around the base of the chimney starter. What's going to happen, in short, is that the heat from the fire is going to be travelling upwards but will be contained by the chimney and thus focused on the charcoal such that they'll have a nice long-starting burn. As the heat rises and take the air up and out with it, air from below -- remember those open vents? -- will be sucked up to replace it such that the fire has a source of air to keep heating the charcoal.
• About 20+ minutes later, the heat should've ignited all of the charcoal. You'll know it's ready when the charcoal on top starts turning white. At this point, very carefully pick up your chimney starter just by the handle and spill out the flaming hot charcoal into your BBQ. Set the chimney starter aside.
• Put the top grill (it is clean, right?) on the BBQ to start heating up.
• Close the bottom vent 40-60% of the way -- we still want an updraft, but only a very little one. Too much air will result in our charcoal burning faster, but now that we've got the charcoal started, our goal is to maintain its temperature. You may want to partially lay the BBQ on top of the BBQ (with its vents open) to further reduce the amount of air that's fanning the flames. I do not recommend fully putting the lid on at this point. Just lay it on at a jaunty angle or something.

You'll notice that there was no lighter fluid used, either on or in the charcoal. This is because lighter fluid is a chemical abomination that adds a very nasty sharp flavor to the meat. The fantastic physics of the chimney starter trump the mediocre chemistry of the lighter fluid. Really they do.

Okay, so now we go inside and rinse our salty meat because we want to taste great meat, not salt. Stick it with a fork a few times so you know how it feels raw and then take it out and slab it on the grill. Close the grill lid, but leave the vents open. Rotate the lid so that the vents are as close to directly above the meat as possible -- if you visualize the air going from the bottom vents to the top vents, you want it going straight through the meat, not escaping off to the side.

Now you may want to add some grill effects to your steak. For our season opener, here's what I did:

• Take a shotglass. Because shotglasses are fun.
• Fill it halfway with olive oil. This is sticky and fatty without being unhealthy, and olives have a good flavor to go with meat -- though you wouldn't really know it until you've had a green olive relish on a steak sandwich.
• Add a bit of Worschester sauce. This is our augmented salt above and beyond what minor residue was left over from salting your steak.
• Put a lot of garlic powder in. It goes well with the olive oil.
• Put even more oregano in. I'm an oregano fanatic. Feel free to substitute whatever leafy herb you prefer -- I suppose basil or rosemary would also be popular choices.
• Grind a dash of black pepper on the top (or use more of it if you're a black pepper fanatic).
• Stir the shotglass with a toothpick or somesuch.
• Now drink that nasty mix and... wait, no, take it outside for the meat. Don't actually drink it at all. Really. Don't.

Pour about 2/3rds of your mixture on the top of your meat which should be turning a nice shade of brown and making pleasing "sizzle" noises. When the meat is mostly brown, turn it over to finish cooking and pour the rest of your mixture on the already mostly-done side. Then close the lid and go get a knife and a fork. The next time you see your meat, you'll be cutting it open to ensure that it's done well enough to your liking. If it's not adequately done, turn it one last time to let it finish up. You should never have to turn your steak more than twice.

Please note that the amount of time meat needs to cook in this manner is based primarily on its thickness so I can't really advise on how long the actual cooking takes. If you want a quicker-cooking steak that gets more done and chewy, go thin. But ever since I've gotten the coals to behave themselves consistently, I've been going for thicker steaks with rarer cookings -- the goal is to sear the outside of the steak to seal in the juices while getting the whole thing hot enough to kill anything nasty that's festering inside of it. And if you're anywhere close to getting a good searing, then you won't have to turn your steak more than twice in the process of getting it cooked.

So there's your steak. Offload it to a platter, put the lid back on top of the grill but don't close the vents yet. Take your steak in and enjoy a proper meal. Things that go well with steak would include:

• Red wine. I'm a big fan of Australian wines, but they've kind of flooded the market. As a result, we're picking up more wines from South Africa lately. I'm particularly keen on Indaba's reds as I've had their Shiraz, Merlot and now Pinotage and they're all quite lovely. (Just to clarify, they're the bottles with the swirled logos.)
• Bread, either a white baguette or a ciabatta (with olives!), maybe a sourdough. The bread soaks up the extra tasty juices that would otherwise make a mess of your plate.
• Cheese, the sharper the better -- though this varies by taste. I've only recently acquired a taste for Stilton cheese, but it was brain-bendingly good with the Indaba Pinotage.
• Green olives, stuffed with either blue cheese (in leiu of the cheese directly) or garlic (if you're skipping the cheese to stay kosher). But really, if it's just you and the mistress (really, what did you think "Mrs" was compressed from?), go for the potent cheese -- as far as I know the original kosher law was regarding not boiling baby critters in their mothers' milk, and we're just eating cheese with our fantastically BBQ'd steak from a buffalo which is hardly the same thing.

You'll notice that there isn't much in the way of salad with this meal. That's because we're cooking like a man and frankly steaks and salads don't do well together. If you want more plant matter, try any of the following: orange bell pepper (before the meal), roma tomato (before or after the meal), or a mango (after the meal).

This is the part where you go nom nom nom nom nom.

Okay, now that you're well-fed, it's time to step back outside and close the BBQ vents now that they've pretty well sterilized and carbonized the grill.

Unless you want to toast marshmallows over the coals for s'mores -- or just toasted marshmallows --which is the other thing we do a lot of. But that's more of a grilled-burger kind of activity. Grilled burgers are very similar to steaks, except that they need to really cook until done, only get turned once, go on very tasty ciabatta rolls, use fresh basil leaves -- not frikkin' lettuce! -- as greens, has cheese melted right onto it... and might use a raspberry ale instead of red wine.

Anyway, that's what works for me. You can probably get more and possibly better information by digging around any of the links I've included, or going and seeing what Ronnie Shewchuk does. After all, it was from reading about his penchant for hardwood charcoal that I got started on my path of using fire as a proper cooking tool.

Update: Now with pictures from my last BBQ!