Steak au Poivre

If you don’t own it already, buy Alton Brown’s “I’m Just Here for the Food” and read it from cover to cover.  There’s a lot of stuff there that makes a good foundation for why a dish works, or how it can get screwed up.  Making this dish, I was reminded of how I started out cooking steak when I was using it to learn to cook in college, and how I confused the differences between searing and pan frying and it sometimes led to disaster.  Neither is very hard, and this recipe calls for the latter.  Also, this is very much in the vein of cheap, fast, good, and relatively healthy recipes.

• 1 fresh, large steak, ribeye or ny strip
• 6 shiitake mushrooms, sliced thinly
• 1/3 cup cognac (I like Remy Martin VS because it’s cheap and has a very bold flavor)
• 1-1.5 cups half and half (easy mode: heavy cream, hard mode: milk)
• Black pepper grinder

I don’t exactly follow either Julia Child’s or Alton Brown’s recipe, but I’ve made this a lot and settled on one I like.  Cut the steak in half with a sharp knife.  Grind peppercorns onto a dinner plate, and press the steaks down so the peppercorns stick.  Flip over and repeat so that it’s pretty evenly coated on both sides.  You can lightly salt the steaks as well, but some recipes don’t even call for that.  Put a tablespoon of olive oil in a saute pan on medium to medium-high heat.  This recipe will involve deglazing, so a metal pan will work better than non-stick, but I’ve even used a teflon coated wok, so don’t sweat it.  Once the oil barely starts to smoke, put the steaks in, with enough space between them, and give them 4 minutes a side.  Use a timer, and whatever you do, don’t touch the steaks. If you mess with them at all, they won’t brown properly.  Flip over at the 4-minute mark, and take them out to a plate a little before the second timer can go off for a medium steak.  When you take them out to the plate, the steaks will be rare, but it’s important to remember that hot food will continue to cook, so by the time the sauce is done and you start eating, the steaks will be medium.

If there’s a ton of grease and drippings in the pan, pour some of it off.  Let the pan cool a little bit.  Also, turn off the burner for the stove.  Pour the cognac into a separate cup, and pour the cognac into the pan, away from the heat.  This next part involves flames that can get a few feet high, so no loose clothing, long hair, flammable materials hanging from your ceiling, etc.  Put the pan onto the heat and turn on the burner, holding the pan firmly by the handle.  If you have a gas stove, tilt the pan slightly until it ignites (the fumes are what ignite it, so it shouldn’t take much).  If not, use a long kitchen lighter.  It’ll look pretty impressive, but if you have the pan at arm’s length, you’ll be fine.  Once the flames die down, scrape the pan with the browned cognac/steak juices stuck to the pan and get that flavor into your sauce base.  Pour in the milk or half-and-half, and stir until it’s consistent.  Put in the mushrooms, and turn the heat to medium-high.  You’ll want to stir to coat the mushrooms and make sure they cook, and keep the sauce bubbling and reducing for a few minutes.  The litmus test for sauce is generally enough viscosity to coat the back of a spoon, so just turn off the heat once it’s that thick and the mushrooms are cooked.  Pour over the steaks and serve.  I usually have it with some  rice to soak up the excess sauce and juices, and some green vegetable like baby bok choy or peas for contrast.  Easy difficulty is butter instead of olive oil and cream instead of half-and-half.  If you go the olive oil and milk route, and don’t eat the lumps of fat around the edges of the cut, it’s a pretty lean dish that’s low in fat and high in protein.