Grey Steaks are for Prisoners and Old Women

Today I adjusted my new Pit Boss portable propane grill so it was fit for a MAN to use, and I already have the results of the experiment.

I hit Walmart today because I needed a tackle box for my leathercraft stuff, and while I was there, I found a fat rib eye on sale. They were dumping it because it was too old. A sticker on the package said it should be cooked no later than tomorrow.

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA.

If you know anything about steak, you know that aging only makes it better. Walmart aged a steak for me and then charged me LESS for it. Unbelievable.

Steaks are aged in two ways: dry and wet. A dry-aged steak is allowed to age while exposed to the dry air of a refrigerator. It loses water, concentrating the flavor, and supposedly, enzymes naturally present in beef tenderize it. I don’t know if that last part is true. Of course, bacteria will work on it while it’s aging, and my opinion is that as long as they’re friendly bacteria, they will improve the flavor.

Wet-aging is the same process, except you wrap the steak so water can’t evaporate. It produces a juicier steak which is not quite as tasty. Women have pushed the market toward wet-aging, because they have bad taste in food and like things that are soft and juicy.

Walmart wet-aged my steak for me. If you want to wet-age a steak, here’s how you do it: leave it in the refrigerator. That’s all there is to it. Leave the plastic on it, and check it from time to time to make sure it’s not turning green.

I’ve been eating frozen broccoli with cheese sauce with my steaks lately, because I have a bizarre fondness for the dish, but today I decided to man up and prepare something better. I bought a big red pepper and a white onion. I cut the pepper in half. I cut the onion in thick slices. I smeared both with cheap (not extra-virgin) olive oil, and I salted and peppered them. Extra-virgin olive oil is not for cooked foods. Heat ruins its flavor.

I salted the rib eye heavily, added a touch of pepper, fired up my souped-up grill, and made myself dinner. I’ll post some photos.

Here, you can see flames curling around the heat diffusers in the grill. Yesterday, there was no way to make that happen. The grill had polite little flames just barely big enough to cook a steak. When I adjusted the grill today, it was hard to tell how much of a difference it made, but now that I see the grill in action, I can tell it’s much, much better. It turned the heat diffusers red hot. I love it.

Actually, maybe you can’t see the flames from the burner all that well, because they’re much smaller than the flames from burning fat. Anyway, the flames are way higher than they were yesterday.

Here, you can see the steak after I turned it. There are some issues that need to be dealt with. The employee who cut the steak for packaging made the disgraceful error of trimming the fat off of most of it. That left it with a pointy end that had more fat than the main part of the steak. The pointy end dripped a lot of fat on the heat diffuser, and the resulting flames burned the pointy end too much. I need to work around things like that in the future.

Mind you, the pointy bit still tasted wonderful, but it would have been better with a bit less carbon.

Here is the steak on my plate. I charred it as much as possible without going all the way to medium. It was not perfect, but it was very good. There was nothing at all wrong with it, but there could have been more that was right.

The steak had a medium-rare appearance, but because it was cooked on high heat, it was surprisingly hot inside. That’s much, much better than hot outside, cool inside.

Resting steaks is very stupid, so I don’t do it. I eat herd creatures; I do not behave like one. I dug into this steak as fast as I could. The outside of a steak should be very hot. If you really wanted a perfect steak, you would have to eat it right beside the grill, when the outside is hottest. This steak, although consumed a few minutes after coming off the flames, was nice and hot outside. Just as it should have been.

Steak chillers…I mean “resters”…complain that failing to rest a steak makes the juice run out of it. When I was done eating, there was probably less than a teaspoon of beef juice on the plate. I know, because I kept staring at it. I wanted to drink it. It was beautiful.

The whole resting nonsense is a ludicrous myth that claims millions of victims every day.

The vegetables were magnificent. That’s the thing about grilling. Everything is good when you grill it. I took a ferocious, sharp-tasting white onion and threw it on the flames for a few minutes, and it came off the grill sweet and juicy. The pepper was equally tasty. They really complimented the taste of the meat.

The increased heat didn’t hurt the grill at all. Nothing melted. Nothing that should have been cool got hot. The grill can take it. I got a winner here.

Now that I’ve conquered the grill problem, I can quit eating steak every day. Maybe I won’t even grill tomorrow. Or maybe I’ll grill something small and tame, like a chicken quarter. I can get some more vegetables. Maybe squash sliced lengthwise. I don’t know if it would hold together, but I can find out.

Very nice. Outstanding.

Don’t let the grilling nannies hold you back. Don’t rest until your grill will burn the outside of a steak while leaving the inside a glorious, intense pink or even red. Life is too short to eat lame food foisted on you by a food industry comprised mostly of people who cook very poorly.