There are 3 steak cooking contention points I have never seen a satisfactory resolution to.
1. should you season the steak with pepper BEFORE you start cooking, or when its nearly done? Many people say pepper before cooking will burn/char the pepper so its not a good idea. Salt before is fine, since it won't burn.
2. Almost everyone says you should let the steak sit for 1-2 minutes, then flip, and not move the steak around. However a few people claim you should constantly flip the steak every 40-60 seconds for maximum heat, and have used science to show it to be true.
3. What about the fat strips? I like to flip the steak on the side at the end and try to render down the fat strip a little bit at the end, which helps with the brown sauce.
1. Well, science. Salting the meat with large flakes of salt (kosher or sea) draws water to the surface via osmotic pressure. But this water is impregnated with a ton of proteins and other substances which brown very nicely. Now if you salt the steak and leave it for 10-30 minutes, that is enough time draw out the liquid, but not enough time for it to actually be re-absorbed by the meat, so all that goodness will mostly just stick to the pan. Salting it just before cooking would be better in that case. But pepper will have a hard time adhering if you apply and then immediately cook so will likely end up mostly in the pan, burned and certainly not flavoring the steak. But if you pepper the steak, then salt it, and leave it for 40+ minutes (overnight in the fridge is totally an option here) the osmotic pressure of the salt will draw those liquids to the surface. Overdraw them, in fact, and then after a while the meat will reabsorb those liquids which are now impregnated with the oils from the pepper, though they will be distributed in the meat very differently. You can actually see the difference by taking two identical steaks and salting one and letting it sit for 40 minutes and salt the other just before cooking, then sear both. This is the same principle a brine works on. If you were to do this and then dry the surface (with, say, a fan) you'd create a pellicle. Which is what you'd want to do if you were going to smoke it, so the smoke would adhere to the meat and flavor it. Since we are using a fast, high heat method, we can skip the drying part (unless you are dry aging your meat, but that is a different story). But either way if you make a pan sauce, the pepper that was in the pan will end up flavoring the sauce... and the reality is it takes a lot to burn coarsely ground pepper. Which is where most people get it wrong. You do not use fine ground (or pre-ground) pepper. Fine ground won't adhere and will burn, because of the increased surface area.
2. Original work done by Food Science writer Harold McGee, I am stealing the explanation from Modernist Cuisine though, book 2. Food flipped once is just easier to remember. Food flipped four times cooks both faster and more evenly. The more you flip it, the faster and more evenly it cooks... to a point. That point is 15-30 seconds between flips (see attachment for a nice graph). Uneven cooking happens when there is a gradient between the surface temperature and the core temperature. The bigger the difference, the more uneven cooking is. In a pan food is being cooked at roughly 300 C/572 F, the layers just below the surface reach the boiling point of water rapidly while the core is still much cooler. The temperature of the surface rapidly rises and dehydrates the surface, causing browning and (eventually) burning. Typically you flip the food before that happens. By that time, however, much of the food beneath the surface has been overcooked but the core is still undercooked. Which is why you need to cook it on the other side almost as long again.
While the flipped food cooks on the new side the other side starts to cool down. Some of the built-up heat near the surface diffuses through conduction toward the center. The hot water at the surface evaporates as steam. Some of the surface heat will convect away into the cooler air. The total effect is to cool the surface and slightly raise the temp of the core. Basically the heat on the surface doesn't just "stop" once you remove it from the heat, it keeps radiating both out into the air and further into the meat. This is what "resting" is actually doing. You let the meat finish cooking with the heat from the surface. But how do you predict exactly how many degrees the core will rise from the rest so you know when to pull the meat? Normal answer: years of experience. Better answer: frequent flipping. The less time the meat spends against the heat, the less time heat has to build up and overcook the layers just under the surface. So the overcooked layer is minimized and more of the center is just right.
Flipping reduces the average temperature of the surface and it reduces the size of the temperature swings. Which means, edge to edge, the foods ends up more evenly cooked. Repeated flipping also slightly speeds the cooking process because, much the same way that is minimizes how much heat builds up, it also reduces the mount of cooling that occurs on the resting side. Flip too frequently and you'll get diminishing returns though.
Because the surface and the core temps never get very far apart, the interior temp rising very little during resting. It is easier to estimate when to stop cooking and timing becomes much less less split second critical between "just right" and "overcooked." Also, just from personal experience as I tried this as an experiment, it is actually possible to cook a steak well-done (no pink) without burning it or drying it out by frequent flipping. It was not as good as how I normally cook steak but with Modernist Cuisine staring at me every day filling my head with all this information I feel inspired to just try things. Caveat to flipping frequently: if the food sticks, you'll ruin your crust.
Too long; didn't read: The bottom one was flipped every 15 seconds. The top one was flipped once. See how there is more perfectly done center in the bottom one?
3. Alain Ducasse likes to hold the fat strip against the pan for a bit until it liquifies and use that to cook the steak and ensure it doesn't stick. I feel like you could cut off some of the excess fat and put it in the pan without risking heating the steak early. Which would be my primary objection, if the fat is connected to the steak, you're adding more heat to your steak and fiddling with adding time via the fat covered edge seems like a hassle if you are going for absolute perfection.
I think you can still only buy true kobe beef inside Japan, all the vegas/nyc/etc places that sell Kobe beef are selling Wagyu beef, dunno how they get away with it
http://www.forbes.com/sites/larryolm...kobe-beef-lie/
Gives a complete explanation of the past and current situation surrounding real Kobe. I've had it, in Japan, and for me it was a stunning experience. By far the best steak I have ever had. I've been to a fair number of famous steak houses in the U.S. as well, just for comparison's sake. Basically "Kobe" is not a regulated term except in Japan. The change in the import laws actually kind of sucks, because before you knew if you weren't in Japan, it was not Kobe. Now... it could be, if the place is high end enough. Or maybe it isn't. Who knows? They can say it is, the term "Kobe" is not regulated anywhere but Japan.
