Some people like to enhance flavour and tenderise meat with a marinade. You can add an Asian dimension to your beef with a miso or teriyaki marinade. Lots of chefs add whole garlic cloves and robust herbs like thyme and rosemary to the hot fat while the steak is cooking, which adds background flavour to the steak subtly, without overpowering it.
Flavourless oils like sunflower, vegetable or groundnut work best, and once the steak is searing you can add butter to the pan for flavour. Searing a steak until it gets a caramelised brown crust will give it lots of flavour. For this to happen, the pan and the fat need to be hot enough. The conventional way is to sear it on one side, then cook it for the same amount on the other side. This gives good results but the second side is never as nicely caramelised as the first.
To build up an even crust on both sides, cook the steak for the total time stated in the recipe, but turn the steak every minute. Our cookery team have outlined what you can expect from each category of steak. Use your fingers to prod the cooked steak — when rare it will feel soft, medium-rare will be lightly bouncy, and well-done will be much firmer.
A cooked steak should rest at room temperature for at least five minutes and ideally around half the cooking time — it will stay warm for anything up to 10 minutes. Here, pure science comes into play — the fibres of the meat will reabsorb the free-running juices, resulting in a moist and tender steak.
Any resting juices should be poured over the steak before serving. Grass-fed beef: Grass-fed cattle get to walk around and graze on pasture, which means the meat is leaner with a richer, gamier flavour that tastes of the environment it was reared in. This is why Scottish grass-fed beef will taste different to Irish. Marbling: Marbling is the fat found interlacing the inside of a cut of meat. Meat with a lot of marbling mostly comes from the back of the animal where the muscles get little exercise.
Wagyu: Wagyu is a generic name for four breeds of Japanese cattle. They are fed foraged grass and rice straw, then supplemented with corn, barley, soya bean, wheat bran and, in some cases, even beer or sake. Wagyu cattle produce meat with heavy marbling but this comes at a hefty price.
The reason for this is heat conduction, these types of pans retain heat well allowing them to get really hot, which makes them ideal for caramelisation to happen, achieving that flavoursome, smoky, charred finish on the surface of the steak, without cooking all the way through the meat. Also, have a good spatula or ideally cooking tongs on hand to enable you to flip the steak easily.
A spoon will come in handy too. At least one hour before cooking take the sirloin steak out of the fridge and allow to come to room temperature.
The reason for this is so that the heat from the pan can more easily penetrate to the middle of the meat. Naturally, you do not want that.
Coat the steak in oil such as sunflower or vegetable oil, just enough. Never opt for an oil with a low smoke point like olive oil, as this will turn bitter in the heat which will transfer over to the steak. Next, season well with salt on both sides of your steak. The salt will be absorbed by the steak to help draw out the moisture, this, in turn, creates a salt brine which is reabsorbed back into the steak when cooking to help make the meat even more tender.
Have the butter on hand so you can easily scoop a knob and pop it into the pan when the steak is cooking. To enhance with even more flavour, add in some whole garlic cloves and thyme or rosemary. They will mix with the butter and juices of the steak to add some delightful flavours. After the steak has been well seared and butter added, then you can add cracked black pepper to your taste so keep that handy. A note on salt, lots of recipes call for sea salt, and sea salt is good, but plain table salt does the job just as well.
The main thing about salt is to use enough without saturating the meat. Ensure that you give your pan enough time to heat up. It needs to be very hot. This is so that you can sear the sirloin steak until it gets a caramelised brown smoky crust. Even an extra minute can be too much. Start off by searing the outer layer of fat first for about a minute, then do the same to the opposite side. Now, turn it and lay it flat in the pan for about a minute each side, as the juices and oil begin to run, add the knob of butter, and if you have them the garlic and herbs too.
By waiting to add it, you allow the pan to decrease in temperature because of the running juices and heat absorption by the steak enough that the butter foams up and turns a nice golden brown colour, taking on the flavours of your aromatics without burning.
While cooking you may notice that one side usually gets caramelised a little better than the other, but to ensure they are as caramelised as evenly and as much as they can be, turn every 30 seconds to a minute in the pan. In between, use your spoon to baste the steak with the butter and juices. After the butter has been added you can twist some cracked black pepper over the steak to your own taste. Simple sirloin steak. By Barney Desmazery. Preparation and cooking time. Prep: 5 mins Cook: 10 mins.
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