I am hardly a grill master. But this easy summertime meal of grilled steak and vegetables?
I've got this down to a science. The secret? Flavor the butter, not the steak.
I'll start with maybe half a stick of softened butter. You can speed-soften butter by putting
it in the microwave on low power. Nuke it for 10 seconds, give it a quarter turn, another
10 seconds, another quarter turn. You do that three or four times and it'll be nice and
soft but not melted.
Now, I'll chop up a few cloves of garlic. Also chop up a bunch of parsley or whatever
herbs you want. The trick to easily chopping herbs is to bunch them up on themselves, then
you can just mow throw them. Garlic and parsley go into the butter along with a ton of pepper,
and stir it all up. That's way more solid ingredients than people normally put in a
compound butter. If you want more butter, go for it, but I'm mostly in this for the
garlic.
Now, that'll get better as it just sits around for a while, which is why I do it first. If
you put it in the fridge, don't forget you'll need to soften it up again before you grill.
Successful grilling is all about planning, and having everything that you need right
at hand, ready to go.
Here is the undisputed champion of charcoal lighters: the chimney starter. Nothing else
comes close. I use natural lump charcoal. It burns far hotter than reconstituted briquettes,
and the flavor it gives is amazing. Fill it up most of the way.
Then you need some kindling to get it going. Many things could work, but this never fails
me. I take a cardboard paper towel tube, cut it in half, and then jam a paper towel inside
each one. Put those on the lower grill grate, and light them up. Nice, dry, thin material
with plenty of air flowing around it. Perfect kindling. Make sure they're really burning
before you layer the chimney starter on top.
Give that 10 minutes and it will be a glowing tower of fiery doom. Back inside now for our
last-minute prep.
Zucchini is a perfect grilling vegetable. Shout-out if you call it a courgette. There
is a secret special way to cut it, though. Get rid of the ends, cut it in half lengthwise,
then into quarters. Then stand the quarter up on its side and cut off the triangular
point. That's where the seeds are, and that's the part that always goes slimy when cooked.
I just toss it. What we have left is a solid piece with uniform thickness that'll have
a firm, crunchy texture when cooked, and that will lie flat on the grill grates. When I
started doing this it gave me a whole new appreciation for zucchini. I never liked that
slimy core. One zucchini per person is probably fine. I'm going with two because I love vegetables
and these are so easy and good.
Alright, I put them all into a big plastic bin — light and easy to carry out to the
grill. Now, steaks for about four people. A couple of nice ribeyes, an inch thick at
most. I think both very thick and very thin steaks are much more challenging to grill.
Speaking of thick, here's one of those absurdly thick pieces of tenderloin that the butchers
always cut. You gotta be really good a temperature control to successfully grill a steak that
thick, so I just cut it in half. There you go, two one-inch-thick fillets. Lauren will
want one of those. All steaks in the bin.
Here's a metal baking tray where I will put all of my finished food. I'm gonna take a
spoonful of my garlic butter and smear it onto the side where I will lay the freshly
grilled steaks. That will flavor their undersides, and their residual heat will take the edge
off of the garlic.
Now, just a splash of oil goes on the zucchini. Looks like a lot, but that's a lot of zucchini.
Lots of pepper, lots of salt, you could do lots of other seasonings too. I like to splash
on some vinegar.
I'll just toss it around and get everything coated. Everything must be ready to drop onto
the grill before it goes out that back door, otherwise you're gonna have a bad time.
To that end, just the tiniest bit of oil goes on the steaks. Just enough for a super-light
coating all around. I'll show you later what too much oil would do. Enough salt and pepper
to cover all the steaks. If you were definitely gonna use my board sauce method, there wouldn't
be much purpose in seasoning these now, but seasoning immediately before cooking does
give you the option of serving the steaks whole with a nice crust.
Just toss those around in the seasoning, everything goes outside and, uh oh. Shooting the video
slowed down my prep, and my charcoal burned down a lot. Guess I was inside for about 25
minutes. I'm gonna layer on a bunch of fresh charcoal to compensate. I would normally layer
on about half this many fresh chunks at this stage. No problem, they'll still light right
up. Grill grate goes on, and yeah, that's pretty yucky from my previous grill session.
No problem. Just let it heat for a couple minutes and then you can scrape it clean with
a wire brush. Comes right off. And you want to give the grate a couple of minutes to get
hot anyway, otherwise the steaks are more likely to stick to them.
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let’s grill.
OK, the ribeyes are bigger, they'll take longer, so they go on first. If you don't hear sizzle,
your grill's not hot enough yet.
Now, see that flame licking that one steak a little? You want to avoid that. Direct flame
char on meat tastes burned, and more significantly, it can be carsinagenic. One solution is to
use your tongs to rotate the grill grate to get the meat away from the flame.
After two or three minutes, they're looking ready to flip. Under ideal circumstances,
they won't stick when you're ready to flip. But if they seem like they might, you can
take a metal spatula and just scrape it underneath to release. Then they'll flip right over and
you won't lose any precious crust bits that would've stuck to the bars.
Now, you might like a darker crust on yours. For what it's worth, when I grill my steaks
as dark as I would get them in the pan, they tend to taste a little burned to me. I have
learned to be more conservative with the color when I grill.
Oh by the way, for safety purposes, after you've flipped the still-raw meat, just hold
your tongs down into the fire for a second. That'll definitely kill any germs on there.
Now, this is where it really pays to have practiced cooking steak enough that you can
judge doneness by feel. A lot of the visual cues that I would normally look for when cooking
inside just don't look the same out here on the grill, and because the temperatures are
so extreme, I find it really hard to get an accurate thermometer reading.
So I'm just poking. Medium rare is soft, but it bounces back at you. Rare is squishy.
It's been three minutes since I flipped them. They're almost done, so it's time for the
garlic butter. Smear a big spoonful onto each one. If we had put that garlic directly on
the steak, it would have burned black by now. The butter is a really effective, convenient
way of delivering a ton of flavor right at the end, so it only gets the minute of cooking
that it needs. Now check this out, see those crazy flame-ups I'm getting? That's what would
have been happening this whole time if we had put too much oil on the steaks. Fat is
fuel. It's biodiesel. It bursts right into flames when it hits the coals. Another reason
to put the butter on at the very end.
Off they come onto the tray that we smeared with more garlic butter. We'll let those rest
while we dump on the whole bucket of zucchini. Those nice big pieces are so easy to handle
on the grill. I'll just arrange them so they're cut side down and perpendicular to the grill
grates. The cut sides brown better than the skin side. Man, those are pretty. After they've
been on for two or three minutes and gotten nice grill marks, I just slosh them around
to give the skin sides some cooking time, but not much. When they're just kinda floppy
like that, they're not done, but they will be done by the time you pull them off, cut
them up and eat them. I want to make sure that they're crunchy and not slimy. Off the
come to the other side of the tray where they will mingle with the meat juices and the melted
garlic butter. Yum.
We're done. Back inside.
Now, people could just grab a steak and a few zucchini pieces and cut them up on their
own plates. I like to pre-slice everything. Here is my surprisingly controversial method
for carving ribeye. I just peel that delicious cap muscle off the not-quite-as-delicious
eye muscle. And that allows me to shave off the big bits of un-rendered fat that live
between them. I love fat, but I love melty or crispy fat. Not a big fan of big blubber
hunks and I'm hardly alone in that. With those bits out, I can just chop it all into bite-size
chunks.
Same deal with the fillets. Depending on where they were cut from, tenderloin steaks can
actually have a lot of gristle running through them. Lauren doesn't like that, so pre-cutting
the meat allows me to get in there and trim out all of the stuff she won't eat anyway.
Pieces all go back on the tray, along with any of the precious board juices. Then the
zucchinis. If they're all lined up like that, it's really easy to just hack them into bite-size
bits. Back onto the tray, and I turn on the burners under the tray to their lowest settings.
That'll keep all of this food warm indefinitely, which makes this meal great for like a little
buffet situation if you have friends over.
Now I'll just toss all the pieces in their own juices and the melted garlic butter. Each
piece is just soaked in summery, smokey, buttery, garlicy deliciousness. Out onto a plate it
comes. I would squeeze a little bit of lemon over all of that. And no, it does not look
fancy all chopped up like this. If that matters to you, then, you know, don't do it. But in
this form, you can just take a plate and a fork out onto the front porch. You can stand
around and maybe light some more things on fire while you eat. Happy Independence Day
to my American viewers, and to my British viewers, I say, courgette!