It’s summertime and it’s time to fire up the grill! Chef Rob Ruiz provides simple instruction and education on 'How To Prepare a Charcoal Grill' and 'How To Grill The Perfect Steak' in this easy-to-watch video.
Rob is one of the world leaders of regenerative practices for a sustainable food chain. Watch as Rob breaks down the basics of grilling a perfect steak, everything from selecting high-quality meat to setting up your coals to cleaning your grill, seasoning your meat, and how to tell when your steak is done.
Rob cooks up some mouth-watering Beef Flat Iron steak, Beef Chuck Steak, and Bison Hanging Tender all from Stay Classy Meats. Stay Classy Meats provides high-quality small-batch meats direct to your door.
Transcription:
Hey what's up everybody. I'm Chef Robert Ruiz and we’re here in Vista, CA at the Dirt Co ranch and we're going to partner up today with Stay Classy Meats. We're going do a breakdown on a simple how to grill and how to cook yourself a nice piece of steak.
So this is a pretty standard in everybody's backyard. This is a Weber kettle grill. Today we're just trying to keep it really basic. So we're just gonna do some standard briquette barbecue coals here. We're going to wait about 15 to 20 minutes. We're gonna let these coals get orange and red hot slightly turned white with some ash.
We know that they're ready to cook. When that's done we're gonna put them off to the side. And get some direct heat cooking and then offer a safe zone for us on the side that will be indirect heat. We want to keep things clean and sanitary. So we're gonna put the lid on. We're gonna let this thing sit for about four or five minutes and what happens is that the inside is gonna get up to about four hundred degrees and that's gonna basically kill everything. So you can use a grill brush – if you guys have one handy, a wire grill brush is great. If you want to skip the grill brush and just do it home-style a handy piece of aluminum foil does the exact same thing.
You have three different cuts here from Stay Classy Meats: Beef Flat Iron, Bison Hanging Tender, and Beef Chuck Steak. So going to get these out and get them season we get ‘em on the grill. A lot of people want to get fancy and chefy about this stuff and put olive oil and this, that and the other, but we want to make this as simple as possible. These things are great. Super flavorful. Best cuts of meat you can get from passionate people that care about their animals and their land. So we're proud to have them here today. I'm just gonna give him a hard seasoning with salt pepper. Don’t be afraid to season super hard, you're going to lose about 35-40 percent of your seasoning on the grill. Want to rub it in and want to get both sides.
We have the vent holes on the front of the grill open and on the bottom. That means we're getting maximum air coming into it to get it as hot as possible. We're gonna start over the real hot side first the direct heat and lay the meat down away from you. What that color everyone talks about is called the Maillard Reaction. That's where the amino acids burst open and these beautiful flavors and all these chemical reactions happen that give us that delicious flavor. And what's happening is all that moisture, all the flavor, all that liquid inside the steak is running from the heat. And what that's doing is it's driving the moisture up into the heat and you're getting a sear, a caramelization happening on the bottom of the meat and that's exactly what we want.
So you're at home and it's your first time you can look at it and say OK well I'm going to wait for that to go about halfway through and I'm going to turn it over. And then that's when you're going to know your steaks are more than halfway done. Another really important thing that I learned - this is how you tell the temperature of a steak. Take your finger and your thumb together. Touch the inside of your thumb. This is rare. Medium rare on the next finger. This will be close to medium well on the next finger and your pinky this will be well your pinky and your thumb. And if you do it it'll kind of blow your mind because it's really true, you can feel the tension change as you go through the fingers.
So we're back and you can see we have large, medium, and small. In our smallest steak, our beef steak, you can see it's cooked more than halfway through you start to get juices coming up out of the top. That's where we want it so we're going to come in here and flip it. Yeah nice color. Some grill marks, the salt's gotten crispy, and some caramelizing here on the side.
Next steak looks beautiful, look at that, exactly what you want. This bison steak, it's obviously it's a bigger piece and a lot of people are intimidated by cooking what they call ‘game meats’. So we're going to let it sit a little bit longer on this side because it's a bigger piece of meat. But the reality is, is that because it's bison, it's very very lean. It has a lower fat content. So you just got to watch it a little closer and it's going to be that much better for you.
Finally getting to cut into the steaks off the grill. We've let them rest. We have some veggies roasted on the grill. These are our beef steaks. I’m just going to lay them out check the temperature, we've let them rest. You can see the ends here, just perfect you see just, just lightly peek inside like just a very nice medium rare plus. This one went a little closer to medium well but still has some nice pink there too. So there’s are our two beef steaks.
I’m gonna go into the bison now here. This one’s still pretty warm, could’ve rested a little bit longer, but I can't wait. Look at the color. It's incredible. You can see here too a really important thing about why you're letting him rest. You can see this one's really juicy in the juices are kind of coming out here. I'm going to let the rest of it longer because I don't want to lose any more of it.
So we have our beef steaks along the front. These two, we have a nice medium rare and a nice medium rare plus across the back. And then here we've just started to slice into the bison which again you can see if you look beautiful green. Beautiful texture you can tell it comes from a really beautiful healthy animal. And now we get to enjoy it.
Just by using that simple touch method you can see, you can still hit a perfect temp. You don't have to have all the science behind it. You can just go in the backyard and grill yourself a steak. Easy.
