Cooking a $450 steak puts pressure on chef
Corey Mintz tries his hand at seasoning a paycheque’s worth of high-end meat
I’ve never felt heat like the steak oven at Jacobs & Co. Inside the Montague broiler there’s less than a foot between the top and bottom and it reaches up to 1,800 F. Standing next to it doesn’t make you sweat. It just hurts. Five minutes is like a day at the beach without turning over or reapplying sunscreen.
But this is what you need to cook a good steak. Not silly marinades or spice rubs or stupid grill marks. Granted, those will help a garbage steak taste less like garbage. But we’re talking about a good piece of meat here, raised without drugs and aged between 30 and 120 days.
The smell of beef, standing next to the ovens in the tight, long, narrow service kitchen, flesh sweetening under the flames, is narcotic.
The first time I get close to the raw beef it’s to tie the tenderloins. The lean cuts tend to lose shape during cooking if they’re not bound by string. I’m only trusted with these because the tenderloins, derided as insufficiently fatty to have much flavour, are the pawns really, on the chessboard of steaks.
Encased in glass, looming over the dining room as if presiding over a royal court, every customer can see the beef: row after row of ribs and loins aging, oxygen and time transforming their flesh from extraordinary to magical (enzymes changing proteins into amino acids, glycogen into glucose, intensifying the flavour, while tenderizing the meat). Inside the glass it smells not unlike pecorino cheese.
While I’m in the kitchen, one table orders an eight-ounce rib-eye ($450) and six-ounce striploin ($200) wagyu, the fat marbling nearing 50 per cent, making the meat look like actual red marble.
No matter the cost, sous chef Massimo Bogani and chef de cuisine Mike Erner cook every steak the same way, their only ingredients are salt, pepper, oil and heat.
I’m afraid to even touch the steaks, worried my fingers will immediately devalue the merchandise. But Bogani talks me through the process. When orders come in, with requests for how they’re cooked, we pull the steaks from the fridge and line them up in order of seat numbers. Then comes salt and pepper, lots of it.
“Always two to one, salt to pepper,” says Bogani, coaxing me to add more as I sprinkle seasoning over a paycheque’s worth of beef. Cast iron pans, heating on the stove, layered with canola oil, are smoking hot when we slowly lower the steaks into them, the fat sputtering as it makes contact with the metal.
Other than rotating them a bit, we don’t fuss much at this stage. The key is to reach peak crust, without burning, while holding their position; steaks placed in the pans in order of the seat numbers, starting with the six o’clock position of the handle.
“Don’t get too close,” warns vegetable cook Patrick Lawton, as I peer at frying steaks, my face inches from the pan. “Sometimes pockets of fat explode. You don’t want your face to be there.”
When they’ve got an even, copper-brown crust on each side, they’re slid into the oven and Erner takes over. Every few minutes he pulls the pans out and pokes the meat, his brain hard-wired from thousands of steaks, trained to recognize the tightening of protein, remembering which steak is cooked to which temperature based on their position in the pan, sometimes keeping track of dozens at a time.
Using his sense of touch (forget your timers and thermometers), he determines when each steak has reached rare, medium rare, medium or points beyond — which they shudder to even mention, the overcooking rendering the delicate flavours of the beef inert.
“I’d rather have to do Chicago (charred on the surface) than well done,” says Erner. But they serve at the customer’s pleasure. And if the customer wants to pay to have a beautiful steak overcooked, that’s their privilege. Email Corey Mintz at mintz.corey@gmail.com and follow @coreymintz on Twitter and instagram.com/coreymintz
Jacobs Cheesecake
At Jacobs, pastry chef Heather Pollack tops this cheesecake with torched marshmallows and chocolate sauce. Not that I wouldn’t gladly pour caramel, strawberry jam or molten Nutella over top. But the cake is more than rich enough on its own. Note: This makes a very tall cheesecake in a 10-inch pan. For the filling: 3 lbs. (1.3 kg) or 6 cups (1.5L) room temperature cream cheese
1 1/2 cups (375 mL) granulated
sugar 1 1/2 tsp (7 mL) vanilla extract 6 eggs room temperature In a mixer, using the paddle attachment, mix the cream cheese and the sugar until smooth. Add the vanilla and eggs.
Mix until incorporated into a smooth batter. For the crust: 2 cups (500 mL) graham cracker
crumbs 3 tbsp (45 mL) granulated sugar 1/2 cup (120 mL) melted butter splash of vegetable oil or spritz from cooking spray Preheat oven to 325 F/160 C.
In a large bowl, use your hands to combine graham cracker crumbs, sugar and melted butter.
Line a 10-inch (25 cm) spring form pan with parchment around the sides, being sure to go above the top to accommodate all the filling. Use cooking spray or rub oil to lightly coat surface of parchment. Press the crust into the bottom of the pan to form an even layer. Bake for 10 min- utes and let cool.
Fill the prebaked crust with the filling and bake again until the centre is not wobbly, about an 1 hour and 45 minutes. Cool on a rack and chill in fridge before slicing.
Makes about 12 slices.