Daily Mail - Daily Mail Weekend Magazine
The secret to STEAK perfection
There’s nothing more pleasing than a delicious steak for dinner. But how should you cook it to get it just right? Here, Anne Shooter tells you…
irst, you need to choose the right steak. British meat should have the Red Tractor symbol which shows it is 100 per cent British and farmed and packaged to strict hygiene, welfare and environmental standards.
Lidl uses this, along with the Scotch Beef PGI status on selected Deluxe Scotch steaks, which shows that they are from Scottish farms assured by Quality Meat Scotland (QMS) for their best practice regarding natural rearing methods and animal welfare.
If you can, choose aged meat. Lidl’s Deluxe Scotch rib eye, sirloin and rump steaks arematured for 28 days for superb flavour and to make them as tender and succulent as possible.
You want the steak to have good marbling – fat running through it – and in the case of rump and sirloin, a good layer of fat around one side which adds flavour and moisture.
To cook a steak perfectly, first take it out of the fridge and let it come to room temperature, which will take around 30 minutes.
Pat it dry with kitchen paper, then season it really well with salt and pepper on both sides.
Heat a decent, heavy-based frying pan on the hob until it is hot, then use tongs to hold the fat layer, if there is one, against the hot pan until it starts to go a lovely dark brown. Cook the steak foraminute and a half on each side, to get a really good colour on it, then turn the heat down to medium and add a large knob of salted butter to the pan (around 25g), along with a garlic clove and a sprig of thyme or tarragon, if you like.
Baste the steak with the butter as you continue to cook it. You can tell howwell done a steak is by how it feels. A rawsteak is very soft – wobbly, almost. It firms up as it cooks. With practice you will become more accurate but as a guide, a 2 cmsirloin steak will take about three minutes on each side in total to be cooked tomedium.
So you need to baste and cook for a further minute and a half on each side after the initial browning. Medium rare is two and a half minutes on each side – so an extra minute on each side.
Remove the cooked steak from the pan to a warmed plate and leave to rest somewhere warm for around five minutes so the juices are re-absorbed. Serve with your favourite accompaniments.