Best way to cook any steak indoors

Sometimes you can't, or just don't feel like grilling outdoors. Never fear, cooking a steak indoors is actually easier and produces great results too.

Take your ~1" thick steaks out of the refrigerator ~40 minutes before you want to eat them. Pat them dry and cover each side lightly with oil, fresh cracked pepper, and coarse salt.

Put an oven safe skillet - I prefer cast iron - into the oven, then turn the oven on to 500. You want your oven to reach 500 ~10 minutes before you want to eat.

Once the oven reaches that temperature, take the pan out and put it on a burner set to high. Place the steaks on the skillet for one minute per side. Make sure your range hood fan is on high!

This method makes for a great crust. After you've cooked each side of your steak for 1 minute, put the skillet back into the oven for 3 minutes. After 3 minutes, flip the steaks. After 3 minutes, remove the steaks from the oven and take them out of the pan and allow them to rest for 2 minutes before serving. Enjoy!

This recipe is for ~1" thick steaks cooked to medium. If your steaks are thicker or you want them cooked beyond medium, then increase the time in the oven to 5 minutes per side.

If you're good at making sauces and things, look at what's left in the pan after cooking these steaks!

London Broil

London Broil is a great cooking method for cheap cuts of meat. If you love beef but don't want to pay for high-end cuts, pick up any inferior cut of beef and cook it London Broil style. Typically your meat supplier will label the beef as London Broil. Don't be fooled though, London Broil is a cooking method, not a cut of beef!

I prefer to use a soy based marinade for my London Broil meat. This is really only because I love salt. For London Broil, I tend to avoid anything that isn't liquid in the marinade. This is because the meat is cooked at a high temperature and anything that isn't liquid stands that chance of imparting a sour flavor once it's burned.

Marinate your London Broil meat at least 4 hours before you plan to cook it; overnight is best. About 30 minutes before you plan to cook it, take it out of the fridge to bring it up to room temperature. Remove the London Broil meat from the marinade.

Today was a particularly rainy day so I cooked this piece of meat on the stove. However, you can certainly grill it (and that's preferred), but either way you do it, it's delicious. Get whatever surface you're using to cook this meat up to a high temperature. In my case, I'm using a pan and I set the heat on high. Once the pan began to smoke, I lowered the temperature to medium-high and added the meat. Be sure to have your fan on if you're cooking this indoors.

I like to flip mine after 3 minutes per side, but unless you like your meat really rare, you'll need to keep it on the grill or in the pan until it reaches ~130 degrees before you pull it off. Do not cook a London Broil meat beyond medium or it will be too tough to enjoy. Don't let the smoke and burning smell scare you; keep the meat on the heat until the internal temperature is to your liking.

This piece of meat was on for ~15 minutes before I pulled it off to rest for ~5 minutes. I like to use my Bear Paws Meat Handlers to hold the meat while I'm slicing it thin against the grain. Always slice this type of meat against the grain and as thin as possible.

Pick up the meat and put it on a plate (if your dinner guests care about meat juice) and you're all set!

BBQed Pulled Pork

If you're looking for a real treat and have access to a smoker (or a way to maintain low temperatures for a long period of time and impart wood smoke), BBQing a pork shoulder is an easy and practically foolproof way to enjoy delicious food.

The obvious first step is to purchase your meat. You'll want to buy a bone in pork shoulder blade roast, typically called a Boston butt. When deciding how much meat to purchase, figuring one pound per person is a good rule of thumb. For this post, I had 8 adults and 4 kids (2 - 3 years old) so I bought a shoulder that weighed a little less than 9 pounds.

This photo shows the fat cap of the shoulder that should be placed up when smoking this cut of meat. BBQing with the fat cap on top allows the melting fat to trickle down to the meat keeping it moist and delicious.

Here's the bottom of the shoulder.

The night before you plan to BBQ this cheap cut of meat, you'll want to rinse and dry it, then cover it all over with a healthy dose of dry rub. You can use any rub really, so I won't go into the rub recipe I used. However, here's a picture of the rub before I mixed it all up.

After you've covered the butt with plenty of dry rub, be sure you have some left over to apply more right before the meat is smoked. If you don't have enough rub left over, buy or make more. Also, if you want to add some of the dry rub mixture to your mopping sauce or water pan (recommended), save some for that too.

Here's the butt after I applied the rub.

Next, wrap this hunk of meat in plastic wrap and put it in the fridge to absorb the rub's flavor. Don't keep the meat in a metal pan or cover it in foil. Notice I have the meat on a ceramic plate and it's covered with plastic wrap.

About an hour before you plan to BBQ, take the meat out of the fridge and uncover it. Sprinkle it with more rub and fire up the smoker so it's at ~210 F.

After the meat has sat out uncovered for about an hour, put it in the smoker for ~2 hours per pound, until the meat reaches 200 F. I used hickory chips for the first 2 hours; some folks like more smoke and some like less.

Once the meat has reached 200 F, take it out and let it rest for ~30 minutes. This one cooked for ~18 hours (remember I had a shoulder that was almost 9 pounds) and came out perfect!

Once the meat has rested for ~30 minutes, start shredding and serve!

If you have any questions (this is very high-level) please feel free to comment and I'll answer them.

tIC

BBQ pork chops

BBQing pork chops is a great way to impart smoke flavor and ensure juicy meat. I prefer boneless pork chops simply because I cut my own pork loin, but bone-in pork chops will work as well. I like to use grill mates pork rub. I empty some of the contents into a shaker so I can easily and evenly season the chops:

After you season the meat, it's preferable to put it back into the refrigerator for a couple of hours. Take the meat out about 30 minutes prior to cooking to bring it up to room temperature for even cooking.

BBQ the pork on low heat until the internal temperature reaches 145 degrees. The middle will be a little pink, but the chops will be juicy!

BBQ asparagus

This is a pretty simple recipe where you don't really follow any "rules". First, buy a nice bunch of asparagus, then break off the woody ends using your hands. The woody ends should snap off naturally; don't force them at a specific area on the asparagus. Woody ends removed:

Woody ends:

Discard the woody ends. Next, put the asparagus in some kind of container with a lid. I said there are no rules so what I do is drizzle olive oil on them, put in a couple cloves of minced garlic and add salt and pepper to taste.

Net put your lid on your container and give the asparagus a good shake to evenly distribute whatever you put on them.

I pop the container into the refrigerator until I'm ready to BBQ them. Set your BBQ to low heat and put the asparagus on perpendicular to your grill's grates.

Depending on how firm or soft you like your asparagus, let them cook for a couple of minutes before flipping them (I like mine on the firm side). After you flip them, let them cook a couple of minutes more. As I said, I like my asparagus firm, but I also like a little char on them for added flavor.

Continue to flip the asparagus so they get a little black but not burnt until they're done to your liking. Serve immediately.

Cut your own pork loin and save big!

I recently bought a ~10 lb boneless pork loin from Costco. It cost about $21. By cutting up this pork loin myself, I ended up with:

• 13 1" thick loin chops
• 1  rib roast
• 1 sirloin roast

Now, I don't really know how much all of this would have cost at a supermarket, but I suspect it would be way more than $21. Another nice part about it is you can cut the loin chops as thick or as thin as you want them. You can even take a bit of liberty to determine how big or small you want the two roasts to be (or heck, cut the roasts in half and end up with 4!).

Before:

After:

Now all you have to do is wrap the pork in plastic in your desired serving sizes:

Then wrap it in butcher paper (I'm not good at wrapping presents or meat!):

Pop these packages in the freezer and enjoy saving money!

Awesome BLTs!

If you read my post about making bacon in the oven, then the below isn't really new. What is new though is to make a "bacon weave" so you get bacon in each bite of your BLT. What you need is 3 slices of bacon cut in half (for each weave), lettuce, tomato, and some good ole sourdough bread.

The bacon has to cook a little longer if you like it crispy. This is thick cut bacon and I cooked it for 20 minutes. You can tell the single slices are nice and crunchy, but the weaves could cook a little longer.

For the sourdough, I bought a round, cut the slices in half, spread mayonnaise on one side, then browned them at 350 on a skillet for about 10 minutes.

Look how beautiful this is:

BBQ Shit sauce review

For starters, this sauce does not taste like shit. It has a bit of a kick to it, but I think most folks will find it's very tolerable. It's not particularly sweet, which I like, so that was nice. Overall this is a great sauce (that's kind of runny) and one that I would BBQ with, use as a dipping sauce, or if I'm feeling crazy, take a sip of.