How to tell when a steak is done?

Many people have asked me to be more quantitative in the posts I put on this site. I've been asked to give more exact times, temps and amounts. My Dad and Cousin are much better at this than I am. This is a hard thing for me. I don't cook with recipes generally. I use a recipe once and then it's sort of committed to memory. I don't use meat thermometers. I decide when a piece of meat is done based on feel and practice. I don't measure things out when I am making a rub or a marinade. And therein lies a problem - How do I teach feel to someone else?

For the most part I can't. So I need to be more diligent in my prep work. I need to actually find the measuring cups and spoons that I'm pretty sure are in my kitchen somewhere and measure out my ingredients to be relayed to you through this site in a more quantitative manner.

While for the most part I cannot teach feel there is something I can teach in terms of feel and that is how to tell a steak is done without a meat thermometer or slicing into it. It is said that there are only two ways to tell if a snake is poisonous in the United States - if it's got a rattle or if it's got fangs. Finding out if a snake is poisonous using the latter method is akin to slicing into a steak on the grill to see if it's cooked properly. By the time you know it's too late!!!

So if you are cooking steaks for 6 people and only have one meat thermometer how can you tell how all six steaks are cooked to the proper doneness? Simple. Just use the thumb method:

Click below to see the thumb method in action...



What is the thumb method? The thumb method is so simple you will wonder how you had never heard of it before. Simply touch the tip of your forefinger to the tip of your thumb to make the OK sign.

Now pinch the meaty part of the thumb close to the palm and wrist:

See how spongy that is? Take your tongs and push on the top of the steak in the middle (do not squeeze the steak as it will not give the same results). When a steak is as spongy as this it is rare.

Now touch the tip of your middle finger to the tip of your thumb:

Again, squeeze the meaty part of the thumb by the palm and wrist:

The meaty part of the thumb is a little more firm that it was when you were touching your forefinger to your thumb right? A steak that is about as firm as the meaty part of your thumb here is medium rare.

Now touch the tip of your ring finger to the tip of your thumb and squeeze the meaty part of the thumb:

The meaty part of the thumb is a bit firmer yet again, right? That is the equivalent of a steak that is medium.

Now touch the pinky to the thumb and squeeze the meaty part of the thumb:

That is the equivalent to a medium well steak.

Since the vast majority of us are out of fingers at this point how do you tell if a steak is well done? For that just squeeze the sole of your shoe. When it is that consistency it is well done!?!?

So take your tongs and give the steak a little push to see how spongy or firm it is. The firmer it is the more done it is. It's just that easy.

Click here for the rest of the process

Bison Steaks

This is the first time I have ever done Bison steaks. I've had Bison burgers but only prepared for me at a restaurant. I'd heard good things about it and wanted to give it a try. And I have to say I was not at all disappointed. The steaks were very similar to beef but they had a heartier consistency than beef. And despite having very little fat they were just as good if not better than beef in terms of flavor. For the rest of the pictures and the write up click below...



I want to start with a little about Bison before I go any farther. First off, Bison is not cheap. I bought two Rib Eye steaks at $18.99/pound. Second, the steak is very lean. There was very little marbling if any in these steaks. The NY Strips had a little marbling but were and extra $1/pound. They say that the lack of marbling is due to the Bison being grass fed over corn fed like most of the beef we buy, but I don't know if that's true. I want to apologize for not getting some pics of the meat before I threw it in a marinade. I was distracted when I got home and was prepping them for the following evening and totally forgot to get some pre shots.

Here are the steaks after I pulled them out of the marinade. Decent size but if you have been here before you know these pale in comparison to some of the other monsters I have done on this site:


The marinade was as simple as can be. Garlic, fresh ground black pepper, and this marinade:


I gotta say I like this stuff. It's milder than Andria's so I didn't feel the need to cut it like I do Andria's with coke or oil. It has much less sodium than Andria's as well. I'm gonna add this to the repertoire as a regular. Expect to see more of this stuff on this site.

One thing I was disappointed in was the wine:


The Gallo Reserve stuff is really good normally. And this got a 90 point rating and was only about $11. I was very excited. Love to find good 90+ pointers for $10. But I gotta wonder if they got the labels mixed up with a batch of merlot. Zin is supposed to be meaty, spicy, hearty. This was very smooth and velvety, which is all well and good if one is drinking a merlot. I wanted something to stand up against the Bison. This was not it. I wonder if somewhere there are people drinking a Gallo Reserve Merlot and wondering why it is so spicy?

People ask me all the time how I know when the coals are ready to dump. Well when doing steaks the cook time is only a few minutes of searing and a couple of minutes of baking, if necessary. So you don't need to save the charcoal for a long grill session. You want hot and fast not slow and low so no need to save the charcoal. So when the charcoal chimney looks like this you are ready to go:


After dumping the coals you can see that they are ready to go for a high heat sear. This is a HOT fire:


Same as always, coals on one side for the searing. No coals on the other side for the baking.

My wife likes her steak a little more done than I like so hers went on first:


Seared for about 60 seconds, rotated about 60 degrees and seared some more and then flipped:


Here is a close up of a great sear:


Put hers off to the side to bake. After a few minutes of baking here comes mine for the sear:


Different flash setting along with the edge of my wife's steak which is off the heat but I have it close to the coals as it was a cold and windy night. If I had it all the way over, as far from the heat as possible, it would completely stop cooking while I flame seared mine as there would be no heat anywhere near it for about 4 minutes:


I only baked mine for maybe 2 minutes. The steaks were thinner than I normally make and Bison is supposed to be cooked for a little less than beef. If it were a hot summer night with no wind, I probably would've just seared and pulled mine off. But here we have both on the cutting board ready to rest - hers on the right, mine on the left. Hers has a little better sear than mine as the fire was hotter when I did hers. While hers baked the fire died a bit:


After taking this shot I threw some foil over the top to let them rest and retain some of the heat:


And here we have the money shot of mine. My wife does not care for me delaying dinner with the taking of pictures of said dinner so I didn't risk upsetting her by making her wait while I got pics of her steak. But here is the money shot of mine. Grey around the edges. Pink to red in the middle. Almost perfect where I am concerned:



Now, I want to talk about the differences between Bison and Beef. Bison is meatier, leaner, more expensive and maybe a little tastier. Although that could be the new marinade I used. I need to marinade a steak all night in it to see if that is the difference. Remember I only marinaded the Filet I did a few days ago for a couple hours. But the question that begs to be asked - does a meatier, leaner, more expensive and a little tastier Bison steak warrant the extra cost over a beef steak? Do the Bison benefits merit paying $8/more per pound? Probably not. I liked it a lot, but I also have a little boy that my would like to one day send to private school. I will do it again. I want my dad to try it. But I can't see myself doing Bison very often. But if you have the means and want a healthier steak then this is the way to go.

Click here for the rest of the process

Filet Mignion that almost wasn't - Many videos of the process

Grilling is not a science. Some may call it an art. But one thing is for sure, sometimes things don't go as planned and improvisation is required. This was one of those times. The conditions outside were not ideal for grilling. 40 degrees and the wind was blowing strong. Keeping a grill at the proper temp can be tough in a situation like that. Normally with a Filet Mignon like this I would sear on each side for 2 minutes and bake for another 3-4 minutes on the side with no coals. The conditions this night changed that time frame and the method pretty dramatically. Click below to get the details.


But first let's start from the beginning. For this session I cooked a very nice size Filet Mignon. Stopped by John's Butcher Shoppee off 270 and St. Charles Rock Road and was delighted to find that they had Filets on sale for $8/pound. This bad boy on cost me $8.31:

Yeah, that is a new cell phone for reference. The old Razr is no where to be found.

While at John's I picked up some of their Marinade:

I am a bit partial to Andria's (something John's carries) but I decided to give their "marinade & flavorizer" a go... Here are the ingredients for their marinade:

The main reason I decided to give this a shot is when I saw the Sodium in this and the Sodium in Andrias. Andrias has almost 3 times the sodium John's does. And I have to say I'm happy I bought the marinade. It was really good. Can't wait to have it on something that is marinaded overnight such as the Bison Steaks I'm doing on Friday.

I threw the Filet into a ziplock with some garlic, black pepper, olive oil and the marinade and put it in the fridge for about 90 minutes:

The reason I used oil instead of my usual cola is because I don't want to ternderize the steak anymore than it already is. For tender cuts you want to go more towards oil based marinades rather than acid based marinades.

After 90 minutes or so I pulled it from the fridge and let it come to room temperature on the counter. You can see how the red steak has browned a bit by pulling in the marinade from the bag into the steak:

Time to find the proper wine pairing with my steak. Rosemount Shiraz should do the trick nicely:

This was the bottle that started it all. Different Vintage, but it was about 10 years ago that I was at a house warmin party and someone walked in with a 1998 Rosemount Shiraz. The guy said, "I realize it is Australian but go ahead and try it. It's great." Now at the time I thought of Australians and wine about the way I felt about the French and cars. Despite that I tried that wine and it was incredible. Turned out that 1998 was the best year Australia has ever had in recent history and they were churning out fantastic wines. I was buying it and giving bottles away to people. And thus began the shift in my family from a bunch of beer drinkers to wine drinkers.

Now out to the grill. With more than a few people mentioning how dark some of my outside shots are I attempted to rectify that with a 500 wat Halogen light. Seems to have worked better than the mag light I held under my arm for the last video I shot!?!?!

And here we have a grill set up for two zone grilling. Coals flaming hot on the left, nothing on the right. Oh, and as I always do just before I grill, I give the grate a good cleaning.

Now to those videos I promises in the title. This is me searing the Filet on one side. For some reason in this video it looks like the flames are hitting me in the face. Trust me, that didn't happen:

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And here we have me searing the other side of the steak:



How do I tell if a steak is done? By feel. I push on the steak. The harder it is the more done it is. As you can see in this video, after a full 5 minutes the Filet was just not cooking. The wind was whicking the heat away too fast so I put the steak closer to the coals:



I pushed it closer to the coals and cooked it 2 minutes on each side and it was still way too spongy so I had to transfer it to right over the coals if I wanted the thing to be more than raw. So much for those beautiful grill marks. Time to form a nice tasty crust:



One little trick here. I needed to get air to the coals to keep them hot but keep the heat in and around the steak. To do so I just cracked the lid a bit as seen here. Some would say that with a weber I just would need to open the bottom vents, except I hadn't dumped the ash in a while and those vents were under a couple inches of ash and not much use:



And here we have the steak on the plate and ready to rest for a little while. As you can see in this video that the steak is much firmer than it was when I was testing the doneness after 5 minutes of baking on the side of the grill:



I let this guy rest for about 4 minutes under foil while I got the movie ready for the evening:


With Pitchers and Catchers arriving in Jupiter tomorrow I felt a baseball movie was in order. Sure half the movie is a chick flick but it's still a great baseball movie:

Same ritual every year. In the weeks leading up to opening day I run the gamut of my baseball flicks including Bull Durham, Field of Dreams, the Natural, and For the Love of the Game. And no, I am not some Kevin Costner nut. The only other move I own that he is in is Silverado, but he makes great baseball movies. Back to the steak


Here we have the Money Shot:


And a bonus money shot of an awesome, tender, and juicy bite:



Click here for the rest of the process

How the GrillinFool celebrated the Super Bowl - Part II - Sliced Ribeye Sammiches

Normally this is just served on Christmas Eve but my dad broke this out for the SB. This is an excellent recipe for feeding a lot of people as it is simple and once the meat is cooked it can remain in a warm oven for quite some time while the rest of the meal is prepared. This is so simple and so flippin good!!!


Basically go to your local butcher and ask him or her to slice a ribeye cut wafer thin. We're talking about right at a quarter inch thick. While traveling for his job my Dad got the meat at the Save-A-Lot in Princeton, Indiana for $3.99 per pound. And the meat cutter there, Jim, sliced it perfectly for this. When you get home put those slices in a ziplock with some Andria's and coke and allow to marinade overnight.


If you don't have access to Andrias, Worcestershire, garlic and cola will suffice. You could do Dr. Pepper if you want as well.

The next day, set yourself up a grill with high heat on one side of the grill and low on the other. One side to quickly sear the meat and the other side for a nice ribeye spa which is where you put the marinade in a disposable tin pan. Once the steak is cooked, toss it in the pan to keep it warm:


Let's get a look at that succullent meat. How good does this look:


Once the grill is hot, slap that meat on the heat:


Sear it quickly on one side:


Then flip and repeat:


It doesn't take very long. 60 second on each side should do it if the fire is hot enough. Remember this stuff is very thin. As the slices finish cooking transfer them to the spa where you can see the sauce is steaming:


As the pan fills apply more of the marinade as you can see here. That black stuff is extra marinade:


Despite it not taking long to cook each slice, there are a ton of slices and only so much grill space so to finish all of the meat it might take an hour or two. In a situation like this, that just means more time for drinking as my father was demonstrating as he was tending to the meat:


Once the pan if full, slap some tin foil over it and throw it into a warm oven. When it's time to feed the masses, pull off the foil and set next to whatever condiments you desire.


For me all I need is some mayo or sometimes a slice of cheese:



Click here for the rest of the process

My rarest steak to date on this site

That hunk of beef may still be mooing. This is for all you folks out there that order a steak with the hooves and horns knocked off and warmed up a bit. This is one of those glorious steaks...


While I was preparing my chili last Thursday I was also getting this beautiful piece of meat ready to be grilled on Tuesday night:


A picture from that side doesn't really do the steak justice in terms of thickness. The shot above shows the nice marbling but doesn't really give this credit it's due. This one does a better job:



I marinaded this guy in Worchestershire, garlic, black pepper, a little coke and some pepper oil to kick up the heat a bit:


Pepper oil? Take some dried peppers, put them in an oil bottle, add oil, put someplace dark, in a couple of months you have a nice spicy oil. Sadly the oil had little impact on the flavor of the steak. Just decided to try something new. Sometimes when you take a swing you hit a homerun. Sometimes you hit a single. Sometimes you swing and miss. No big deal.

The steak is ready for the fridge and an all night soak in that marinade:


The next day I pulled it out of the fridge, rinsed off the marinade, let it come up to room temp and then added some coarse salt and black pepper:


While my coals were heating up outside I got a proper beverage to enjoy with the meal. 91 point wine for $12 is a great deal as this bottle was really good:


BTW, for those of you wondering where I got the name GrillinFool, well maybe because on a Tuesday night in January I was outside grilling when the temp was this (not to mention windchill and it was pretty windy):


As for the grilling proces, here is a video of the process. Considering how dark my videos have been in the past I decided to try to do something about it. I got all kinds of fancy by holding a mag light under my arm, filming, and cooking all at the same time. The mag light lighting method is not the best method. I need to come up with something else for this. Maybe a portable shop light. But here is the video and it helps show the process from start to finish:



Here is the steak brought in to rest. Nice cross hatch:



Click here for the rest of the process