How to Grill the Perfect Steak

I love to cook, and I especially love to cook outside over a grill.  I know it is a total cliche, but cooking meat over a fire is an important connection to our roots.  I would imagine one of the reasons grilled meats taste so good to us is that it has been an important part of our behavioral evolution since Homo erectus roasted a fat slab of woolly mammoth rump roast over a fire 400,000 years ago.  Maybe charred and browned bits of meat aren't the best thing for us, but they may be the oldest comfort food.

I come from a family of deliciously arrogant cooks.  My Uncle Philip believes he makes Italian meatballs "the right way," and all other practitioners are creating abominations.  My Granddad is the only one in the family capable of making "Granddad's Tomatoes," a oil and herb tomato salad.  My father makes the best chocolate chip cookies.  He has never once used a recipe, and I have never met a baker who can replicate them.  He knows they are the best, and he relishes the fact that nobody can replicate him.

My specialty... grilled game meat.  I always get a little nervous whenever somebody else grills my steak.  There are few things that bring out an anal-retentive streak in me, but grilling game meat is one of them.  You don't screw around with grilled game meat for a couple of reasons.  First, a free and wild creature gave its life for your dinner; you better respect the animal by not ruining its meat.  Second, when properly done, grilled elk, deer, or antelope steak is about as sublime as it gets.  Game meat is lean, yet full of flavor, and the properly prepared steak is almost never tough, gamey, or otherwise unpalatable.

So how is it done?  I am not a trained chef... and there may be techniques that accomplished chefs would eschew (I know my Uncle Phil would), but this works.  I have cooked game meat this way for the accomplished palate and the neophyte game eater alike, and both sing the praises of the HHMM steak... (the implicit assumption is that these people aren't just being polite).  I have had many wonderful game steaks cooked other ways than described below, but I still like my own recipe the best.  Here is my approach:

Step 1. Harvest a game animal, then butcher the tasty critter yourself.  A steak will taste much better if you do all the work to put it on your plate.  In a pinch, commercially processed game meat or game meat from a friend will certainly get the job done.

Step 2. Baste all sides of a backstrap/loin (whole or cut into steaks), sirloin, or any steak-quality cut, with a mixture of:
3-4 tablespoons of olive oil
1 tablespoon of Kosher salt
 4-5 (or 8-10) cloves of chopped garlic
A bunch of course ground pepper
(note: I never measure anything when I am cooking meat, unless I am making a snooty French sauce to go on the meat. Quantities listed above are both approximate and relative).

Make sure you save any of the left over mixture.

Step 2.  Start the fire.  While your meat is resting on the counter in a bath of oil and spices, get charcoal going nice and hot, but only on one side of the kettle, as shown below.  In my not-humble opinion, charcoal is the only proper way to grill a steak (remember what I said earlier about me and my family).  Again, in a pinch, gas will work, but charcoal sears and browns the meat better, and it is easier to concentrate and control the heat by moving your meat relative to where your pile of coals sits.  Whether you are using charcoal or gas, the only time you should clean your grate is when it is piping hot.  Use only a wire brush and scrape the grease and crusties off from the previous cookout.  The hot oils will quickly develop a patina on the metal, much like what is on cast iron cookware.  This patina will prevent food from sticking on your grill, and who knows, maybe it adds to the flavor to have a homegrown seasoning on your cookware.

Step 3.  Put the meat directly over the hot coals, where the heat is the most intense.  You are going to sear the meat, which seals in juices and develops that wonderful browned meat flavor.  The oil will help with this browning process by sizzling on the meat.  It will also help prevent sticking, it will keep the meat (which has very little fat) from drying out, and olive oil tastes really darn good.  Besides which, it helps with the patina described in step 2.

Step 4.  After the meat is seared on  to your satisfaction, take some of the remaining oil-seasoning mixture and baste it on the seared side.  Once all sides are seared, move the meat off of the heat to the side of the grate with no hot charcoal underneath.  Close the upper vents on your grill lid.  Here you can cook more slowly, in the smoke of the charcoal until it is cooked to desired doneness (more on this later).  Continue basting at regular intervals throughout the entire cooking process.

Step 5.  Remove the meat from the grill a couple of minutes after your last basting.  In my mind, the one easy way to ruin game steak is to overcook it.  Cuts of meat with lots of connective tissue and sinew (i.e. neck meat, shoulder roast, shank meat), should be cooked very slowly at low temperature in a moist environment (i.e. braising).  Steak and other cuts with low amounts of connective tissue are tender to begin with and should be cooked quickly over high heat, and they should never be cooked beyond medium rare, period.  In my household, meat cooked beyond medium rare is known as "ruined."  This is because the meat is dryer, has less flavor, and it starts to get more chewy, less tender. When I use a meat thermometer, I like to take the meat off at an internal temperature of 120 for "purple in the center" (which is delicious) or 130 - 135 for rare to medium rare, but make sure you calibrate your meat thermometer to your true desired doneness.

Step 6. Slice, serve, and enjoy.  The outside of the slices should be a salty, garlicky shell around savory, succulent centers.  This is as good as red meat gets.  I think beef is greasy and flavorless in comparison.  Wild meat is the King of steak meats.  Doesn't that photo below make you want to bust out the best red wine in the cellar and celebrate?  Yet, it only took a few minutes to prepare and cook... The flavors are simple, yet full.  Olive oil, salt, and garlic cooperate quite nicely with these meats.  (Actually that steak was slighltly over-done for my taste, but it was really darn good!).

Spring.

The peppers are looking up in the basement seedling operation.  The chicks are using their training run, getting used to the outdoor life.  The Mini-HHMM is running around the yard in his shorts.  Peas are coming up in the garden.  It must be spring and I can almost taste the sweetness of homegrown life.  Definitely living the dream...

Chicks!!! Part 3: Coping with life as a crappy carpenter.

Carpentry is one of those things that doesn't come easily to me.  I spend more time than I should staring at a design question, grinding my mental gears.  In general, I will finally act with relative haste on the last plan I conjured, generally to curse myself later for not taking another approach.  I know that "square" and "level" are important foundations of good carpentry, but I rarely achieve those standards to my liking.  I just spent an entire Saturday out of square and not level.  The good news is, Emily and I are modifying a shed into a chicken coop and the only poop chickens give about level and square is the poop I will someday be scooping off of the floor.

I learned today that among her many talents, my bride isn't a half-bad carpentress.  She designed and (after a quick refresher on power tool use) cut out all the pieces for our nesting box.  Then we worked together and fastened all the chunks in place.  No, it isn't perfectly square, but considering she used warped recycled lumber she ferreted from several of the stashes around the homestead, it turned out pretty darn good!

The design and plans for this nesting box came from the book Keeping Chickens by Ashley English, part of the Homemade Living series of DIY guides put out by Lark Books.  The book, like its author, is simultaneously fantastic and maddening.  Fantastic because it is full of great information in an attractive package; maddening because the attention paid to an attractive package led to a book that can be difficult to navigate (Ashley English is maddening because she makes a living at being a total hipster, whereas the rest of us have to make a living and be hipsters in our free time).

My major woodworking accomplishment of the day... a functioning door so the chickens will be able to cruise in and out of the coop, and get shut in for the night, to keep them safe from marauding predators, both wild and domestic.  I also reinforced a dry-rotted floor, and installed a baffle to keep litter and bedding away from the door when we enter the coop.  Tomorrow, I will finish framing in the door, so it is solid, and we will whitewash the walls, install the nesting boxes and some roosts, and our chickens will have a poultry palace.  Now all they will need is a run... gotta get rid of that walnut tree!

My eyes are bigger than my stomach.

Emily and I have careers, so we can support our wild toddler, a needy Labrador  and a cat with IBS.  We have way more stuff to do in a day than time to do it.  Taxes, bills, retirement savings, car repairs, house repairs...  well, welcome to adulthood, I suppose.  This is harder than I thought it would be.  We have an old house, we want a big garden, a mini-orchard, a mini-vineyard, and we want a coop full of chickens.  I want to adventure deep into mountains and canyons to harvest big game animals and I want to wade wild streams to harvest fish.  Why do we want to complicate our lives with all this stuff?  Pretty much so we can cook  a really kick-ass meal, made almost completely from stuff we grew, killed, and gathered (at least one)... and we want to wash it down with beverages we brewed.  Then we want to take pictures of it, and brag about it in a blog.

Goldeneye and Antelope pâté en terrine. I.e. haute cuisine at its best... double I.e. snotty french food made with my game meat.

It is kinda weird, if you think about it.  I am trying to put out homegrown garden/fishing/hunting/cooking pornography.  Hobby farm exhibitionism.  Is it simply a symptom of Millennial narcissism?  Maybe.  My family is well known for their inflated sense of confidence.  But I don't think that is the whole answer.  I think we do it because we want to create something tangible.

For me there are two operative words there: create and tangible.  My career certainly provides opportunity for creativity.  Science itself is a creative process and fishery management is always described as 'an art and a science.'  For me, my career leaves something to be desired in the tangible component.  I have no doubt I will "make a difference" and help "conserve resources for future generations.," but it often takes a whole career to make that kind of impact... to create something tangible.  Sure, spreadsheets, reports, papers, presentations, and the like are satisfying in their own way, but growth in the length of my CV isn't going to cut it for me.  I am more sensual than that, and I need instant gratification.  I want to feel burn when hot oil hits my arm after venison and chilies go in my wok together.  I want to be piqued by the aroma of a freshly harvested elk.  I want to hear nothing but gurgling river water and the banter of family when I fillet a fish for camp hors d'oeuvres.  I want to see ripe tomatoes, fat eggplants, and ripening melons in our garden.  I want to taste all of it.

When I was a kid, my dad used to tease me about my eyes being bigger than my stomach.  I think that logic still applies.

Oh, yeah... I am hungry!  Especially for the antelope kidneys that are en flambé  in my wok.

Fence Project: Chapter 1

Been working on the recycled-shutter portion of the privacy fence/trellis.  Coming along nicely!  Re-purposing is fun!  Blackberries? Hops? Grapes?  Blackberries are probably a bit thorny for this spot, so what is it? Hops or grapes?  What should we grow up this fence and train to the three cables that will be strung between the fence posts above the shutters? Thoughts, anybody?

Lasagna Garden: Layer your way to a green thumb.

There hasn't been much time to blog lately.  Weekends are about building the garden Emily and I have been dreaming about for years.  We have scrambled the yard - brings to mind the adage about breaking eggs to make an omelet.  The previous owners of our home built some nice raised beds, but some of them didn't fit into our vision, so now they are gone.  The landscape timbers from the beds are piled on the lawn and will become the posts for our garden fence.  A bony walnut tree has been reduced to a skeleton of its former self, a pile of firewood, and a heap of brush.  The remainder of the tree is waiting for a professional arborist to safely remove the crown from the electrical service line for our house, without collapsing our neighbor's shop roof.  Much of the shrubbery has been trimmed back to accommodate the 8-foot tall privacy fence/grape arbor that will soon provide us with trellising for the build up, not out, approach to gardening.  The final ingredient to this apparent disarray: tarp-covered rectangular heaps with soil-covered sycamore leaves spilling out from underneath.  We have been sheet layering compost and leaves, in an attempt to build rich garden soil above what was once only lawn.  We used this "lasagna garden" technique once before in Helena.  Our first year was good... we had some tasty veggies, but the second year was spectacular.  I can only hope this endeavor will be even more fruitful, now that we live in a place with more than 150 frost-free days.

How to lasagna garden?  The Internet is full of good advice, and there is a great book on the subject, but here is our approach. Note: We built these lasagna beds in the spring, but if you have the time, it would be best to do this in the fall.  Still, enough decomposition does occur before planting time to make this a viable spring gardening method.  When we did this in Helena, we built the beds and planted a week later.

We're playing our garden by ear this year, but our general idea is to break our 30'x 35' garden area into four beds of roughly the same size. We laid down heavy duty weed barrier to be the foundation for paths, which we will cover with straw or some other mulch once the beds are complete.

Then we put down a layer of wet newspaper on top of the grass within each "bed."  Each piece of newspaper overlapped with the piece newspaper next to it, the idea being that this should help keep at bay the Kentucky bluegrass underneath the bed.  We'll still battle some grass later on, but the newspaper really does help.

Next, we heaped on a layer (about 18 inches thick) of stockpiled fall leaves from our giant sycamore , which should produce abundant carbon garden fodder.  Note: We learned something interesting about stockpiling fall leaves.  Tarping your heap of leaves in the fall greatly improves the rate of decomposition, giving you a head start for spring use in sheet composting.  Before moving to the next step, we stomped down the leaves by marching methodically back and forth across the bed, compressing the pile a little.  

In order to alternate green and brown organic material, which apparently creates the Cadillac of composts, we then spread partly decomposed grass clippings (about 3 inches thick) that we had been saving from our late summer lawn cuttings.  Note: Alternatively, you could use partly decomposed material from your regular compost bin.  Since we ran out of grass clippings, we used the material in our earth machine for the "green" layer in our second bed. There were still recognizable vegetable scraps, green plant remnants from our winter pea crop, and the wilted remains of Emily's Valentine's bouquet. Next, we piled on another 18-in thick layer of slightly composted leaves, then topped it off with about 2 inches of good rich garden soil recycled from one of the raised beds we ripped out.  In the end, we had a beautiful raised bed, infused with various refuse from last summer's growth.

The final layer for this year will be a 3-in cap of commercial compost purchased from the local facility, but for now, we covered the bed in black plastic to encourage further composting while we wait for our starts to be ground-ready and the weather to warm enough for seeding our other crops. Note: Since we are new to the Lewiston gardening scene, we are relying on planting times this year from our neighbor who has been gardening in this area for 25+ years.  He uses his grandmother's method: it's time to plant seeds when you put your finger into the soil and it feels warm.

Throughout the summer, we will mulch the vegetables with grass clippings from the mower.  Next fall, after a (hopefully) abundant crop, we will renew the process of sheet composting by heaping leaves from the sycamore, as well as composted chicken turds (from our new flock), on top of the beds, covering them with plastic to cook away for the winter.

Chicks!!! Part 2.

The chicks are growing far faster than I would have imagined.  I think they are doubling in size weekly right now.  They have already been through 20 pounds of food in just three weeks, which seems an awful lot for the teeny down puffs they were when we brought them home.  Of course they are messy eaters and many kernels are lost to the duff.  Flight feathers are not only growing in, they are operable.  We have been forced to find a way to lower the ceiling on their sorties in a big hurry.

Each breed has already separated itself from a personality standpoint.  Is it nature or nurture?  The buff Orpingtons seem to be the most observant, curious, and friendly.  Our barred rocks are goofy and a bit skittish.  The Wynadottes, which are Emily's favorite, are mellow, friendly, and especially determined to keep chunks of nightcrawlers away from their brooder mates.  Finally, our Araucanas are still an enigma.  We named one of them "Psycho-Chicken," due to its immediate and  incessant proclivity to peck at the walls of the brooder, dig through the litter to the cardboard below, and run circles around the other chicks.  On the other end of the Araucana spectrum, we have our most mellow, laziest, and "prettiest" bird (though it is very hard to use the word pretty to describe chicks pushing a month old).

We have already reaped some benefits, besides entertainment from our flock.  We are working their poo-laden pine shaving litter into our lasagna garden beds for an extra kick of nutrients.  Waste not, want not.  We may reap benefits from the meat of one of our birds much earlier than expected.  Seems we might have a little cockerel on our hands.  An extra tall and spiky comb on our smallest barred rock... hmm.  I don't think we'll go for roosters at this point.  We don't have much desire to raise the ire of any neighbor.