Hello and welcome back to The Stone Soup Cook–so glad you’re here!
It’s been another tough week since losing our precious Jino, but day by day, we move on and the grief eases bit by bit.
Over the last couple of weeks, I’ve had a hard time staying focused on anything in particular, so writing hasn’t come easy…nor reading, nor cleaning house, nor…anything.
But today, I have felt focused enough to get back to my desk and I’m happy to be sharing a great summertime celebratory recipe with you: grilled tomahawk steak.
As I continue my series on California Cuisine, I’m stepping back over to my new Big Green Egg to grill a tomahawk steak:
…now friends–this is one serious hunk of meat. It’s also no ordinary hunk of meat. What exactly is a tomahawk steak? It’s basically the ribeye steak with the rib bone left attached which forms kind of a “handle” which makes the cut of meat resemble a tomahawk. It’s cut to be around 1 3/4″-2″ thick and weighs in at about 2.5 pounds. Part of the weight is the bone, but there’s meat all the way up the spine of that bone, too.
I’ll be honest–when I first saw this cut of meat featured several years ago on a cooking show I like, I thought it was just a gimmick–just something conjured up by the producers of the show to make a splashy challenge for the contestants. But now I see it on menus and in my favorite grocery store, so apparently that gimmick had legs.
Turns out, it’s a cut that’s been around for a while. It came onto the scene in the early 2000’s and fairly recently has gained traction in restaurants and grocery stores. At 2.5 pounds of meat, Mr. Stone Soup and I split the steak and still had some leftover. Now if you’re a “Big-Texas-Steak-House” meat-eater (if you missed my post on the Big Texas Steak Ranch, click here), you might want two of them, but really, this is a steak that’s perfect for two for a celebratory dinner in. It’s a splurge (mine was around fifty bucks) and makes for an impressive presentation.
But how do you approach such a behemoth steak on the grill? By using a new-to-me technique called the “reverse sear,” that’s how. Basically a reverse sear involves cooking the steak on indirect heat for while and then blasting it on a very hot grill for just a couple of minutes to get some nice sear marks. Timing depends on the thickness of the cut.
In my case, the steak was almost two inches thick. I fired up my Big Egg and used the “conveggtor” to get indirect heat. I used regular hardwood FOGO lump charcoal and tossed in a couple of pieces of pecan smoking wood and a couple of pieces of mesquite smoking wood. I got a temperature of about 260-270* and set it there. I had let the steak come to room temperature while tenderizing with lime juice and salt. I placed the steak in the Egg and let it cook/smoke over indirect heat at around 265* for about 45 minutes, at which point the temperature of the steak was about 115*.
I pulled it out and covered it with aluminum foil to rest while I prepared the Egg for a sear. I pulled out the convEggtor and cranked the heat up to about 550-600*.
While I was waiting for the Egg to heat up, I threw a couple of ears of corn and a red bell pepper onto the grill:
…so I could serve this great corn salsa with the meat:
Once the Egg reached about 575*, I slapped the steak back on the grill for about 1.5 minutes per side and rested the steak again for about 5-7 minutes.
Folks–this technique on this cut yielded a pretty incredible steak–great, rich flavor, tender, juicy, smoky–really–everything you could ask for in a date-night steak.
Soooo–
I’m coming down on the side of “Glamorous Date Night In” for the tomahawk steak and I’ll be making it again, but probably only for special occasions due to the cost.
This week, I’m going to try to publish not only another installment of “What’s Cooking in my California Kitchen” but also start a new sidebar feature: “The Sourdough Diaries.”
I mentioned in my last post that as part of my quest to fill up time on my hands now that I no longer have any dogs in the house, that I was taking up sourdough bread baking again. As part of my “therapy,” I began keeping a journal of what kind of sourdough I make, how, when and with what I feed my sourdough starters (yes–I have two of them that I am feeding with different types of flour to compare and contrast) and what techniques and ingredients I’m using to make the bread.
I want to start the feature this week, but we’ll see how things go.
Until then–
Peace, love and good food,
Keri
