Summers here, and I got a brand-new grill, so now seems like as good a time as any to reexamine some of the things we know about grilling beef. A perfect steak should have a crusty, crunchy, well brown exterior surrounding a core of perfectly pink, juicy, tender meat that spans from you. Well, donners, can go eat your hockey pucks on someone else's lawn. A perfect steak should have a nice contrast between the smoky, almost chart exterior and the deeply beefy interior. 
A perfect steak should be chin, drippingly, juicy, and melt in your mouth tender. We all know where we want to go. The real debate is what's the best way to get there? You've just dropped $50 on some prime aged beef, and you're rightfully nervous about screwing it all up. After all, there's a lot at a wait for it steak. Want to know how to grill a steak? 
Here's my advice do not do it the way they do it at steakhouses. Well, yes, they know how to cook a steak in a steakhouse setting, where their goal is consistency, quality, and more importantly, speed. Hungry customers don't want to have to wait for their meat. And a steakhouse has equipment and techniques designed to meet those needs at home. On the other hand, consistency and quality are important, but speed? Not so much. Check for marbling. You want plenty of intramuscular fat? Buy a thick steak. 2s Bone in or boneless, it doesn't make a difference. This is totally a matter of personal choices. 

Beef, unless you don't enjoy the extra tenderness or slightly funky flavor of dry aged meat. Salt in advance and salt well. I season mine four days in advance, but you want to do it a minimum of 40 minutes ahead of time. For better searing, rest your steak uncovered on a wire rack in the fridge at least overnight and up to four days. Use hardwood coal if you've got it, but briquettes will work just fine. And arrange the coals in a two zone pattern with all the heat under one half of the grill. Cook your meat gently, then sear at the end. This will give you more evenly cooked meat and a better crust. 
Flip your meat as often as you like. The whole thing about only flipping once is utter nonsense, and we can prove it. Use a thermometer. If you don't have one, go ahead and poke or cut and peak. It won't harm the stake. Let your meat rest. Your meat should rest for about a third of the time it took to cook in order to prevent excess moisture loss. Selecting the right cut first a definition steaks are basically any piece of meat that falls under the category of fast cooking cuts cuts that are low enough in connective tissue that they don't require the long cooking times that slow cooking cuts require. The difference between a steak and roast essentially comes down to size. Any good roast can be cut into individual stakes, although, unfortunately, it's not possible to put together several steaks into a large roast without the aid of transcutaminase or at the very least, a reliable time machine. The tenderness of a steak is inversely related to the amount of work that a muscle does during the steers lifetime. 
The longissimus dorsi, referred to as the loin or the backstrap, are relatively unused muscles, so they're extremely tender, making them an ideal candidate for steak and also quite expensive. The Sowas major are a pair of shorter muscles that start about twothirds of the way down the steer's spine and run on the. Of the ribs, commonly referred to as the filet mignon or tenderloin, thereby far the tenderest piece of meat on the steer, coupled with their small size, makeham most expensive cut at the butcher. That whole supply and demand thing, you know. Out of these two muscles come a number of cuts. Here's what you'll find at the typical butcher cooking. Given the same amount of coal and the same exact treatment, a steak cooked over hardwood will have a better crustier sea and a smokier flavour. This difference largely has to do with the relative densities of the two products. Hardwood is not nearly as dense as a briquette and is thus better ventilated when burning. This leads to a hotter, faster burn. Measure the heat at grill level from a chimney full of briquettes and a chimney full of hardwood, and the difference can be as much as 100 degrees or more. 
Charcoal briquettes are easier to find. I can't get real hardwood within a 20 block radius of my apartment cheaper, more reliable and longer burning, making them great for extended grilling sessions. Salt your meat about 40 minutes before it hits the grill. When the salt first hits a steak, it sits on the surface. Through the process of osmosis, it'll slowly draw liquid out of the mat, which you'll see pull up in little droplets. As those droplets grow, the salt will dissolve in the meat juice, forming a concentrated brine. At this stage in the game, about 25 to 30 minutes in or steak is in the absolute worst shape possible for grilling. 
That moisture will evaporate right off, leaving you with a tough, stringy crust. Give it a bit more time and eventually that brine will begin to break down some of the muscle tissue in the meat, allowing the juices to be reabsorbed and taking the salt right along with it. What does this lead to? Meat that is both better seasoned and more tender and moist when you cook it. Personally, I season my steaks at least a few days in advance to give the salt maximum time to work its way into the meat. Why steakhouses don't do this is a mystery to me. Do use kosher salt. Not regular table salt, the larger grains of kosher salt. 1s koshering salt, as salt itself is always kosher. Kosher salt is coarse salt used in the koshering process, easier to sprinkle evenly with your fingers, and will also draw more initial moisture out of the meat to dissolve than table salt quite heavily. 
A thick steak will be seasoned only on its exterior, so you need enough salt to carry that flavor through. I always have a hard time describing how much salt to use, but my best description is the way a light snowflurry looks on a dark ashfelt parking lot. Not completely white, but enough salt that you can see it very, very clearly. I also like to keep a highquality, coarse sea salt, like molten or flour de cell at the table to serve with the steak, sprinkling it on the interior of individual slices as I eat. Therefore, the closer it is to its final eating temperature, the more evenly it will cook. 
Letting it sit on the counter for 20 to 30 minutes will bring the steak up to room temperature. The warmer meat will brown better, the thinking goes, because you don't need to waste energy from the pan to take the chill off of its surface. I found that with a thick steak, even after 2 hours of sitting out at room temperature, the center of the steak had risen by a measly 19 degrees or so, not even 15% of the way to its final target temperature. But when cooked side by side with. Straight from the fridge. The end results were completely indistinguishable. Here's the issue. Steak can't brown until most of the moisture has evaporated from the layers of meat closest to the surface. And it takes a hell of a lot of energy to evaporate moisture. It takes five times more energy to convert a single gram of water into steam than it does to raise the temperature of that water all the way from icecold to boiling hot. When searing a steak, the vast majority of energy that goes into it is used to evaporate moisture from its surface layers. Next to that energy requirement, a 2030 or even 40 degree difference in the temperature of the surface of the meat is a pittelling affair. 
Don't bother letting your steaks rest at room temperature. The single best thing you can do to improve your steak is to let it rest on a rack uncovered in the fridge, at least overnight and up to a few nights. This process is not dry aging, as some folks will have you believe, but rather it accomplishes an entirely different goal drawing out the exterior. The vast majority of energy that goes into a stake in the early stages of cooking are spent converting surface moisture to steam. Without that surface moisture, your steak will brown much more efficiently, which means less overcooked meat underneath the surface. At this stage in the game, I don't think I need to tell any of you that the old saying that is utter and complete nonsense. You can prove this quite easily by cooking two identical roasts. One see it first, then finished at a low temperature, the other started at a low temperature and seared at the end. If searing really locked in anything, you'd expect the one seared first to retain more moisture. In fact, you find that the exact opposite is the case. In reality, the amount of juices a steak loses is directly proportional to the temperature you cook it to, not the temperature you cook it at so wide. As a slow start, searate end roast lose less moisture. 
It has to do with the length of time it takes to build up a good crusty sear. Throw a raw steak on the grill and the cold, moist meat takes a long time to heat up to the point where it can begin browning and crisping properly. By the time it's well seared, the outermost layers are already overcooked and you've lost the battle before you've even begun to cook the steak through to the centre. Start a steak out on the cold side of the grill with the cover on the entire time. 1s On the other hand, and by the time it's reached within a few degrees of the proper final temperature, more on that in a moment its exterior has already gotten a good head start on the browning and crisping phase. All it takes is a moment on the hot side of the grill to crisp up you end up with meat that is as crusty as you could hope for and perfectly evenly cooked from edge to edge. I call the method the reverse sear and its gunner changed the way you make your steaks forever. Also note that for a gas grill, closing the lid will increase the temperature inside the grill, whereas for a coal grill, closing the lid will starve the coal of oxygen and thus decrease the temperature. 
Make sure to preheat gas grills with the lid closed before searing that steak. The reality is that multiple flipping will not only get your steak to cook faster up to 30% faster, but will actually cause it to cook more evenly as well. If you imagine that you can flip your steak infinitely fast, asterisk then you can see that what ends up happening is that you approximate cooking the steak simultaneously from both sides, but at a gentler pace. While it's true that it takes a bit longer over the hot side of the grill to build up the same level of crust, in a multifliper steak, the fact that it cooks more evenly means that you can cook over the hot side a bit longer without the risk of burning the outside before the center cooks. 
You can also avoid creating a harsh temperature gradient inside the meat as you would if you were to cook it entirely over the hot side without flipping. There are two possible advantages to the single flip method. The first is that if you like pretty grill marks, you won't get them with multiflipping. The second is that multiflipping can be a pain in the butt. If you have a ton of meat on the grill, you don't have to flip your steaks multiple times. But if someone tells you that you're ruining your steak by flipping it over and over, you can assure them that science is on your side. The theory is that a seasoned cook can tell how well done by poking it with their finger. If its rare, it should feel like the fleshy part of your hand at the base of your thumb when you touch your thumb to your index finger. Enjoy your barbecue this weekend.