Leading Up To Lent

With Ash Wednesday coming up, hubs and I thought that we better get our meat fix before we begin our 40 day vegetarian fast leading up to Easter. So what better way to stock up on meat than a juicy, melt-in-your-mouth steak?

I was fixed on having two tenderloin steaks, so I popped over to Ben's General Food Store, Publika and I was in for a treat!

Wagyu tenderloin! I'm not a steak person but I was not going to say no to some Wagyu, so we bought two slabs of 200g tenderloin. After the sheer excitement of imagining myself eating the steak wore off, I realised that I had to cook it perfectly. Come on, I didn't want to be known as the one who ruined a Wagyu steak!

So I got home and started googling 'How to cook a Wagyu steak'. There were many schools of thought on how to make the 'perfect' steak. Some required searing the outside and then popping it into the oven, which seemed a little risky and complicated because I didn't have those thermometers that you can stick into the centre of the meat, so how would I know when the meat was done?

Plus, if I had such a good cut of meat, why would I want to cook it so well? I wanted to eat it rare so that it would be juicy and just dissolve in my mouth. *Drool*

So I came across a video on youtube and I think that this method would probably be the best way of preparing a steak. A steak should never be accompanied by sauce/ gravy because it would completely hide the flavours of the meat! Unless that was the exact intention of having gravy in the first place.

So what was the secret method of preparing the steak? Very simply:

Step 1

Make sure your meat is at room temperature. Season with salt and pepper and oil lightly with some olive oil. Heat up a DRY frying pan on high for 5 minutes.

Step 2

Place steaks in the pan and make sure they don't touch each other because it will cause the meat to boil instead of fry. Give each side a minute (for thinner slices) or a little more and flip. Cut a garlic and rub gently on each side followed by brushing some butter on the meat. The time the steaks take to cook depends on how you like your steak. The softer the steak it to the touch, the rarer it is. 

Step 3

Remove steaks from the pan (should've taken about 3-4 mins to cook) and let them rest on a plate for 3-4 minutes, depending on the thickness of the meat. Transfer steaks to a separate plate and mix the juices from the steaks with a knob of butter and pour the 'resting' juices onto the steaks and serve immediately with your favourite veggies. I also like to place a knob of butter on each steak simply because you can never have enough butter!

Pure bliss!