The Salt Alternative You Should Be Using To Season Steak

While bullion (the gold kind) and bouillon (the soup kind) may be adjacent in the dictionary, they are two completely different words ... and yet, there's a certain overlap, nevertheless, since in certain circumstances bouillon, too, can be good as gold. One YouTube video shows British chef Marco Pierre White using bouillon, or, as he calls them, beef stock, cubes as a steak seasoning. His method involves crushing the cubes, then mixing them into a paste with some olive oil. He says he's been doing this for years and claims that this is still his preferred way to prep a steak, although we'd be remiss if we failed to point out that the video is not an outtake from a cooking show but is instead an advertisement for a specific brand of bouillon.

Despite this chef endorsement being a commercial deal, there's certainly something in the idea of re-purposing bouillon as a steak rub. A TikTok creator decided to try an experiment, cooking two halves of the same steak with the same method, with the only difference being the seasoning. The steak encrusted with bouillon paste, he said, was "just as good, if not better" than the salt-sprinkled one, although he did note that the bouillon coating was more prone to burning than was the salt and, as a result, that steak required a slightly lower cooking temperature.

One fun thing about using bouillon instead of salt is that you can easily change up the flavor a bit. Fancy a chicken-fried steak seasoned with chicken bouillon? If it's surf-and-turf you prefer, there's shrimp bouillon for that. Vegetable bouillon, too, may help provide the illusion of a well-balanced meal even if you're more of a meat-and-potatoes person. If you really want to spice things up, bouillon cubes are available in flavors such as chipotle and tom yum. If you don't want to be bothered with crushing up cubes, you can always use granulated bouillon, while there's also a type of bouillon that's already in paste form, as well.

If the reason why you're looking for a salt alternative to season your steak is that you want to lower your sodium intake, low and no-sodium bouillons exist, too. You could even, should you be so inclined, create your own DIY low-sodium bouillon substitute by mixing nutritional yeast with onion and garlic powders, parsley, and any other herbs and spices you enjoy. Mix this with olive oil, then rub it all over your steak before cooking and enjoy some extra added umami without spiking your sodium.