You Don't Need This Technique For Great Steak, According To Andrew Zimmern

What, exactly, constitutes a great steak? Therein lies the problem. To start with, there are many different cuts of steak, some of them significantly more succulent and tasty than others. What's more, there are a great many ways to cook perfect steak, as well as marinating secrets and tenderizing tricks. All of this gives you a virtually endless array of steak-cooking opportunities to experiment with, even before you get to the subject of sides and sauces. 

This ridiculous amount of steak-cooking opportunities is both a blessing and a curse, because it's easy to get overwhelmed by the sheer number of choices. Fortunately, experts have been known to lend a hand in determining which steak-making methods are the best — and, as it happens, which ones simply don't cut the mustard. "Bizarre Foods" maestro Andrew Zimmern knows a thing or two about ways you should and shouldn't prepare food, and he has now revealed the one particular technique that you don't need to make a great steak.

In the bone marrow episode of Zimmern's YouTube series "Andrew Zimmern Cooks," Zimmern cooks an absolutely stunning-looking tomahawk steak before moving on to the marrow. While doing so, he casually reveals that the sous vide process, in cases like this, is entirely pointless. "No sous vide here," Zimmern says, while cutting into the meat that's seared to perfection while perfectly pink in the middle. "You can actually achieve this kind of searing perfection if you go nice and slow with a big, thick cut of meat."

Zimmern doesn't particularly elaborate on his definition of "nice and slow," though it does involve resting the meat a full half an hour. However, his earlier YouTube video about tomahawk steaks employs the extremely nice and slow method of reverse searing, in which you start out grilling the meat over the cool side of the grill (or, alternately, a low-temperature oven), and ultimately finishing things up with a nice sear over high heat. For grilling enthusiasts who enjoy their thick cuts of steak super tender, but have no particular interest to employ the sous vide method, this may very well be worth a shot.