A well-cooked steak using a quality cut of meat is one of life’s greatest pleasures. When you get that perfectly-seared, slightly charred exterior encasing that tender and juicy interior cooked to medium-rare perfection, it can feel like the absolute height of luxury.
Unfortunately, the same can be said for the price, with a nice steak now almost prohibitively expensive in many restaurants where you’d expect to pay at least £30 for a 200g fillet steak.
Fortunately, however, you can pick up a nice steak from a local butcher or even the supermarket and, with a bit of know-how, produce a delicious and well-cooked steak that’s not far off restaurant quality. The joy of a good steak is that it doesn’t rely on lots of additional ingredients or complicated cooking methods — instead it’s down to the quality of the meat and the cooking.
And many people swear by using a kitchen staple to achieve that ultimate crispy crust: cornflour.
The reason cornflour works is because it helps dry the surface of the meat and it’s a really dry surface that helps develop that coveted crust. This is also why it’s important you dry the surface of your steak with a paper towel whether you’re using cornflour or not.
The Takeout explains that “the technique is based on Argentinian-style steaks, or churrasco”. These are “cooked low and slow over a wood fire” and “the longer cook time helps the steak develop its iconic crust, which is the key to good churrasco”. In fact, the crust is said to be not just crispy but “crunchy” with a “lightly breaded texture” (which sounds sensational if you ask me).
How to get crust on a steak
The crusty surface on a well-seared steak (as well as other meats like chicken) comes from the Maillard reaction, which happens when food is exposed to high heat and this causes chemical reactions in the sugars and proteins in the meat, altering both the colour and the flavour.
Some people advise that this method works best for a thick cut of steak (some even suggest 1.5-2 inches — but it can work on thinner cuts than that). This is what you need to do:
1. Bring your steak up to room temperature by having it out of the fridge for an hour or so before cooking.
2. Mix salt and cornflour together (you don’t need lots of cornflour — a 2:1 salt to cornflour ratio is sufficient) and coat your steak on all sides with the mixture. Ideally, you would let the steaks rest for a little while on a wire rack before cooking but it’s not essential.
3. Put a pan on a high heat on your stove and get it smoking hot before adding your steak. Cook on one side before turning over to cook the other side. An important factor to getting the lovely seared crust is to leave the steak alone for a few minutes while it browns. Even though it’s very tempting to keep flipping, if you do it too many times, flipping will interfere with the browning process. Of course, you don’t want your steak to overcook or go black so keep an eye on it!
4. Once your steak is ready, take it out of the pan and let it rest for about 10 minutes before eating.
When to salt your steak
As you’ll see, the guide above advises you to salt your steak as part of the cornstarch mixture before cooking. But you’ve likely also read that it’s a good idea to salt your steak well in advance of cooking for best results. So does it matter?
One culinary consultant decided to put it to the test. J Kenji Lopez-Alt bought six different steaks and salted them at 10-minute intervals. Writing on Serious Eats, he explained that meant that the last salted steak went into the pan immediately after salting, while the first one was salted 50 minutes before cooking.
He said: “The steaks that were salted immediately before cooking and those that were salted and rested for at least 40 minutes turned out far better than those that were cooked at any point in between.”