Perfecting a steak is a cooking skill that can be, at times, tedious and complicated. While you would ideally want all the juicy flavour of the cut of meat, you also would like to avoid undercooking it, nor ending up with a shoe-sole texture. The art of steak-cooking also requires using the right ingredients.
However, you would also not want your spices or seasonings to overtake your steak’s taste, especially since steaks are generally considered an expensive cut of beef in the UK. Nevertheless, there are countless recipes to elevate your steak game, and one of them relies on balancing savoury and sweetness with a surprising ingredient.
Moreover, this method of cooking a steak might just be a complete game-changer, with its author labelling it a “brilliant trick for the best steak”, in addition to being ‘life-changing’. Taking to the popular cooking blog The Kitchn, Vy Tran paid tribute to her Vietnamese heritage by sharing her mother’s sweetened condensed milk steak recipe.
Sweetened condensed milk is extremely popular in Vietnam, particularly when used in coffee. But Vy shared that the thick, sweet, and shelf-stable dairy product could be just as tasty in dinner meals.
With her mom’s cooking relying on ingredients that could be found in the family pantry, Vy became accustomed to meat marinated in the sweet stuff. “I came to understand the food science behind why using sweetened condensed milk is a great hack for caramelising meat,” Vy wrote.
“Through the Maillard reaction — in which both protein and sugar interact when exposed to heat — the meat develops a beautiful, caramelised crust with a complex flavour.”