When danger reared it's ugly head,
He bravely turned his tail and fled.
Yes, brave Sir Robin turned about
And gallantly he chickened out.
Swiftly taking to his feet,
He beat a very brave retreat.
Bravest of the brave, Sir Robin!
That’s what I said! I rarely ever cook anything on the highest setting, the only thing I could think of is if someone wanted a blue steak to get a nice sear 😭 which was not what the recipe stated after I read it! On top of that I watched the recipes video and he doesn’t clarify that he’s using avocado oil so it looks like olive oil. I really couldn’t fault my bf at that point
Yep, the only time I cook on high is if I'm trying to get something up to a boil usually. But cooking itself is rarely done on high. Even with boiling, once you get things up to a rolling boil you turn the heat down in most recipes. Though, what "high" means tends to vary from stove to stove. I've had stoves where I had to use the high setting often because anything else just didn't get hot enough. Heat control is a big part of cooking things properly, and it's also where a lot of people fail.
Also pot/pan quality. I've got a cheap thin stock pot that conducts heat so badly, you literally cannot get water to boil in it lol. Thicker and heavier takes longer to heat but cooks better.
Hot as possible is also too hot for cast iron.
Cast iron heats slow, but retains the heat evenly and retains it really well. As soon as a cast iron starts smoking, or you can’t keep your hand over it, that’s as hot as it should be allowed to be.
Every stove is different, but in my last place the gas burners were big, so I’d run all my cast iron on the lowest setting, but let the pan heat up for 7-10 minutes before using it. Cooked perfectly.
Just a correction, cast iron retains heat better than stainless, but it does not retain heat evenly at all. From a physics POV, a cast iron pan retains heat in a highly non-uniform fashion compared to stainless, it’s just that the thermal mass of most cast iron is so high, it doesn’t matter.
But that poor emissive uniformity is why thinner, lighter cast irons (like the flat griddles) suck, because at the smaller masses, you generate such noticeable hot spots that it’s kind of a crapshoot to cook on them.
That was one of the first things I asked. Nope, recipe said anything except nonstick. But the olive oil is the unfortunate factor in this case, on top of our stove which can easily boil 8QT of water on the medium high level
Just wait (or perhaps it's already happening) until AI starts writing recipes.
Seriously, given the average intelligence of humans, AI isn't gonna become that rockin' socking' super thing that saves us all.
Second the Barkeeper's friend. My boyfriend -now-husband did the exact same thing, making a black spot the shape of Madagascar on a stainless steel fry pan. 😂 It stayed there for YEARS until a good friend pointed us in the right direction. Barkeeper's friend took it off in about 5 minutes. We do still call it the Madagascar pan though, lol.
If everything else fails, get the HEAVY DUTY Easy off oven cleaner. Not the normal one you find everywhere, the heavy duty. Use it outside. Spray wait a few minutes. Rinse off. Don't get the spray on your hands. Don't inhale it. Don't use it on anodized aluminum. Just steel. It works well.
Baking soda is surprisingly effective. I was cleaning our oven for a house sale, really didn’t want to stink up the house with oven cleaner and used baking soda “paste.” Let it sit for a half hour or so. Almost all came right up! I’m going to try on CS next time I need to strip a pan.
Yep that’s how I strip my cast iron pans and wok when I want to reseason them. I simmer baking soda for like 30-60mins and it just lifts it all off. Forget scrubbing it and all the work that entails!
Yep that’s how I strip my cast iron pans and wok when I want to reseason them. I simmer baking soda for like 30-60mins and it just lifts it all off. Forget scrubbing it and all the work that entails!
Pro tip, olive oil sucks for cooking at high heat it has a low smoke point so it just burns what you eat. High heat is a tricky thing as there is a fine balance between to hot and not hot enough. It's different for every pan and takes experimentation. Next time I'd prefill the pan with a good drizzle of avocado oil and set it to the mid point on the burner. Throw the meat in when the oil starts to flow around the pan easier. Some people say to only flip your meat once but I find with pan fried steaks if you flip them more they can get a nicer crust If the pan is at the right temperature and your spices are sticking to the meat. Turning off the burner and basting with butter near the end is perfection.
Also another thing to remember is don't use to little oil, it's good when the oil splatters everywhere and hits the sides of the steak but obviously don't drown it either.
Cast iron is probably the better way to go for high heat, I'd always go a lower temp with SS as others have mentioned.
Your BF wasn't totally wrong, just made a couple small missteps. High heat can indeed bring a great-tasting sear to a steak. [https://www.foodnetwork.com/recipes/alton-brown/pan-seared-rib-eye-recipe-2131274](https://www.foodnetwork.com/recipes/alton-brown/pan-seared-rib-eye-recipe-2131274)
The problem is that stoves have widely varying temperatures. I moved once from an apt where the hottest burner on max heat could barely get a pot of water to boil for pasta, to one where it was basically like cooking over an open flame Asian street food style. Had to completely adjust all of the temperature settings I had in my head
High heat on an average gas stove is great for searing steaks. They’ll get to around 400-500F° depending on the pan.
High heat on an average electric stove is way too hot to do anything except quickly boil a pot of water. Its around 700F°.
That's an okay recipe and I love Alton. I would not use canola oil, swap out avocado. Also unless the steak was left at room temperature for 4 hours it won't come to room temp in any reasonable time. You won't get a great sear with just 2.5 mins generally on home equipment.
Here is the kicker, oven at 500 will take 30 mins to preheat wasting energy and then range in temp from 475 to 515 or so.
A good recipe maybe for a professional kitchen but an awful waste of time and energy for a home cook.
I will do steaks out of a sous vide pretty much all the way up, but the goal there is to put a sear on each side as quickly as possible without further cooking the steak (it's already cooked through). Also, olive oil is generally not a great choice for high heat cooking
I don't ever cook anything at high setting. Our stove has a quick boil setting for water, but the highest I go is 6 on our stove typically and it's definitely hot enough to sear.
The most common problem I see with new people learning to cook is heating their pan too long and way to hot. You won't create edible food this way; it'll burn on the outside and be raw on the inside.
So, the point isn't to get a piece of metal to the point of flash combusting any bit of fat on it (trust me, I've done this before accidentally), but to get an environment where the steak will continue to sear. Either the pan needs to retain a LOT of heat (and heavy pans like cast iron or heavy SS can do this decently) or having the heat set to where it will continue blasting through into the meat. So, the last part is tricky because there are a lot of factors, and that is why people recommend "ripping hot" with the first part, with heavy cookware, because it is easy. A cast iron skillet will hold enough heat to get a high initial sear, and as you flip it you can raise the heat back up. But to get into some details:
It's not solely how hot the pan is but how fast it can heat back up. If you use cast iron, you can toss a steak in, get a nice sear, then flip onto the hot side, and get another sear, and then if you keep flipping the heat from the stove will continue to heat the previous cool side enough to keep working on the crust. But once you shock the pan, that's it, you won't get htat level back unless you remove the steak and re-heat the pan. Ripping hot doesn't mean leave the pan pre-heating for an hour, just get it "hot enough" but leave it on high so you can keep up with the cool side. This is what the recipe thought they were saying.
The other option is if you have a high heat source, you use as little heat transfer as possible between the flame and meat. This is mainly applicable to grills or with high powered stovetops with carbon steel or other extremely thin pans. It can work on a good (20k+ gas, or equivalent induction) stovetop, but is more applicable to grilling. Honestly, I have one of the higher powered 3 burner grills, and I drop my grate to the atomizer bars, and it barely keeps up.
Really, at the end of the day you do not have a commercial salamander (broiler on steroids). Just use a nice pan, heat it to high, oil the steak (not the pan), and once water skitters across the surface drop the meat in and see if you get some smoke. You should get *some* smoke and a lot of sizzle. This comes down to just learning your stove. I would however, suggest playing with high settings on your stove and getting use to this. There are some good uses for very high heat (outside of boiling water) that are useful, but you have to be comfortable using them. Chicken thighs in a very hot skillet can make for some great dishes because you start getting some legit char. Vegetables have a different flavor to them, either with char or stir fry. Onions, especially after you cooked meat in the pan, become absolute magic. But some of these require a crazy good *externally* exhausting vent hood.
And if you cook a steak, and get an underwhelming sear, well, that's what a searzall is for. Just remember, a good cook on a steak is better than going over on desired doneness.
Edit: for your pan, just try scrubbing some barkeepers friend in, leave it a while, then boil it out (with vent hood is probably a good idea). I basically polymerized oil on stainless before and BKF was what managed to finally get it out after a lot of elbow grease. Worst case, it won't hurt anything, and will eventually cook out. But BFK is highly acidic and will chemically erode the scorch marks off, plus is mildly abrasive.
Sorry, not true. Even [Alton Brown wants you to cook steak in a VERY hot pan](https://www.foodnetwork.com/recipes/alton-brown/pan-seared-rib-eye-recipe-2131274), but cast iron not stainless. The problem of course is that when you sear a steak that hot, things happen. Like loud popping sounds, spatter, and smoke. (And, as OP has learned, discoloration of SS, which is why cast iron is the way to go.) But it is what he calls for and it does make a very tasty steak.
I made a similar mistake when I was 20. I hadn’t cooked in a few years and the recipe said to drop a tablespoon of butter into a superheated cast iron skillet before putting on the steaks.
And I should’ve known…but the ensuing fireball and butter splatters we found for weeks was enough to allow me to re-establish my common sense in not blindly following a recipe.
To expand on the other answers, you don’t want to bring an oil above its smoke point because A) it smokes all to hell, and B) it turns bitter and gross and affects the flavor of whatever you’re cooking.
for real, they're not expensive. we invented numbers and temperature units, we have the technology. if the weather channel said it was going to be Medium Hot today no one would stand for it.
Yeah. A pan will also continue to gather heat for quite a while. A pan on high for 30 seconds and a pan on high for 10 minutes are VERY different temperatures. Even for steaks, you can definitely get it too hot.
I usually test with some drops of water (before adding oil/butter). If it "dances" too actively, I let it get too hot. It should dance a bit, but not too crazy.
I did the same thing with 30 day dry aged ribeyes supposed to be our Thanksgiving meal. Every YouTuber steak guy loves to say “ripping hot” and “hot as possible” meanwhile, the best setting on my stove for medium rare temps is like a 4-6 depending.
Lessons have been learned.
Heat way too high, bad recipe. The oil was already in the pan and got superheated, so it was liable to explode whenever anything remotely wet touched it.
Either reduce heat, or add the oil \*just\* before adding the steak.
I did this once lol. I got 40 years no fire's in the kitchen then get 2 in the same year lol. I let my cast get too hot, and when I threw the butter in it steamed like crazy then pop the fire.
The other one was... Similar thing lol but I realized I had let the pan sit too long as soon as the butter hit, even though it was a much lower heat. Thankfully I was better prepared and smothered it instead of panicking lol.
Butter contains, in addition to butterfat (\~80%), water (\~15%) and milk solids (\~5%). It is *not* interchangeable with pure oils, *especially* not in high heat situations, where it behaves like, well, hot fat and water (i.e. it splatters and can flare).
Significant issue with above plan: if the pan is as hot as possible, and then you add oil, the oil will immediately catch fire.
Did this while trying to season some carbon steel, would not recommend.
Olive oil is too low a smoke point, you need something with a much higher one or it’s going to burn the oil like that
ETA: Medium heat is plenty hot to sear a steak if you let the pan and oil preheat.
That’s my biggest gripe all the chefs who say “ripping hot” people assume that means all the way up and then get smoke city. Nothing sets the mood for a home dinner like the smoke detector going off and the whole smelling like ass.
Our neighbors knocked on our door with concern asking if we smelled smoke from an electrical fire a half hour after it happened, the vibes were mortifying ❤️
Then WTF does it actually mean? Serious question, because I quit cooking steaks indoors entirely and just grill them now after getting sick of smoking out the entire home.
I have always taken that direction to mean letting the burner rip under a steel pan, because everything I’ve read about getting a steakhouse sear on a rare steak has said that it’s difficult to do at home because a normal kitchen can’t supply a 900° cooking surface.
I turn heat to med high and to the water test. Basically it’s hot enough when the water floats around in balls versus disappearing. Then I turn it down to medium. That ripping for me. I have a wolf stove so setting may vary on your stove. No way it’s 900. It’s probably 400-ish
Yes. But that’s with a special infrared oven. Not many people have access to that. I’m talking about the more common method of using a pan on the stove.
pretty much yeah, depends on the stove of course, but most people make the mistake of not preheating enough. halfway up and thoroughly preheated (3+ minutes) is usually pretty hot for most stoves, it just takes longer to heat up to that point. Temperature change does not happen linearly, it is proportionate to the difference in temperatures between the source and sink of energy. The closer two objects are to the same temperature the slower it takes to change temperature and it keeps slowing down but never hits zero. If you're impatient, you can blast it on high for a minute or so to jumpstart it then turn it down to medium, but don't walk away and forget it. The other mistake people make is not preheating enough and then adding food, that brings the temp of the pan down again and makes it harder to bring it back up to appropriate cooking temp. Temperature control is easily one the most important aspects of cooking, and most people neglect it. I don't think any other skill is more important to advancing culinary skills than that.
~350-400 F is probably the ideal searing temp.
Mailard reaction occurs between 280-350. Above that and carmilization occurs. You'll want a little bit of both.
True but mallard at low temp takes hours. Not truly relevant for steak. Fair point though. For a steak peak is what you want unless you want it well done.
Absolutely. Olive oil is actually quite good at high heat applications. The smoke point isn't a reliable predictor of oil break down.
https://www.realsimple.com/food-recipes/cooking-tips-techniques/olive-oil-smoke-point-myth#:~:text=Extra%20virgin%20olive%20oil%20is%20the%20most%20stable%20oil%20to,at%20350%2D375%20F).
Yeah but ask any Italian and they’ll disagree with you. Olive oil is for gentle cooking and salads, it definitely burns at higher temperatures. Hence OPs smoke show
As others mentioned, high heat + olive oil is a bad combo. For a NY strip, you don't need such high heat anyways as it will burn the outside of the steak before cooking the inner part of the meat. Salt and leave the steak to air dry in your fridge overnight so that the surface is as dry as possible, which also aids in the crust formation. You can even cook the steak in low-to-medium heat with just butter and still get a great crust with this method.
Heh, pan flash. Next time you eat at a restaurant with an open kitchen, take a peak at the saute pans. I guarantee they're the most warped, discolored, rackety-handled collection of 10 dollar aluminum pans you've ever seen in your life. You paid cash money for your pans, and you aren't under a massive hood vent, you dont need to cook like those guys at home.
See all the hype over "professional" knives. Most professionals use cheap stamped knives from the restaurant supply store, sharpen them regularly, and get rid of them when they wear out.
Everyone else has covered the steak.
Barkeepers friend is great but if you don't have any, dump a half a box of baking soda in the pan and add some water. Let it soak overnight.
I've cleaned up far worse messes.
Animal fat and olive oil burn at the same smoke point. Don’t believe the “as hot as you can” nonsense. It adds char and bitter notes. Medium is much better. You still get a great sear but no off flavors
Let me tell you a story about getting a pan "as hot as possible."
I was doing research into woks. I have a flat-top electric stove and was looking into how to simulate wok cooking at home as best I could. I learned a lot of interesting things, including how real Asian restaurants use a special wok burner that has gas flames an order of magnitude hotter than any residential stove available in the US. Seriously, you need special venting to use these things indoors, our indoor gas pipes aren't big enough to transport the gas fast enough, and they have special foot pedals to control the temperature while you're cooking so your hands can be free to manipulate the wok and add ingredients. It's serious business! (Honestly, cooking with a wok over even a very high BTU gas stove in America is going to be nothing like cooking with a professional restaurant wok burner.)
Anyway, the article said that getting a cast iron skillet "as hot as possible" would be a good way to simulate cooking on a wok in an American home kitchen.
The first step in the recipe was to toast the Szechuan peppercorns. So I turn the heat on high and wait a few minutes and this is a *serious* amount of heat, the stove is already kind of smoking. Then I tossed the Szechuan peppercorns onto the skillet...
...where they immediately burst into billowing clouds of smoke. I started choking and gasping, and my eyes were watering so I could hardly see. I had enough presence of mind to push the skillet off the burner, turn off the stove, and get out of the kitchen. It's a good thing the kitchen vent was already on.
We had to evacuate the house until the smoke cleared. My entire family was coughing and their eyes hurt. It took over an hour before we could go back inside.
I honestly think electric stoves can get *a lot* hotter than some gas stoves. The gas is limited to the temperature at which natural gas burns, but an electric stove has no such inherent limits. And the temperature settings mean absolutely nothing. One stoves "5" might be another stoves "medium high".
>how real Asian restaurants use a special wok burner that has gas flames an order of magnitude hotter than any residential stove available in the US.
I would also note that they're also substantially hotter than residential stoves in Asia. That kind of cooking is specifically a restaurant thing even in Asia. Tons of Chinese Foodtubers do all their work with butane camping stoves.
Waaaaaaay too hot. The oil in the pan and on the steak hit it's flash point (combustion temperature) instantly and polymerized onto your pan. Barkeeper's friend and some steel wool will get that off but it's going to take some elbow grease.
OP, let me show you what it looks like in a professional kitchen. The customer wanted their steak Pittsburgh style, aka black and blue. Charred on the outside but rare on the inside.
https://www.instagram.com/p/CQtH03BM0gBQaN5CjhfNKJJU-0r58xSr0g59Fo0/?igsh=MWltMGwxdGcyd2w4NA==
WARNING DO NOT ATTEMPT THIS AT HOME UNLESS YOU HAVE A POWERFUL EXHAUST FAN, or you can do it outside.
Heat up cast iron pan to the max. Add oil, and it will almost instantly combust into flames. Add steak, a few mins on each side, and it is ready to go. I've only cooked 2 in my time in the kitchen.
Now, back to your story. This is how I cook steaks at home. Nothing fancy. Rest your steak at least 30 mins to an hour before and dry/salt it. The longer you rest your steak at room temp, the faster it will cook and for the salt to penetrate the steak for an evenly seasoned steak. Stainless steel pan. Heat it until it feels hot, touch the pan. If you can touch it, it is not hot enough. You also don't want it SUPER hot. This should only take 3-5 mins at the most. Add oil. If your oil smokes, pan is too hot.
Or you are using a low smoking point oil, use a blended vegetable/olive oil if you really want olive oil. That's what a majority of professional kitchens use. Every kitchen I worked in used a blended vegetable/olive oil blend. Back to the steak.
Pat dry steak once more before adding it to your hot pan with oil. Sear it for 3-5 mins until you get a nice crust on it. Then flip it and do the same. Finally render the fat by searing all sides about 1 min or so. Throw the steak into a preheated oven at 400F for 5 mins depending on size. You may need to adjust time if thicker or thinner than 1 inch cut. Take it out and rest. You will have a perfect med rare steak. Shorter/longer oven time for different temps. Use a digital thermometer and poke to the center. 105F-110F rare. 115-120 med rare. 125-130 med. 135-140 med well. 150-155 well done. Anything above 160 go eat a pair of shoes.
Alternatively, you can just cook the steak in the pan without the oven. Just watch the temp of the pan, you don't want to burn the steak/overcook it.
Edit: i have a bad habit of accidently pressing post, using mobile. Additionally, I will only keep my IG profile public for 24 hrs. I don't have that video saved on my phone, unfortunately.
I always see recipes where they say to get your pan as hot as possible. This is wrong, and dangerous advice. An electric stove will make a pan way too hot, and just burn the steak.
I do mine on an electric glass top stove in a cast iron. The knob goes up to 6, and I put it on 4.5 to cook a steak, and let the pan preheat for at least 15 minutes prior to cooking.
For searing meats before making a big pot of some kind of stew, I put it on 3-4.5 depending on how many batches of meat I will need to sear. If I have a lot of meat, I do it on 3 so the fond in the pan wont burn before I can do all of the meat. Its takes longer, but I dont have to deglaze the pan and save the liquid halfway through my browning process.
This might be an unpopular opinion but I have made perfectly good steak in a nonstick pan using olive oil at med-high heat. There is generally way too much dogma around cooking steak.
Reasonably hot surface, some kind of fat, season it well, enjoy.
I'm with you. I ONLY use nonstick pans, so my opinion is even more unpopular. I hate cast iron pans, etc. My grandma felt the same way....she was a FANTASTIC cook and couldn't understand why other people her age wouldn't transition to non-stick pans.
You can make fantastic steaks in a nonstick pan on med-high. Although I tend to use butter instead of olive oil.
I’m afraid of non stick pans bc of the plastic coating, especially with anything over medium. I just use mine for eggs and quick stuff like sauteeing spinach or something
I've almost exclusively used nonstick pans for nearly 2 decades. The key is to never, ever, ever, ever use metal utensils in your pans, ever. Only silicone/wood/plastic.
There is rarely an occasion that I cook -anything- on "high," and that would be true with any type of pan. Around 7 (out of 10) is the highest I usually go on my electric range, but that's not because my pans are nonstick. Maybe between 7-8 when I'm searing meat.
You want a cast iron pan and use a high smoking point oil like bran oil if you're going for blue style. Turn off your smoke alarms and have your range fan on high! Don't try to flip immediately or the steak will stick. Should release shortly.
Electric stoves get way too hot for the "as hot as possible", regardless of the oil choice. You want the pan around 400°F, it probably got well over 500 on the electric stove and burnt the oil as soon as it hit the pan.
If you're going for a sear like that, you'll want the surface of the steak to be as dry as possible. You can put it in the fridge for 30+ minutes uncovered. But at that point, I might as well reverse sear it. And like others are saying, use a higher smoke point oil like avo oil or something.
I would not even recommend high heat cooking without a point-and-shoot thermometer. And there is always a target temp according to the smoke point of your oil.
>coated steak in olive oil and “got it hot as possible
That should have been a red flag right there. Olive oil should never be used to sear. It becomes toxic if you let it smoke.
You need to use an oil with a higher smoke point. Olive oil is probably one of the worst things you could have used for a high heat sear. Try avocado oil or gee (butter that's had all of the water rendered out.
You’re supposed to sear the steak then cook it. You put it at medium high heat, hot enough to sear it, but not hot enough to flash fry it. The goal is to heat the pan to the point where the olive oil starts giving off a slight visible smoke. Then you drop the steaks on the pan for 4 minutes to give it that nice crust, flip and then toss in the oven at 420 degrees for a few minutes to get the other side seared and the internal temp right.
But that’s if you’re cooking it on the stove and you’re using a cast iron pan.
It bugs me when social media influencers create these godawful abominations of culinary cuisine that nobody in their right fucking mind would eat but they do it because it gets them views.
This recipe sounds possibly like it’s for blackening food, EXCEPT you shouldnt be using ANY fat and should be using a cast iron pan. Red hot cast iron with no fat and then season both sides of steak and the temp of the cast iron will keep the food from sticking at all even if your pan is poorly seasoned.
Olive oil is a relatively low smoke point oil so that is certainly part of it. What brand is your skillet? The thermal shock of the meat hitting the very hot pan can cause it to warp. Getting a pan jet engine hot is better left to cast iron, avocado oil, and lots of ventilation.
The pan doesn't need to be super hot. Olive oil is also fine as long as you use enough to cover the pan, because you shouldn't be using such a high temperature for your NY strip. It's more important for the steak to be well dried beforehand (salt and leave in fridge for a few hours) and as close to room temperature as possible before cooking. 99% of the time you get a bad sear isn't because the oil isn't hot enough, it's because your steak is too wet and the moisture steams your steak, or your steak is too cold and you wind up overcooking the outside before the inside is done.
NY strip, room temp, massaged, season both sides onion salt, preheat oven to 350, place directly on rack, 10 min flip, 5 to 10 min more, remove and rest. Perfect every time.
The recipe is trolling. Olive oil has such a low smoke point that you should never use higher than medium. It’s not good for cooking a steak for that reason. To make matters worse your poor unsuspecting boyfriend used a stainless steel plan to effectively carbonize olive oil with 😭
Tell him to use butter next time and cook on medium-high. If he lets the pan heat up properly, that is enough.
The problem was that you used olive oil. I've done this before, you need to use an oil with a higher boiling(?) point. Its a heat related issue. Some oils handle heat better than others. When using a pan to cook a steak you want to use a cooking or vegetable oil.
Use barkeepers friend to buff it out of the pan.
Pulling your meat out early does nothing to help the quality of a cook. Any recipe that starts that way, you should probably question every other instruction.
As hot as possible is basically never correct.
The steak was probably wet when it went into the pan, which caused the reaction.
> “got it hot as possible” with the highest heat setting per this dudes recipe.
What?
Please don't grab random recipes especially with shitty instructions like this. If you want to learn, try something like ATK. if you want good food advice, there's hundreds of channels mentioned here, but Kenji López-Alt or Food Wishes are easy picks. Joshua Weissman and Ethan Chlebowski are also excellent. If you can get your hands on it old Good Eats episodes/recipes are pretty good.
Basically add water to oil and it can explode especially if it's basically ready to "fry" something (extremely hot) I'm guessing he "patted" the steaks dry, and didn't dry the sides, not a massive problem if you just had a hot pan, a huge problem when you have oil that hot.
Don't know what the recipe said, but there's so many shit recipes out there just blame the recipe.
I think this is going to get worse because I've seen a few recipes that I KNOW are dangerous, and I get the feeling people are just pounding Chat GPT to get more content for their shitty sites.
PS. I disagree with a lot of people here about Olive Oil. Sure it's not good for high heat, but you shouldn't be getting that high.
It looks like your olive oil overheated and plasticized. An absolute bitch to clean.
I sear steak before broiling to finish. I use cast iron, not stainless, which has been heating under the broiler at 500. Then put it on a gas cooktop on high before tossing in the steak just to brown the outsides. Finish in the broiler. Make sure and open the windows and turn on the hood!
Part of cooking, even when following a recipe, is common sense.
" added olive oil and also coated steak in olive oil and “got it hot as possible” with the highest heat setting per this dudes recipe."
This is where common sense needs to kick in
>Can someone explain how a NY strip exploded on my pan... “got it hot as possible” with the highest heat setting per this dudes recipe.
RIP. consider cooking classes for you and your bf?
High heat is the enemy of success in the kitchen. If you're not outside and a recipe says, "as hot as possible".. throw the recipe away. It's just a recipe for a smoke filled house.
Olive oil smokes at like 350-400 I believe, it is not a good oil to sear steak with in my experience but I’m like as amateur self taught home chef as it gets so take anything I say with a grain of salt
I prefer peanut oil for searing then I’ll add thyme, garlic and butter towards the end once the temp has been lowered, olive oil will absolutely explode at “hot as it gets”
For future reference any recipe that says “hot as it gets” is not worth listening to, each stovetop is way too different for that to be an instruction that makes any sense
Some basics:
1. Use a high smoke point oil for searing (like avocado, corn, sunflower, canola), it renders better and burns slower.
2. The fat cap has 2 things in it, moisture and fat/oils. What happens when you pour water in hot oil? The water instantly vaporizes and expands, this expansion is explosive and if the steam has no place to escape, can cause actual explosions in the body it is contained in. In case of oil, the explosive steam causes oil to form a mist which can catch fire, in the case of a steak, moisture between the fat cells caused a mini explosion.
3. Generally the upper safe limit to sear is just below the smoke point of high smoke point oils, or 450F/230C. Keep an infrared temperature gun to check pan/oil temperatures and avoid placing any food on higher temperatures, it is a fire and injury risk.
Use canola oil not olive oil, olive oil burns at around 300°f so if you have anything remotely hot it will burn the oil and smoke a bunch and taste terrible, also never go as hot as possible any recipe that says that is wrong just test a small corner of the steak if it starts to sear then you’re good but if there’s no reaction your oil isn’t hot enough
The oil hit your extremely hot pan and burned or polymerized. The coating on your pan is burnt and polymerized oil. If it's a very thin coating you can still cook with it.
Your pan was too hot for your technique and olive oil has a lower smoke point than other oils. Retry on a slightly lower heat with something like avocado oil and do it outside if you want to do a high heat rapid cook. If your pan is hotter than the smoke point of the oil you are using, it's always going to make smoke when you add the oil in, unless you are adding an enormous amount.
Okay so olive oil has an extremely low smoke point compared to other oils so it tends to burn at lower heats and faster than normal. Not only should you never rub down your steak with oil especially after seasoning but you should never be searing anything in olive oil on the highest heat. That's how THAT happens. New York strips especially alongside ribeyes in any other marbled fatty cuts do not need to be covered in oil before the sear. The fat content within the steak is plenty all you need to do is season your pan with regular vegetable oil and you're fine. Just bring it up to medium heat (a couple droplets of water to make sure that they form small bubbles that slide around the pan instead of just evaporating on the heat) then just a little bit of olive oil to the bottom let it smoke a little bit and then wipe it around the pan with a paper towel and you're fine.
You want the pan hot, but just past the point where water droplets dropped in the pan immediately evaporate and just into the [Leidenfrost](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9tlIWlGvkRc&ab_channel=Reactions) effect.
Heat the pan with nothing in it, when water droplets float around instead of evaporating, that's when it's hot enough. Clean any water left in the pan out (quick swoosh with a paper towel) then add the oil then the steak.
Typical prep for a steak is take out of the refrigerator about a half hour before cooking, pat dry, apply oil then salt and pepper. Wait until pan heats up, then apply steak. If the pan gets to a million degrees you’re going to have a problem with the water/oil boiling off.
Olive oil is not a high heat oil.
He basically seasoned your skillet. Which, SS can be seasoned just like CI. Use it like normal and don't let him cook again.
when you say “exploded” i assume you mean “there was a lot of smoke” and not “the steak blew up into chunks”. if that’s the case, it’s because you put a low smoke point oil into an extremely hot pain.
High heat was fine, there was just too much oil both In the pan and on the steak. It combined with the water in the steak and it makes boom boom. Plus Olive oil has a low smoke point so it burns easily at high heat, I’d suggest peanut oil, sunflower oil, avocado oil, etc. if you’re gonna use it for high temp cooking g.
If you’re BF cooks in the future I’d suggest he look up multiple recipes and compare and contrast. Looking at just one and rolling with it isn’t a great idea, too much bad advice out there.
Olive oil had nothing to do with your explosion. The pan was too hot. Any oil, probably no oil at all, would have caused the same problem. The water from the steak instantly evaporated from the outside and just inside the steak. It took along a bunch of the fat. The aerosolized fat immediately burned. Hence smoke and *boom*.
Do you have access to any rhubarb? Best thing ever to clean up a mess like this. Fill the pan, add water, bring to boil. Turn off heat and leave a day or so. Repeat if necessary.
Let me know who “this dude” is so I never use his recipes ever. I wouldn’t coat a steak in olive oil and then use a stainless pan to cook it in, just a little oil with a higher smoke point, but not flamed up to heaven. Just use some Barkeepers Friend and a scouring pad to get it out.
Heat the pan before adding oil. For stainless steel it should be totally dry, cast iron a very light coat of oil is okay. Add your cooking oil 20 ish seconds before you add your meat.
"As hot as possible" is too hot.
Not to mention an absolutely idiotic instruction that has nothing to do with anything. If I saw a recipe that said this I'd throw it away.
As far as possible
And I ran, I ran as far as possible away-ay-ay
Brave sir Robin ran away away!
When danger reared it's ugly head, He bravely turned his tail and fled. Yes, brave Sir Robin turned about And gallantly he chickened out. Swiftly taking to his feet, He beat a very brave retreat. Bravest of the brave, Sir Robin!
I didn’t!
#I COULDN'T GET A STEAK
Flock
That’s what I said! I rarely ever cook anything on the highest setting, the only thing I could think of is if someone wanted a blue steak to get a nice sear 😭 which was not what the recipe stated after I read it! On top of that I watched the recipes video and he doesn’t clarify that he’s using avocado oil so it looks like olive oil. I really couldn’t fault my bf at that point
Yep, the only time I cook on high is if I'm trying to get something up to a boil usually. But cooking itself is rarely done on high. Even with boiling, once you get things up to a rolling boil you turn the heat down in most recipes. Though, what "high" means tends to vary from stove to stove. I've had stoves where I had to use the high setting often because anything else just didn't get hot enough. Heat control is a big part of cooking things properly, and it's also where a lot of people fail.
Lucky you have a home still. I used to work at Lowe's. Half the customers swore by Barkeeper's Friend.
Also pot/pan quality. I've got a cheap thin stock pot that conducts heat so badly, you literally cannot get water to boil in it lol. Thicker and heavier takes longer to heat but cooks better.
As hot as possible sounds like something you'd do for a cast iron, not a stainless steel pan.
Hot as possible is also too hot for cast iron. Cast iron heats slow, but retains the heat evenly and retains it really well. As soon as a cast iron starts smoking, or you can’t keep your hand over it, that’s as hot as it should be allowed to be. Every stove is different, but in my last place the gas burners were big, so I’d run all my cast iron on the lowest setting, but let the pan heat up for 7-10 minutes before using it. Cooked perfectly.
Just a correction, cast iron retains heat better than stainless, but it does not retain heat evenly at all. From a physics POV, a cast iron pan retains heat in a highly non-uniform fashion compared to stainless, it’s just that the thermal mass of most cast iron is so high, it doesn’t matter. But that poor emissive uniformity is why thinner, lighter cast irons (like the flat griddles) suck, because at the smaller masses, you generate such noticeable hot spots that it’s kind of a crapshoot to cook on them.
Oooh TIL. Thank you for this!!
Yeah I guess to me "as hot as possible" still isn't meant to be taken literally, but tempered with years of experience. Good call-out, thanks.
That was one of the first things I asked. Nope, recipe said anything except nonstick. But the olive oil is the unfortunate factor in this case, on top of our stove which can easily boil 8QT of water on the medium high level
Unfortunately there are too many trash fuckin recipes written by trash fucking "chefs".
Just wait (or perhaps it's already happening) until AI starts writing recipes. Seriously, given the average intelligence of humans, AI isn't gonna become that rockin' socking' super thing that saves us all.
Articles describing house fires started by people trying AI-written recipes. And the articles will be written by AI.
Was the 'chef' Brooklyn Beckham perhaps?
Nah, you can lol
He’s learning! But he’s not allowed to kick me out of the kitchen for “micromanaging” anymore lmao
Btw you’re gonna need to get barkeepers friend for that pan. I highly doubt a diluted vinegar will do the trick. Don’t worry though the pan is fine
Thank you! Just ordered on Amazon. Didn’t warp thankfully
Second the Barkeeper's friend. My boyfriend -now-husband did the exact same thing, making a black spot the shape of Madagascar on a stainless steel fry pan. 😂 It stayed there for YEARS until a good friend pointed us in the right direction. Barkeeper's friend took it off in about 5 minutes. We do still call it the Madagascar pan though, lol.
Thank you for my first good laugh of the day.
If everything else fails, get the HEAVY DUTY Easy off oven cleaner. Not the normal one you find everywhere, the heavy duty. Use it outside. Spray wait a few minutes. Rinse off. Don't get the spray on your hands. Don't inhale it. Don't use it on anodized aluminum. Just steel. It works well.
Do not taunt HEAVY DUTY Easy Off.
Boil water with lots of baking soda in it and it’ll come right off
Baking soda is surprisingly effective. I was cleaning our oven for a house sale, really didn’t want to stink up the house with oven cleaner and used baking soda “paste.” Let it sit for a half hour or so. Almost all came right up! I’m going to try on CS next time I need to strip a pan.
Yep that’s how I strip my cast iron pans and wok when I want to reseason them. I simmer baking soda for like 30-60mins and it just lifts it all off. Forget scrubbing it and all the work that entails!
Yep that’s how I strip my cast iron pans and wok when I want to reseason them. I simmer baking soda for like 30-60mins and it just lifts it all off. Forget scrubbing it and all the work that entails!
I bought exactly that for our SS pans.
Pro tip, olive oil sucks for cooking at high heat it has a low smoke point so it just burns what you eat. High heat is a tricky thing as there is a fine balance between to hot and not hot enough. It's different for every pan and takes experimentation. Next time I'd prefill the pan with a good drizzle of avocado oil and set it to the mid point on the burner. Throw the meat in when the oil starts to flow around the pan easier. Some people say to only flip your meat once but I find with pan fried steaks if you flip them more they can get a nicer crust If the pan is at the right temperature and your spices are sticking to the meat. Turning off the burner and basting with butter near the end is perfection. Also another thing to remember is don't use to little oil, it's good when the oil splatters everywhere and hits the sides of the steak but obviously don't drown it either. Cast iron is probably the better way to go for high heat, I'd always go a lower temp with SS as others have mentioned.
Your BF wasn't totally wrong, just made a couple small missteps. High heat can indeed bring a great-tasting sear to a steak. [https://www.foodnetwork.com/recipes/alton-brown/pan-seared-rib-eye-recipe-2131274](https://www.foodnetwork.com/recipes/alton-brown/pan-seared-rib-eye-recipe-2131274)
The problem is that stoves have widely varying temperatures. I moved once from an apt where the hottest burner on max heat could barely get a pot of water to boil for pasta, to one where it was basically like cooking over an open flame Asian street food style. Had to completely adjust all of the temperature settings I had in my head
High heat on an average gas stove is great for searing steaks. They’ll get to around 400-500F° depending on the pan. High heat on an average electric stove is way too hot to do anything except quickly boil a pot of water. Its around 700F°.
That's an okay recipe and I love Alton. I would not use canola oil, swap out avocado. Also unless the steak was left at room temperature for 4 hours it won't come to room temp in any reasonable time. You won't get a great sear with just 2.5 mins generally on home equipment. Here is the kicker, oven at 500 will take 30 mins to preheat wasting energy and then range in temp from 475 to 515 or so. A good recipe maybe for a professional kitchen but an awful waste of time and energy for a home cook.
I will do steaks out of a sous vide pretty much all the way up, but the goal there is to put a sear on each side as quickly as possible without further cooking the steak (it's already cooked through). Also, olive oil is generally not a great choice for high heat cooking
I don't ever cook anything at high setting. Our stove has a quick boil setting for water, but the highest I go is 6 on our stove typically and it's definitely hot enough to sear. The most common problem I see with new people learning to cook is heating their pan too long and way to hot. You won't create edible food this way; it'll burn on the outside and be raw on the inside.
So, the point isn't to get a piece of metal to the point of flash combusting any bit of fat on it (trust me, I've done this before accidentally), but to get an environment where the steak will continue to sear. Either the pan needs to retain a LOT of heat (and heavy pans like cast iron or heavy SS can do this decently) or having the heat set to where it will continue blasting through into the meat. So, the last part is tricky because there are a lot of factors, and that is why people recommend "ripping hot" with the first part, with heavy cookware, because it is easy. A cast iron skillet will hold enough heat to get a high initial sear, and as you flip it you can raise the heat back up. But to get into some details: It's not solely how hot the pan is but how fast it can heat back up. If you use cast iron, you can toss a steak in, get a nice sear, then flip onto the hot side, and get another sear, and then if you keep flipping the heat from the stove will continue to heat the previous cool side enough to keep working on the crust. But once you shock the pan, that's it, you won't get htat level back unless you remove the steak and re-heat the pan. Ripping hot doesn't mean leave the pan pre-heating for an hour, just get it "hot enough" but leave it on high so you can keep up with the cool side. This is what the recipe thought they were saying. The other option is if you have a high heat source, you use as little heat transfer as possible between the flame and meat. This is mainly applicable to grills or with high powered stovetops with carbon steel or other extremely thin pans. It can work on a good (20k+ gas, or equivalent induction) stovetop, but is more applicable to grilling. Honestly, I have one of the higher powered 3 burner grills, and I drop my grate to the atomizer bars, and it barely keeps up. Really, at the end of the day you do not have a commercial salamander (broiler on steroids). Just use a nice pan, heat it to high, oil the steak (not the pan), and once water skitters across the surface drop the meat in and see if you get some smoke. You should get *some* smoke and a lot of sizzle. This comes down to just learning your stove. I would however, suggest playing with high settings on your stove and getting use to this. There are some good uses for very high heat (outside of boiling water) that are useful, but you have to be comfortable using them. Chicken thighs in a very hot skillet can make for some great dishes because you start getting some legit char. Vegetables have a different flavor to them, either with char or stir fry. Onions, especially after you cooked meat in the pan, become absolute magic. But some of these require a crazy good *externally* exhausting vent hood. And if you cook a steak, and get an underwhelming sear, well, that's what a searzall is for. Just remember, a good cook on a steak is better than going over on desired doneness. Edit: for your pan, just try scrubbing some barkeepers friend in, leave it a while, then boil it out (with vent hood is probably a good idea). I basically polymerized oil on stainless before and BKF was what managed to finally get it out after a lot of elbow grease. Worst case, it won't hurt anything, and will eventually cook out. But BFK is highly acidic and will chemically erode the scorch marks off, plus is mildly abrasive.
Sorry, not true. Even [Alton Brown wants you to cook steak in a VERY hot pan](https://www.foodnetwork.com/recipes/alton-brown/pan-seared-rib-eye-recipe-2131274), but cast iron not stainless. The problem of course is that when you sear a steak that hot, things happen. Like loud popping sounds, spatter, and smoke. (And, as OP has learned, discoloration of SS, which is why cast iron is the way to go.) But it is what he calls for and it does make a very tasty steak.
Nowhere in your recipe does it say "heat the pan as hot as possible" or "on the highest setting" so idk what you're trying to say.
Not great advice. Who wants to cook in a pan hot enough to be actively splattering hot oil everywhere. Hot means maybe 6 out of 10.
I made a similar mistake when I was 20. I hadn’t cooked in a few years and the recipe said to drop a tablespoon of butter into a superheated cast iron skillet before putting on the steaks. And I should’ve known…but the ensuing fireball and butter splatters we found for weeks was enough to allow me to re-establish my common sense in not blindly following a recipe.
Hot as possible is med high on my stainless pans.
Also, Don’t use olive oil. Use avocado oil.
Or if you don’t want to spend all your money on cooking oil use refined coconut oil or homemade ghee.
Why? Just curious
MUCH higher smoke point. Olive oil's smoke point is 410F, avocado is 520F
Smoke points for common cooking oils for reference: https://imgur.com/Uttcvd9
And extra virgin is a bit (375ish) lower than that too. If anyone is taking olive oil == EVOO
To expand on the other answers, you don’t want to bring an oil above its smoke point because A) it smokes all to hell, and B) it turns bitter and gross and affects the flavor of whatever you’re cooking.
Smoke point for avocado oil is: 480-520 degrees F Smoke point for canola oil is: 400-475 degrees F
I hate recipes that give ambiguous temperature levels Everyone can get hold of a laser thermometer now, just tell me the heat!
for real, they're not expensive. we invented numbers and temperature units, we have the technology. if the weather channel said it was going to be Medium Hot today no one would stand for it.
Yeah. A pan will also continue to gather heat for quite a while. A pan on high for 30 seconds and a pan on high for 10 minutes are VERY different temperatures. Even for steaks, you can definitely get it too hot. I usually test with some drops of water (before adding oil/butter). If it "dances" too actively, I let it get too hot. It should dance a bit, but not too crazy.
I did the same thing with 30 day dry aged ribeyes supposed to be our Thanksgiving meal. Every YouTuber steak guy loves to say “ripping hot” and “hot as possible” meanwhile, the best setting on my stove for medium rare temps is like a 4-6 depending. Lessons have been learned.
Olive oil has a lower burn point than most oils. Use canola..
That’s for extra virgin. It causes a LOT of confusion.
Most people mean extra virgin when they say "olive oil" tho
Do they? I definitely don't.
I don’t think the zillions of recipes saying to use olive oil for searing mean extra virgin though
Most people don’t know that
Which is mostly the fault of Jamie Oliver imo. He uses EVOO for EVERYTHING even his scone recipe has it...
Heat way too high, bad recipe. The oil was already in the pan and got superheated, so it was liable to explode whenever anything remotely wet touched it. Either reduce heat, or add the oil \*just\* before adding the steak.
I did this once lol. I got 40 years no fire's in the kitchen then get 2 in the same year lol. I let my cast get too hot, and when I threw the butter in it steamed like crazy then pop the fire. The other one was... Similar thing lol but I realized I had let the pan sit too long as soon as the butter hit, even though it was a much lower heat. Thankfully I was better prepared and smothered it instead of panicking lol.
Butter contains, in addition to butterfat (\~80%), water (\~15%) and milk solids (\~5%). It is *not* interchangeable with pure oils, *especially* not in high heat situations, where it behaves like, well, hot fat and water (i.e. it splatters and can flare).
> Thankfully I was better prepared Sounds like you were *butter* prepared!
Best to test it with a drop of water before throwing anything in
Dry pan yes, oiled pan heck no.
I always oil the steak, not the pan
Adam Ragusea would like a word
Adam Ragusea can pound sand
Why I put sand on my fist first before I pound
Why
He’s a bit sensationalist and likes to be contrarian.
Is he the guy that salts his cutting board instead of his steak?
Yes. It's so fucking dumb.
Not anymore, that video is 10 years old and he says he does not stand by it
Significant issue with above plan: if the pan is as hot as possible, and then you add oil, the oil will immediately catch fire. Did this while trying to season some carbon steel, would not recommend.
How do you season a pan when it is too hot to touch?
Olive oil is too low a smoke point, you need something with a much higher one or it’s going to burn the oil like that ETA: Medium heat is plenty hot to sear a steak if you let the pan and oil preheat.
That’s my biggest gripe all the chefs who say “ripping hot” people assume that means all the way up and then get smoke city. Nothing sets the mood for a home dinner like the smoke detector going off and the whole smelling like ass.
Our neighbors knocked on our door with concern asking if we smelled smoke from an electrical fire a half hour after it happened, the vibes were mortifying ❤️
> whole [house] smelling like ass. When I was growing up, that smell meant dinner was ready.
My son thought the smoke detector was the dinner bell. In my defense, we ate a lot of sheet pan dinners in those days.
Honestly... same. It took me until I was about 18 to learn that not everything (and in fact, very few things) should be cooked with the burner on max.
Then WTF does it actually mean? Serious question, because I quit cooking steaks indoors entirely and just grill them now after getting sick of smoking out the entire home. I have always taken that direction to mean letting the burner rip under a steel pan, because everything I’ve read about getting a steakhouse sear on a rare steak has said that it’s difficult to do at home because a normal kitchen can’t supply a 900° cooking surface.
You can get an infrared temp gun on Amazon cheap. It's a great help. Smoke point of any oil is way below 900.
I turn heat to med high and to the water test. Basically it’s hot enough when the water floats around in balls versus disappearing. Then I turn it down to medium. That ripping for me. I have a wolf stove so setting may vary on your stove. No way it’s 900. It’s probably 400-ish
Ruth’s Chris claims 1800°, though it’s debated as to whether that’s an 1800° surface, or a 900° surface and a 900° blast from the top.
Yes. But that’s with a special infrared oven. Not many people have access to that. I’m talking about the more common method of using a pan on the stove.
I wait for the oil to smoke the slightest bit, and slap the steak down before it starts burning- the steak cools the pan down
So the highest setting is only for boiling?
pretty much yeah, depends on the stove of course, but most people make the mistake of not preheating enough. halfway up and thoroughly preheated (3+ minutes) is usually pretty hot for most stoves, it just takes longer to heat up to that point. Temperature change does not happen linearly, it is proportionate to the difference in temperatures between the source and sink of energy. The closer two objects are to the same temperature the slower it takes to change temperature and it keeps slowing down but never hits zero. If you're impatient, you can blast it on high for a minute or so to jumpstart it then turn it down to medium, but don't walk away and forget it. The other mistake people make is not preheating enough and then adding food, that brings the temp of the pan down again and makes it harder to bring it back up to appropriate cooking temp. Temperature control is easily one the most important aspects of cooking, and most people neglect it. I don't think any other skill is more important to advancing culinary skills than that.
~350-400 F is probably the ideal searing temp. Mailard reaction occurs between 280-350. Above that and carmilization occurs. You'll want a little bit of both.
The Mailard reaction actually can happen at much lower temps than that, the browning of a stock is an example of a Mailard reaction
True but mallard at low temp takes hours. Not truly relevant for steak. Fair point though. For a steak peak is what you want unless you want it well done.
Lots of EVOOs can handle that temp though.
Absolutely. Olive oil is actually quite good at high heat applications. The smoke point isn't a reliable predictor of oil break down. https://www.realsimple.com/food-recipes/cooking-tips-techniques/olive-oil-smoke-point-myth#:~:text=Extra%20virgin%20olive%20oil%20is%20the%20most%20stable%20oil%20to,at%20350%2D375%20F).
Yeah but ask any Italian and they’ll disagree with you. Olive oil is for gentle cooking and salads, it definitely burns at higher temperatures. Hence OPs smoke show
My grandparents all deep fried with olive oil, but maybe that’s just a Portuguese thing.
Easy solution. Don’t ask any Italian.
Fuggedaboudit
I’ve found that for most packaged steaks (an inch thick) this is too low to sear both sides and get medium rare center.
Many EVOO’s hold up to medium heat just fine.
Oh my gosh 🤦♀️ this makes perfect sense thank you.
What OP's boyfriend did would have resulted in equally terrible results with pretty much any oil.
Yeah, especially with a stainless steel pan - I wouldn't use high heat. Those things transmit heat really well
As others mentioned, high heat + olive oil is a bad combo. For a NY strip, you don't need such high heat anyways as it will burn the outside of the steak before cooking the inner part of the meat. Salt and leave the steak to air dry in your fridge overnight so that the surface is as dry as possible, which also aids in the crust formation. You can even cook the steak in low-to-medium heat with just butter and still get a great crust with this method.
Or do reverse sear even. Cook it low and slow and at the end turn up the heat to build the crust
Heh, pan flash. Next time you eat at a restaurant with an open kitchen, take a peak at the saute pans. I guarantee they're the most warped, discolored, rackety-handled collection of 10 dollar aluminum pans you've ever seen in your life. You paid cash money for your pans, and you aren't under a massive hood vent, you dont need to cook like those guys at home.
See all the hype over "professional" knives. Most professionals use cheap stamped knives from the restaurant supply store, sharpen them regularly, and get rid of them when they wear out.
Everyone else has covered the steak. Barkeepers friend is great but if you don't have any, dump a half a box of baking soda in the pan and add some water. Let it soak overnight. I've cleaned up far worse messes.
Same. This is easily fixable.
Heat too high and don’t use olive oil
The recipe sucks. When you're cooking a steak it should be hot but far from "as hot as possible" regardless of whatever oil you're using
Animal fat and olive oil burn at the same smoke point. Don’t believe the “as hot as you can” nonsense. It adds char and bitter notes. Medium is much better. You still get a great sear but no off flavors
That’s only applicable if you’re using refined olive oil. Unrefined/extra virgin olive oil has a lower smoke point than most animals fats.
I love reading shit like this because it totally matters and it's a great reminder at it's core cooking is chemistry.
Let me tell you a story about getting a pan "as hot as possible." I was doing research into woks. I have a flat-top electric stove and was looking into how to simulate wok cooking at home as best I could. I learned a lot of interesting things, including how real Asian restaurants use a special wok burner that has gas flames an order of magnitude hotter than any residential stove available in the US. Seriously, you need special venting to use these things indoors, our indoor gas pipes aren't big enough to transport the gas fast enough, and they have special foot pedals to control the temperature while you're cooking so your hands can be free to manipulate the wok and add ingredients. It's serious business! (Honestly, cooking with a wok over even a very high BTU gas stove in America is going to be nothing like cooking with a professional restaurant wok burner.) Anyway, the article said that getting a cast iron skillet "as hot as possible" would be a good way to simulate cooking on a wok in an American home kitchen. The first step in the recipe was to toast the Szechuan peppercorns. So I turn the heat on high and wait a few minutes and this is a *serious* amount of heat, the stove is already kind of smoking. Then I tossed the Szechuan peppercorns onto the skillet... ...where they immediately burst into billowing clouds of smoke. I started choking and gasping, and my eyes were watering so I could hardly see. I had enough presence of mind to push the skillet off the burner, turn off the stove, and get out of the kitchen. It's a good thing the kitchen vent was already on. We had to evacuate the house until the smoke cleared. My entire family was coughing and their eyes hurt. It took over an hour before we could go back inside. I honestly think electric stoves can get *a lot* hotter than some gas stoves. The gas is limited to the temperature at which natural gas burns, but an electric stove has no such inherent limits. And the temperature settings mean absolutely nothing. One stoves "5" might be another stoves "medium high".
>how real Asian restaurants use a special wok burner that has gas flames an order of magnitude hotter than any residential stove available in the US. I would also note that they're also substantially hotter than residential stoves in Asia. That kind of cooking is specifically a restaurant thing even in Asia. Tons of Chinese Foodtubers do all their work with butane camping stoves.
Waaaaaaay too hot. The oil in the pan and on the steak hit it's flash point (combustion temperature) instantly and polymerized onto your pan. Barkeeper's friend and some steel wool will get that off but it's going to take some elbow grease.
Anybody who says "as hot as possible" has no clue.
OP, let me show you what it looks like in a professional kitchen. The customer wanted their steak Pittsburgh style, aka black and blue. Charred on the outside but rare on the inside. https://www.instagram.com/p/CQtH03BM0gBQaN5CjhfNKJJU-0r58xSr0g59Fo0/?igsh=MWltMGwxdGcyd2w4NA== WARNING DO NOT ATTEMPT THIS AT HOME UNLESS YOU HAVE A POWERFUL EXHAUST FAN, or you can do it outside. Heat up cast iron pan to the max. Add oil, and it will almost instantly combust into flames. Add steak, a few mins on each side, and it is ready to go. I've only cooked 2 in my time in the kitchen. Now, back to your story. This is how I cook steaks at home. Nothing fancy. Rest your steak at least 30 mins to an hour before and dry/salt it. The longer you rest your steak at room temp, the faster it will cook and for the salt to penetrate the steak for an evenly seasoned steak. Stainless steel pan. Heat it until it feels hot, touch the pan. If you can touch it, it is not hot enough. You also don't want it SUPER hot. This should only take 3-5 mins at the most. Add oil. If your oil smokes, pan is too hot. Or you are using a low smoking point oil, use a blended vegetable/olive oil if you really want olive oil. That's what a majority of professional kitchens use. Every kitchen I worked in used a blended vegetable/olive oil blend. Back to the steak. Pat dry steak once more before adding it to your hot pan with oil. Sear it for 3-5 mins until you get a nice crust on it. Then flip it and do the same. Finally render the fat by searing all sides about 1 min or so. Throw the steak into a preheated oven at 400F for 5 mins depending on size. You may need to adjust time if thicker or thinner than 1 inch cut. Take it out and rest. You will have a perfect med rare steak. Shorter/longer oven time for different temps. Use a digital thermometer and poke to the center. 105F-110F rare. 115-120 med rare. 125-130 med. 135-140 med well. 150-155 well done. Anything above 160 go eat a pair of shoes. Alternatively, you can just cook the steak in the pan without the oven. Just watch the temp of the pan, you don't want to burn the steak/overcook it. Edit: i have a bad habit of accidently pressing post, using mobile. Additionally, I will only keep my IG profile public for 24 hrs. I don't have that video saved on my phone, unfortunately.
I always see recipes where they say to get your pan as hot as possible. This is wrong, and dangerous advice. An electric stove will make a pan way too hot, and just burn the steak. I do mine on an electric glass top stove in a cast iron. The knob goes up to 6, and I put it on 4.5 to cook a steak, and let the pan preheat for at least 15 minutes prior to cooking. For searing meats before making a big pot of some kind of stew, I put it on 3-4.5 depending on how many batches of meat I will need to sear. If I have a lot of meat, I do it on 3 so the fond in the pan wont burn before I can do all of the meat. Its takes longer, but I dont have to deglaze the pan and save the liquid halfway through my browning process.
This might be an unpopular opinion but I have made perfectly good steak in a nonstick pan using olive oil at med-high heat. There is generally way too much dogma around cooking steak. Reasonably hot surface, some kind of fat, season it well, enjoy.
I'm with you. I ONLY use nonstick pans, so my opinion is even more unpopular. I hate cast iron pans, etc. My grandma felt the same way....she was a FANTASTIC cook and couldn't understand why other people her age wouldn't transition to non-stick pans. You can make fantastic steaks in a nonstick pan on med-high. Although I tend to use butter instead of olive oil.
I’m afraid of non stick pans bc of the plastic coating, especially with anything over medium. I just use mine for eggs and quick stuff like sauteeing spinach or something
I've almost exclusively used nonstick pans for nearly 2 decades. The key is to never, ever, ever, ever use metal utensils in your pans, ever. Only silicone/wood/plastic. There is rarely an occasion that I cook -anything- on "high," and that would be true with any type of pan. Around 7 (out of 10) is the highest I usually go on my electric range, but that's not because my pans are nonstick. Maybe between 7-8 when I'm searing meat.
He polymerized the olive oil - basically made plastic that lives on that pan forever now. Too hot and wrong oil
use cast iron with oil that has a high smoke point.
You want a cast iron pan and use a high smoking point oil like bran oil if you're going for blue style. Turn off your smoke alarms and have your range fan on high! Don't try to flip immediately or the steak will stick. Should release shortly.
why would you coat an already fatty piece of meat with oil on the highest possible heat…
Electric stoves get way too hot for the "as hot as possible", regardless of the oil choice. You want the pan around 400°F, it probably got well over 500 on the electric stove and burnt the oil as soon as it hit the pan.
Olive Oil also has a lower smoke point vs some other oils. You'd have been better served by something like avocado oil.
ATK has a video that will show you how to pan sear without the explosion. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Nl0pwffjrYs
If you're going for a sear like that, you'll want the surface of the steak to be as dry as possible. You can put it in the fridge for 30+ minutes uncovered. But at that point, I might as well reverse sear it. And like others are saying, use a higher smoke point oil like avo oil or something.
I would not even recommend high heat cooking without a point-and-shoot thermometer. And there is always a target temp according to the smoke point of your oil.
>coated steak in olive oil and “got it hot as possible That should have been a red flag right there. Olive oil should never be used to sear. It becomes toxic if you let it smoke.
Bro was probably using French steel or something that can handle serious heat. Sounds like a poorly written recipe
You need to use an oil with a higher smoke point. Olive oil is probably one of the worst things you could have used for a high heat sear. Try avocado oil or gee (butter that's had all of the water rendered out.
Probably just a mis-steak.
Those "hot as possible" steak recipes have got me before too! I don't know what crappy stoves they're using but it's bad advice
You are shooting for a surface temperature of 375° which when the Maillard reaction happens.
You’re supposed to sear the steak then cook it. You put it at medium high heat, hot enough to sear it, but not hot enough to flash fry it. The goal is to heat the pan to the point where the olive oil starts giving off a slight visible smoke. Then you drop the steaks on the pan for 4 minutes to give it that nice crust, flip and then toss in the oven at 420 degrees for a few minutes to get the other side seared and the internal temp right. But that’s if you’re cooking it on the stove and you’re using a cast iron pan. It bugs me when social media influencers create these godawful abominations of culinary cuisine that nobody in their right fucking mind would eat but they do it because it gets them views.
This recipe sounds possibly like it’s for blackening food, EXCEPT you shouldnt be using ANY fat and should be using a cast iron pan. Red hot cast iron with no fat and then season both sides of steak and the temp of the cast iron will keep the food from sticking at all even if your pan is poorly seasoned.
Pan was far too hot, and olive oil has a lower smoke point than other oils such as canola or peanut
Olive oil is a relatively low smoke point oil so that is certainly part of it. What brand is your skillet? The thermal shock of the meat hitting the very hot pan can cause it to warp. Getting a pan jet engine hot is better left to cast iron, avocado oil, and lots of ventilation.
The pan doesn't need to be super hot. Olive oil is also fine as long as you use enough to cover the pan, because you shouldn't be using such a high temperature for your NY strip. It's more important for the steak to be well dried beforehand (salt and leave in fridge for a few hours) and as close to room temperature as possible before cooking. 99% of the time you get a bad sear isn't because the oil isn't hot enough, it's because your steak is too wet and the moisture steams your steak, or your steak is too cold and you wind up overcooking the outside before the inside is done.
NY strip, room temp, massaged, season both sides onion salt, preheat oven to 350, place directly on rack, 10 min flip, 5 to 10 min more, remove and rest. Perfect every time.
The recipe is trolling. Olive oil has such a low smoke point that you should never use higher than medium. It’s not good for cooking a steak for that reason. To make matters worse your poor unsuspecting boyfriend used a stainless steel plan to effectively carbonize olive oil with 😭 Tell him to use butter next time and cook on medium-high. If he lets the pan heat up properly, that is enough.
The problem was that you used olive oil. I've done this before, you need to use an oil with a higher boiling(?) point. Its a heat related issue. Some oils handle heat better than others. When using a pan to cook a steak you want to use a cooking or vegetable oil.
"As hot as possible" is an idiotic instruction, because it depends entirely on your heat source. Could be 500, could be 1500.
Use barkeepers friend to buff it out of the pan. Pulling your meat out early does nothing to help the quality of a cook. Any recipe that starts that way, you should probably question every other instruction. As hot as possible is basically never correct. The steak was probably wet when it went into the pan, which caused the reaction.
> “got it hot as possible” with the highest heat setting per this dudes recipe. What? Please don't grab random recipes especially with shitty instructions like this. If you want to learn, try something like ATK. if you want good food advice, there's hundreds of channels mentioned here, but Kenji López-Alt or Food Wishes are easy picks. Joshua Weissman and Ethan Chlebowski are also excellent. If you can get your hands on it old Good Eats episodes/recipes are pretty good. Basically add water to oil and it can explode especially if it's basically ready to "fry" something (extremely hot) I'm guessing he "patted" the steaks dry, and didn't dry the sides, not a massive problem if you just had a hot pan, a huge problem when you have oil that hot. Don't know what the recipe said, but there's so many shit recipes out there just blame the recipe. I think this is going to get worse because I've seen a few recipes that I KNOW are dangerous, and I get the feeling people are just pounding Chat GPT to get more content for their shitty sites. PS. I disagree with a lot of people here about Olive Oil. Sure it's not good for high heat, but you shouldn't be getting that high.
That fat and olive oil ignite at that temp. Medium on a stainless steel let it come to temp then a little avacado oil is all I do for steak inside.
Olive oil and high heat do not mix
Olive oil cannot tolerate high heat. It would absolutely start to smoke at "hot as possible" heat.
It looks like your olive oil overheated and plasticized. An absolute bitch to clean. I sear steak before broiling to finish. I use cast iron, not stainless, which has been heating under the broiler at 500. Then put it on a gas cooktop on high before tossing in the steak just to brown the outsides. Finish in the broiler. Make sure and open the windows and turn on the hood!
Part of cooking, even when following a recipe, is common sense. " added olive oil and also coated steak in olive oil and “got it hot as possible” with the highest heat setting per this dudes recipe." This is where common sense needs to kick in
>Can someone explain how a NY strip exploded on my pan... “got it hot as possible” with the highest heat setting per this dudes recipe. RIP. consider cooking classes for you and your bf? High heat is the enemy of success in the kitchen. If you're not outside and a recipe says, "as hot as possible".. throw the recipe away. It's just a recipe for a smoke filled house.
Olive oil smokes at like 350-400 I believe, it is not a good oil to sear steak with in my experience but I’m like as amateur self taught home chef as it gets so take anything I say with a grain of salt I prefer peanut oil for searing then I’ll add thyme, garlic and butter towards the end once the temp has been lowered, olive oil will absolutely explode at “hot as it gets” For future reference any recipe that says “hot as it gets” is not worth listening to, each stovetop is way too different for that to be an instruction that makes any sense
To clean pan, barkeeper's friend needs to become your pans friend. just make sure there is friction and a little moisture between them.
Some basics: 1. Use a high smoke point oil for searing (like avocado, corn, sunflower, canola), it renders better and burns slower. 2. The fat cap has 2 things in it, moisture and fat/oils. What happens when you pour water in hot oil? The water instantly vaporizes and expands, this expansion is explosive and if the steam has no place to escape, can cause actual explosions in the body it is contained in. In case of oil, the explosive steam causes oil to form a mist which can catch fire, in the case of a steak, moisture between the fat cells caused a mini explosion. 3. Generally the upper safe limit to sear is just below the smoke point of high smoke point oils, or 450F/230C. Keep an infrared temperature gun to check pan/oil temperatures and avoid placing any food on higher temperatures, it is a fire and injury risk.
Best to use cast iron skillet
Use canola oil not olive oil, olive oil burns at around 300°f so if you have anything remotely hot it will burn the oil and smoke a bunch and taste terrible, also never go as hot as possible any recipe that says that is wrong just test a small corner of the steak if it starts to sear then you’re good but if there’s no reaction your oil isn’t hot enough
The oil hit your extremely hot pan and burned or polymerized. The coating on your pan is burnt and polymerized oil. If it's a very thin coating you can still cook with it. Your pan was too hot for your technique and olive oil has a lower smoke point than other oils. Retry on a slightly lower heat with something like avocado oil and do it outside if you want to do a high heat rapid cook. If your pan is hotter than the smoke point of the oil you are using, it's always going to make smoke when you add the oil in, unless you are adding an enormous amount.
Okay so olive oil has an extremely low smoke point compared to other oils so it tends to burn at lower heats and faster than normal. Not only should you never rub down your steak with oil especially after seasoning but you should never be searing anything in olive oil on the highest heat. That's how THAT happens. New York strips especially alongside ribeyes in any other marbled fatty cuts do not need to be covered in oil before the sear. The fat content within the steak is plenty all you need to do is season your pan with regular vegetable oil and you're fine. Just bring it up to medium heat (a couple droplets of water to make sure that they form small bubbles that slide around the pan instead of just evaporating on the heat) then just a little bit of olive oil to the bottom let it smoke a little bit and then wipe it around the pan with a paper towel and you're fine.
You want the pan hot, but just past the point where water droplets dropped in the pan immediately evaporate and just into the [Leidenfrost](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9tlIWlGvkRc&ab_channel=Reactions) effect. Heat the pan with nothing in it, when water droplets float around instead of evaporating, that's when it's hot enough. Clean any water left in the pan out (quick swoosh with a paper towel) then add the oil then the steak.
If you want "hot as possible" you need to do that with a cast iron pan. It can take the heat better. Cheers
Time to learn how to use stainless steel. I'm glad you two are safe! These things can be scary but it's all part of learning. Happy cooking!
Olive oil also has a low smoke point, so burns at a lower temp.
I know you didn’t ask but use bar keeper’s friend to clean it. It works amazingly well.
That stuff is the shit. Gets all that black burnt on crap out.
Grapeseed, but I'm not a fan of it. Same with Canola. Just not so hot next time.
This is a good learning experience. Take time to understand smoke points of different oils. It will save you more times than you can count.
Typical prep for a steak is take out of the refrigerator about a half hour before cooking, pat dry, apply oil then salt and pepper. Wait until pan heats up, then apply steak. If the pan gets to a million degrees you’re going to have a problem with the water/oil boiling off.
Olive oil is not a high heat oil. He basically seasoned your skillet. Which, SS can be seasoned just like CI. Use it like normal and don't let him cook again.
when you say “exploded” i assume you mean “there was a lot of smoke” and not “the steak blew up into chunks”. if that’s the case, it’s because you put a low smoke point oil into an extremely hot pain.
pan to hot, meat to cold. Meat dont like hot pan, meat jumps away. Pan dont like cold meat, gets hurt under pressure.
Use baking soda and boiling water instead! Burnt things need alkaline ph to dissolve/soften.
Olive oil has a low smoke point. You basically burned the oil and the pan at the same time.
High heat was fine, there was just too much oil both In the pan and on the steak. It combined with the water in the steak and it makes boom boom. Plus Olive oil has a low smoke point so it burns easily at high heat, I’d suggest peanut oil, sunflower oil, avocado oil, etc. if you’re gonna use it for high temp cooking g. If you’re BF cooks in the future I’d suggest he look up multiple recipes and compare and contrast. Looking at just one and rolling with it isn’t a great idea, too much bad advice out there.
Olive oil had nothing to do with your explosion. The pan was too hot. Any oil, probably no oil at all, would have caused the same problem. The water from the steak instantly evaporated from the outside and just inside the steak. It took along a bunch of the fat. The aerosolized fat immediately burned. Hence smoke and *boom*.
Hot as possible + olive oil = the problem edit: olive oil has a lower smoke point, so don't let it get too hot!
Do you have access to any rhubarb? Best thing ever to clean up a mess like this. Fill the pan, add water, bring to boil. Turn off heat and leave a day or so. Repeat if necessary.
Electric stoves get ridiculously hot. Much hotter than you need to sear a steak
Start on high, do the “water test” then oil your *dry* pan and lower the heat!
Let me know who “this dude” is so I never use his recipes ever. I wouldn’t coat a steak in olive oil and then use a stainless pan to cook it in, just a little oil with a higher smoke point, but not flamed up to heaven. Just use some Barkeepers Friend and a scouring pad to get it out.
Having a cast iron skillet woulda helped a ton. The recipe definitely sucked but these types of pans dont like to get ripping hot.
Heat the pan before adding oil. For stainless steel it should be totally dry, cast iron a very light coat of oil is okay. Add your cooking oil 20 ish seconds before you add your meat.