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March 2nd, 2011
11:36 am - Steak ... Love ... / Cooking-RibEye Steak with Gordon Ramsey in 1 Min
| I immediately liked this video ... briefly ... before I took a closer look at it, and found it to be more showmanship than cooking. Consider the fact that the man puts the artichokes on a stovetop grill pan, which presumably will be raised to a high enough temperature for something akin to grilling to occur, and he has coated the pan with olive oil. | |
| Olive oil, as a cooking fat, isn't even recommended for anything resembling a stirfry because its smoking point is too low; those artichokes end up with an attractive deep brown color because they're coated in carbon from the broken down oil. More or less the same thing that happens when you season a cast iron pan, right? Would you really want to eat some of that seasoning? Which seems to be a recurring problem on this video. Consider the beginning, when he heats the olive oil the steak is cooked in until it is sizzling hot, producing this admittedly promisingly appetizingly dark initial searing of the meat | |
| Not bad for the one minute mark, but not where one wants to be, yet, which isn't a surprise; one has to work a little more to get meat to get brown and crisp surfaced in oil than one does with butter, a point which does not seem lost on Ramsay, who soon introduces a small stick of butter into the pan with the steak. Very soon, and that's where trouble arises with this concept. | |
What sort of pan are we to use to make this? The pan Ramsay uses looks a little too bright to be cast iron, not quite bright enough to be stainless steel, so I'm going to guess that it's aluminum. Not bad for making rice or cooking vegetables, in fact quite excellent for either purpose, but is it really the thing to use for steak? For steak (and many other things as well), one wants something that will hold and distribute the heat evenly, hence the strange fascination many of us have with something as heavy, brittle and rustprone as cast iron. It's a pain to work with, but it gets the job done. It also has the virtue of being easily found and relatively inexpensive. The answer to our question is to be found in the thickness of the pan he uses - it's a nice, heavy professional use restaurant skillet, which is why he is able to get away with doing that step, and why you probably can't do the same in your own kitchen, if you try to follow what he has been doing.
Aluminum releases its heat quickly, but the kind of aluminum cookware you're probably going to be able to buy on the budget most of use have to work with will not closely resemble the kind of professional quality kitchenware Ramsay is using. The aluminum one sees in a home kitchen are those thin walled utensils that are, as I said, good for cooking rice or vegetables, but will tend to toughen red meat when used for dry cooking heats (sautes as opposed to braises). On the other hand, if one is using cast iron and tries to slip the butter in as quickly as he did, one gets a quick reminder of why clarified butter is so popular as a cooking fat as one watches the milk solids in the butter burn. | |
| Did you notice the little burst of flame in the griddle at 0:53 as you watched the video? Notice that no brandy was present; that wasn't flambeeing, that was little brief burst of grease fire, because the cook oiled the grill instead of the artichokes, leaving the oil to overheat in a place where the evaporative cooling from the water released by the artichokes would not be able keep the oil's temperature down below the smoking point. What is interesting is not that we see the flame - one can see that beside any number of overvigorously shaken skillets (go to Little Joe's on Broadway in San Francisco at night, and you'll see that a lot), but that the burst took place inside the skillet, where food is taking on flavor, not outside, as a little pan juice and oil escaped into the flame. | |
This video seems designed to send the message to the home cook "look at this beautiful thing you can do at home" (yes, Gordon, we all get to cut up our own meat) leaving the home cook to wonder what he did wrong when he can't get the results he hoped for, when the answer to that question is the use of special, professional grade equipment (seen but not mentioned in the video) is essential to getting the results, which probably look far better than they taste. Whether this ommission was due to Ramsey or the Youtube user who uploaded the segment, we can only guess, but one needn't guess as to why Ramsey is cutting his cooked meat diagonally across the grain at the end of the piece. It's a cheat.
It's a way of making tough meat seem more tender than it actually is, and impressing the gullible along the way. The problem with cooking beef over heat that intense is that the fibers inside the meat don't really have enough time to break down, one of the reasons why I may have seemed less than completely enthusiastic about that idea of using a vegetable pan to cook one's meat a few paragraphs back. Ramsay cuts through the fibers his much too brief and rapid cooking failed to break, hoping that the resting he gives his cut of meat will reduce the loss of juice such a cutting will inevitably produce. Properly prepared, good (or even average) quality meat neither requires nor benefits from such a pretentious presentation - it need simply be brought to the table intact, with appropriate garnitures and sauces. The West abstained from adopting the chopstick for a reason. The diners have knives. One might break down and decide to let them be used. | |
Or, one might do as Ramsey does, ending up with something that looks spectacular and at best tastes tolerable (if one doesn't notice the faint flavor of burnt olive oil), something which will go cold on the plate rapidly if not wolfed down. That the diner will do so might well be Ramsey's hope, since the finer nuances of what he carbonized are likelier to be overlooked when food is passed too quickly over the tounge for those nuances to be detected and the blame for them properly affixed. Which, given Ramsey's own fondness for boorishly mistreating others without provocation, one should do without hesitation or any undue feelings of regret.
Typical of the commentary found on Youtube on that last video I linked to was this bit of wisdom, and I wonder how much it explains of this Gordon Ramsay phenomenon I was lucky enough to have not heard of prior to the time I started writing this blog.
Gordan KNOWS his (expletitive deleted).
So less about "oh he's so arragant/rude/cocky"
HE KNOWS how to run a restaurant. He makes like £500MILLION A YEAR.
I guess high school never ends for some of us. Such a comment as the one above puts on display the same depth of reasoning one sees out of a herd as it begins to stampede, or in a group of yuppies who huddle in long lines during a midwinter night outside of a tacqueria no different from the many on the same street, merely because so many others are waiting as well.
"Everybody else is spending their money here, so this must be a good place to spend one's money", the person who advances this argument never stopping to think that the "everybody" who came before him might have had the exact same non-thought, and the success he bases his purchasing decision on is a reflection of that kind of snowballing, self-creating consensus than any sort of merit on the part of the lucky establishment and owner so favored. The impression left by this video is that Gordon most assuredly does not know his [excrement], not even on a level that would be fitting in a five year old newcomer to the kitchen, and has been getting by on his own overconfidence and the desire of others to follow the herd for years.
Which, I suppose, might raise the question of whether or not that overconfidence worked on me as I gave this video an initial thumbs up over on that social bookmarking site which need not be named. Answer: Not to any serious extent. I'd race through the process of selecting sites to review, giving very hasty ratings so that I wouldn't lose track of a site that looked like it might be interesting in a good or a bad way, and then would come back for a better look later. When you see that positive rating without a review on this blog, take it for what it is - bookmarking without any serious recommendation implied. | |
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