Recipes That Changed My Life: #2 – Cooking a Steak with Gordon Ramsay

Steak dinners were a frequent occurrence at my house growing up. As a kid who was privileged enough to come of age in a two-professional-income household, I did not realize the expense of steak versus other meat choices. I understood my father loved steak: he enjoyed picking the cuts out from the butcher (T-bones were his go-to) and relished grilling them on our barbeque at home. My father was not one of those people who had a lot of weird requirements or rituals about grilling, as I have since learned some grilling fanatics have. There were no rules about who could touch what or any aprons to wear or special equipment to use. Rather, he seemed to enjoy the opportunity to cook outside and he thought the grill made steaks taste better.

Every family member and/or guest at my family dinner table was generally given their very own steak to eat. As a child who had only known life in my parent’s house, I didn’t understand this was unusual. Some people balked at the cost of such a practice or the sheer immensity of the one-T-bone-steak-per-person serving size. It wasn’t until I went to a friend’s house for dinner in my early college years that I realized some families cut up a steak or steaks into several portions for serving.

My first attempt to grill steaks on my own was a disaster. My parents left my brother and I alone to house-sit one weekend when I was 16. As my mother often did when she was getting ready to go out of town for a while, she recited to me all the food that was available for us to consume in their absence. She mentioned my father had frozen some steaks: if we wanted to grill them, we could find those in the spare freezer in our laundry room. As I planned to throw the customary party at my parent’s house while they were out of town, I mentioned to my friends steaks were in the freezer, and we all agreed they should be the centerpiece of our Saturday barbeque.

This steak barbeque plan would have worked out just fine, except because I had not previously dealt with frozen steaks (Dad usually cooked them soon after buying them fresh from the grocery store). I didn’t realize I needed to defrost them and none of my friends did either. This resulted in my putting four frozen-solid rump steaks on a hot grill. I was so confused about why they took so long to cook: this didn’t seem how it went at all when Dad made them. Hours later, not only were they finally cooked, but they were also dried-out shriveled-up shadows of the steaks they had once been.

I became a vegetarian half-way through college and so steak and I went out separate ways for a while. Even when I began consuming meat again in the mid-2000s, I rarely picked up steaks to cook. By then I was supporting myself (and a deadbeat boyfriend) and better appreciated how much a good steak could cost. From 2006 and on, I knew steaks to be a special occasion only food. At this same time in my life, I started moving a lot and living in many places, but none with a grill. My parents hadn’t “believed in” cooking steaks indoors, and so I was skeptical a decent tasting steak could even be made without the use of a barbeque grill.

That is until I met Gordan Ramsay.

I became acquainted with Ramsay during a particularly bleak time in my life. I had relocated to New Jersey from Arizona because Dan (aforementioned deadbeat) needed emergency back surgery, and one of the best surgical specialists for the particular type of surgery he needed practiced at Penn University Hospital in Philadelphia. The hospital was a short 20-minute drive from where Dan’s mother and brother lived in South Jersey. During Dan’s surgery and months-long recovery in physical rehab, I lived with his mother and brother. I had already been scraping by supporting the two of us on a coffee shop manager’s salary, and then had spent the rest of whatever little money I had moving us across the country for his surgery. I was in desperate need of a rent break.

Once Dan was allowed to return home from the hospital, we got our own one-bedroom apartment. After sharing a small two-bedroom apartment with two other people, I was ready to have a bigger space and a modicum of privacy. Our one-bedroom was small, about 700 sq feet, but seemed like a palace after the close quarters I had been living in the past several months.

The palatial feeling, however, was destined to be short lived. About two months after we moved in to our new one-bedroom, Dan’s mother called: she was not going to be able to keep paying the rent on the two-bedroom apartment she and Dan’s 14-year-old brother called home because of issues receiving alimony she was owed from her divorce settlement. She wasn’t sure where she was going to move next. Could she and Dan’s brother stay with Dan and I for a while until they figured things out?

Despite my predisposition to being helpful, my immediate response was “no”. For reasons I won’t dive into here, I believed she had other more appropriate options besides moving in with us. Dan and I got into a huge screaming match: how could I suggest throwing his mother and brother out onto the street? It would only be for a few months. I had a crushing feeling in my chest that the arrangement, if allowed to take place, would not be for just a few months. I screamed this feeling at Dan.

But, in the end, I gave in. And, for the record, my feeling was correct: the three of us lived together for nearly three years in that tiny, tiny apartment.

Although there were many challenges which presented themselves with the four of us sharing 700 sq feet of living space, the one relevant to this blog post is the sharing of the TV in the living room. As the living room also doubled as the area where Dan’s mom and brother slept, they typically had first dibs on what was playing. There would arise times where I wanted to sit somewhere other than in the bedroom, which would draw me out into the living room. Because Dan’s mom worked and Dan’s brother did nothing, I usually had to negotiate TV time with Dan’s brother. Some of his viewing preferences at the time did not overlap with mine: for instance, he went through what seemed like a very long period of binging every episode of the Keifer Sutherland drama 24.

One thing Dan’s brother and I could agree on, however, was Gordan Ramsay. We watched episode after episode of his two biggest shows at that time: MasterChef and Hell’s Kitchen. I will not spend much time here analyzing whether I should be a fan of Gordon Ramsay. On one hand, I like how he approaches every would-be chef with high expectations. I have long held the personal coaching philosophy that people will often live up to the expectations you hold for them, and I think pushing people to be better is important. However, his well-known tendency to scream the most hideous of insults at people (typically in Hell’s Kitchen episodes) is abusive and problematic.

One of the things I enjoyed the most about any Gordan Ramsay program is when he took time, as he often did in episodes of both MasterChef and Hell’s Kitchen, to demonstrate how a particular dish should be prepared. I found his verbal instructions easy to follow and because of the time restraints on these segments—they were usually just a minute or two in length—the recipes he covered were typically basic recipes. They seemed doable to me.

You can imagine how delighted I was when Ramsay took time on an episode of Hell’s Kitchen to demonstrate how to prepare what he considers to be a proper steak. I was especially excited when the recipe did not require the use of a grill, but rather showed how to prepare a steak with just a cast iron skillet.

I was doing a lot of food preparation then. Even though Dan’s mother and I were the only two people in our household that had jobs, we also were somehow the only two people who prepared any meals for the four of us. Because of financial restraints, we rarely ate out. Getting to cook a big luxurious meal in our tiny kitchen was one of my few indulgences then. The first time I cooked steaks in that apartment with Ramsay’s method, I was so pleased with how they turned out I felt about 50% more human for the rest of the day. It felt like an accomplishment during a time in my life where I didn’t feel like I was accomplishing anything.

Making steaks from Ramsay’s instructions help me understand not all hope was lost: if I could learn how to make a great steak for the first time when I was thirty, there were probably other things I could learn how to do and do well. With that in my mind, in the months and years that followed, I pushed myself to excel in my jobs at the bank and made a plan to get into an MBA program, with the goal of becoming a CPA and working at a public accounting firm. Those pursuits eventually got me out of that tiny apartment and onto the next chapter of my professional life (finding my job at the firm), which lead to me the next chapter of my personal life (meeting and falling in love with Basil).

Despite having been a vegan for the past eight years, I still take any opportunity presented to me to make Ramsay-style steaks for other people. I couldn’t find any internet clips of the Hell’s Kitchen footage which originally inspired me, but here is a more recent video of Ramsay going over steak-cooking basics. (Disclaimer: the lesson I originally saw did not call for the thyme sprigs this video features—I would classify those as completely optional.) For those of you who prefer a written recipe, I found this Hell’s Kitchen-devotee blog posting which summarizes the approach in writing.