Bottega - Michael Chiarello [68]
Spoon polenta onto the center of each of 6 warmed plates, top with 1 rib, and pour on a little of the jus reduction.
Bistecca alla Fiorentina (Grilled Grass-Fed Porterhouse) with Grilled Radicchio
SERVES 2
This dish speaks for itself. If you’re a beef-lover, you owe it to yourself to try this method of cooking a porterhouse. I treat a steak this big like a roast. Use the coarsest grind on your pepper mill and push the pepper into the meat before grilling. This is a good place to share my three tricks for great beef.
1. Start with good beef.
2. Let the steak come to room temperature before throwing it on the fire.
3. Let it rest for 8 to 10 minutes before you cut into it.
Number 3 bears repeating: Don’t cut into the beef until it’s had a chance to rest.
Once the beef has rested, I carve it thickly, in good chunks about a finger and a half in width. I don’t slice it thin and fan it out on a plate; that’s not in keeping with the spirit of this steak.
You can serve this with any contorno. I happen to like how the grilled radicchio complements the beef. The trick with that is to soak the radicchio in ice water before grilling so the outside is charred and the inside is still cool, crisp, and fresh—a great contrast to the heartiness of the beef.
Wine Pairing: Cabernet Sauvignon
One 30-ounce Porterhouse steak
Sea salt, preferably gray salt
Coarsely ground black pepper
1 tablespoon extra-virgin olive oil for brushing
1 tablespoon late-harvest olive oil for drizzling
Roasted Lemons
Grilled radicchio
Preheat the oven to 400°F. Heat a large cast-iron skillet over high heat for 10 minutes, or until it’s so hot it’s almost humming. Season the meat liberally with salt and pepper and then brush with the extra-virgin olive oil.
Carefully put the steak in the pan and cook on one side until you see some juices bubbling up on top of the steak, about 8 minutes. Transfer the pan to the oven and cook for about 9 minutes, or until an instant-read thermometer inserted in the center of the steak registers 125°F.
While the steak is in the oven, set a wire rack on a rimmed baking sheet. When the steak is done cooking, transfer it from the pan to the rack and let it rest for 10 minutes. Transfer the steak to a carving board. Cut the meat off the bone and cut it straight down into 1-inch-thick slices. Pour the juices from the baking sheet onto the meat.
Put the bones on a warmed platter and rearrange the meat so it looks as it did before you carved. Drizzle with the late-harvest olive oil and serve with the lemon halves and radicchio.
Note: The Evolution of Grass-Fed Beef
At Bottega, we serve only grass-fed beef, which has come a long way in the past decade. If you take into account the bigger picture, it’s odd that corn-fed beef was the norm for so long, when cows are physiologically set up to digest only grasses. Corn isn’t optimal feed, although God knows I’ve had some phenomenal corn-fed beef.
Ten years ago, it was much more of a challenge to beat the flavor and tenderness of corn-fed beef, but these days I’ll put the flavor of my grass-fed beef up against corn-fed any day of the week and come out ahead. Ranchers have finally matched the right heirloom breed with the right grasses to get good internal marbling without grain.
When you buy beef, look for marbling—the streaks of fat are the key to flavor.
Grilled Rib-Eye Tagliata with Grilled Stone Fruit
SERVES 6
To any butcher, the rib-eye is the best piece of meat on a steer. I’m surprised by how many people eat New York steaks when they could be having rib-eye. I love the smoky sweetness of the grilled stone fruit here, and I am definitely not a fruit-with-meat kind of guy. Choose peaches or nectarines that are perfectly ripe but not the least bit soft or mushy. Don’t discard the olive oil marinade in which you’ve placed the peaches, save it to make a good vinaigrette later.
Wine Pairing: Cabernet Sauvignon
GRILLED STONE FRUIT
6 peaches or nectarines, peeled (for peaches), pitted, and