Meatlove
These slabs of dry-aged ribeye are the most expensive pieces of meat I’ve ever bought and cooked myself. (That’s $60 worth of beef in that there skillet.) They came from Slope Farms in the Catskills.
I don’t know a lot about dry-aging at the moment, but I hope to learn more. The meat looks a little red to me here–all the other dry-aged steaks I’ve seen in photos have looked much more, well, decomposed. Still, it tasted great: richer and fuller than ordinary steaks, with layers of flavor that just kept on revealing themselves.
I cooked them the way I cook almost any steak: brushed with a bit of oil, liberally seasoned, and unrelentingly seared in a cast-iron pan I had brought up to 450 degrees in the oven, before roasting in that same oven and resting for some seemingly interminable while. Some people will finish their steaks with butter, but I find that a bit excessive. They’re practically soaked in tallow by the end, anyway.
It was a nice meal. There was a little under three pounds of meat between the four of us, and we didn’t even get through it all. I have terrible memories of my meals at Peter Luger’s resulting in days of constipation (sorry, but it had to be said), so I wanted the meal to be as light as a meal involving two 1 1/2-inch slabs of ribeye can realistically be. So I made little oil-rubbed toasts of olive bread and topped them with caramelized onions into which I had splashed sherry vinegar and dissolved minced anchovies. Then I started us with chilled green beans in vinaigrette, tossed with shallots, lemon zest, and chopped, toasted walnuts. I served the steak with a platter of room-temperature grilled red peppers and zucchini and roasted fingerlings, all with an avocado-thickened salsa verde for pouring over, and a bitter little salad of romaine, radicchio, and radishes. For dessert we had the simplest strawberry ice, made of nothing more than strawberries, sugar, water, and lemon juice, and I cut up a luscious ripe pineapple, too. I like to eat this way: slowly, with good people, and with lots of sharp and bitter flavors so that my palate stays spry and I don’t feel bloated or ill. I know this isn’t the steakhouse way.