Summer Steak Sizzle

Ah, summer. The heat rises and the cicadas sing. It’s too hot to cook stews or pot roasts.

The perfect summer meal starts with steak. When I was twelve I had the staff hanging out a restaurant kitchen door watching me eat my way through a porterhouse steak of massive proportions. I really enjoyed that steak, and I had dessert after. I don’t remember what was for dessert but I finished it. I was a skinny kid, too. I devoured that steak while we were on vacation on our way to the beach. A steak brings memories of shimmering heat, the song of the cicadas, the smell of growing fields, and lazy driving through the countryside. Steak and summer have gone together for me ever since that trip.

My partner’s birthday is August 15, so I’m really glad that he likes the Ideal Summer Meal. Throw a steak or two or more over charcoal, quick-boil some corn on the cob and provide lots of butter and salt and pepper, and slice good ripe beefsteak tomatoes (or my tomato salad) and you’re good to go.

The centerpiece of the meal is the steak. It can be a rib eye; a good porterhouse or T-bone; if you’re rich, a tenderloin; or if you have good teeth, a sirloin. I’m fond of rib eye steak, myself. It’s flavorful and tender but isn’t as large as a porterhouse or a sirloin. That’s OK.

I can no longer eat a pound and a half of porterhouse steak. My grandfather maintained that there were only four steaks in a steer: the four symmetrical porterhouse steaks. If a steak doesn’t have equal amounts of meat on both sides of the T bone it isn’t a porterhouse, it’s a T-bone. If it isn’t at least an inch thick, he didn’t think it was a steak.

The sirloin is a bit tough for me but has lots of flavor.

Then there’s the tenderloin, the filet mignon. It’s a lean piece of meat that’s tender in spite of its leanness. It doesn’t have as much flavor as a rib eye or porterhouse but that’s because it doesn’t have as much fat. Yes, fat is flavor. Get over it.

I like my steak “Pittsburgh rare.” That means charred on the outside and cool in the middle. I can handle warm in the middle. Any more cooking and the steak dries out unless it’s very high in fat marbling. I live with people who like it anywhere from just rare to medium-well (barely pink in the middle). Don’t give me a hard time about germs. The inside of a steak is sterile, and if you char the outside you’ve killed any bad germs. Mad cow disease is not a germ, it’s a prion, a twisted protein, and no amount of cooking destroys it, so I’m as safe as anybody who eats well-done steak.

The steak is only the beginning. Corn on the cob isn’t what it used to be – and a good thing, too. There was a time when the only way to get perfectly sweet corn on the cob was to take the pot of boiling water to the corn stalk, pick and clean the corn, and drop it right into the kettle. Nowadays most market corn has the “supersweet” gene. It enables the corn to store more sugar and less starch and convert less sugar to starch after it’s picked. It has revolutionized the fresh corn market by making it possible to ship corn longer distances. You can tell if the corn you buy is the right type by looking at the kernels. If they’re mostly yellow with occasional white kernels, then it’s supersweet. Just boil it for a couple of minutes; or microwave it; or clean off the silks, close the husks back up around it, soak it in water, and put it on the grill. But don’t leave it on for long. Overcooking ruins corn. Then slather it with butter and sprinkle fresh-ground black pepper on it.

Then there are tomatoes. Oh, my god, summer tomatoes. I don’t eat winter tomatoes. There’s nothing like home-grown or farm market beefsteak tomatoes. They’re meaty and sweet and very low in acid. The other low-acid tomatoes are yellow ones. I’ve eaten tomatoes picked semi-green and tomatoes picked dead ripe, and believe me, dead ripe is better. I make a dish of tomatoes where I seed and dice them and marinate them in a mixture of olive oil, lemon juice (fresh or frozen, never bottled), fresh garlic, salt and pepper. This is my partner’s favorite way to eat tomatoes, but it can’t be made with anything but low-acid, fully ripe summer tomatoes. No! Don’t even try! It’s especially pretty with red and yellow tomatoes mixed together. No, don’t add any parsley or anything. Leave it alone! One of the marks of a good cook is that he or she knows when to leave it alone!

Finish the meal with the ice cream of your choice, bought or home made, and there you have it. You haven’t heated up the kitchen and you’ve had the Perfect Summer Dinner.

(c) 2008 Katherine DeWitt