Smoking Your Steak Makes It Even More Delicious
By Nicola Lando
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December 1st, 2016
How do I prepare my steak for smoking?
Steaks always taste best seasoned with a little salt, anywhere from 30 minutes to 24 hours before cooking. Pat dry before smoking. A fattier cut like sirloin or ribeye is the most delicious for this.
What do I need?
The smoker
We use a Cameron Gourmet Smoker or Cameron Mini Smoker - both of which let you hot smoke food indoors, on any type of hob.
The wood chips
You don’t want to smoke the steak for very long as it shouldn’t cook through in the hot smoker. Therefore you want the most intense hit of flavour in the shortest time. That’s why we’ve chosen hickory wood chips (which the Cameron Smokers come with a pot of).
How do I smoke infuse my steak?
Just place your steaks in your stovetop smoker on the hob, and cook on a very low heat. You want just enough heat to start the wood chips smouldering, but not so high that the steak cooks through.
Smoke the steaks for 10 to 15 minutes over a very low heat.
The image below is the steak after it's been seared! When it comes out of the smoker, it should look pretty similar to when it went in...
What size smoker should I use?
You can fit one large 250g steak at a time in the Cameron Mini Smoker. If you want to smoke two or three large steaks at once, I’d recommended using the Cameron Gourmet Smoker.
What next?
Once your steaks are infused with smoke, heat a little oil in a frying pan over high heat. Sear the steaks quickly on both sides. Remember the steaks will have started cooking whilst in the hot smoker, so don’t cook them for as long as you usually would.
Leave to rest for a few minutes and enjoy. We like them topped with a little garlic butter. Though too much will mask the smoke flavour, so go easy with the quantities!
For the garlic butter (serves 6)
- 60g butter, at room temperature
- 2 garlic cloves
- 2 tbsp chives
- 1/4 tsp fine salt
Mix together the butter, garlic, chives and salt. Spoon over the steak to serve.
About the author
Nicola is co-founder and CEO at Sous Chef. She has worked in food for over ten years.
Nicola first explored cooking as a career when training at Leiths, before spending the next decade in Finance. However... after a stage as a chef at a London Michelin-starred restaurant, Nicola saw the incredible ingredients available only to chefs. And wanted access to them herself. So Sous Chef was born.
Today, Nicola is ingredients buyer and a recipe writer at Sous Chef. She frequently travels internationally to food fairs, and to meet producers. Her cookbook library is vast, and her knowledge of the storecupboard is unrivalled. She tastes thousands of ingredients every year, to select only the best to stock at Sous Chef.
Nicola shares her knowledge of ingredients and writes recipes to showcase those products. Learning from Sous Chef's suppliers and her travels, Nicola writes many of the recipes on the Sous Chef website. Nicola's recipes are big on flavour, where the ingredients truly shine (although that's from someone who cooks for hours each day - so they're rarely tray-bakes!).
