This recipe is mostly derived from Alton Brown and Good Eats. Primarily the “Steak your Claim”, “Tender is the Loin”, and “Hitting The Sauce” episodes.
I picked up some cheap red-tag steaks at Food Lion on Monday. Red tags simply mean the sell-by date is a day or two off, and the steak is going to get binned shortly if you don’t buy at the reduced price. Sometimes red-tags are horrid looking pieces of meat, already turning an unappealing brown in the packaging. Sometimes there’s nothing visibly awkward at all. These steaks were nothing amazing, just some square cut (in the cross section, 1″ to a side) strips of low grade beef. I tend to grab decent steaks like that to be frozen and later cooked in some kind of gravy in the crockpot, as 8 hours of slow stewing in a delicious brown gravy will make even the worst cuts of meat appetizingly tender.
Monday, however, I wanted to try searing the outside of the steaks prior to putting them in the crockpot. Searing, as examined on Good Eats, merely adds flavor. It does not increase moisture retention as some older cookbooks proclaim (in fact the extra cellular damage to the meat increases moisture loss during further cooking). But, seeing as Meabh wasn’t feeling that well, and feeling slightly adventurous, I decided to try going a step further and finishing the steaks myself. Hit the jump to see how I cooked them, and the pan sauce I made afterwards to accompany them.
