/h4rl3y

I love cooking steaks.

I love how... versatile they are. Truly. You can do almost anything to a steak and it will almost always taste great! (it really won't don't be stupid, have some common sense with your experiments).

Whenever I get the opportunity to cook a steak, I always do it properly. I start with a marinade at-least 24-hours prior to when I plan to cook it.

This time, that marinade consisted of:

• A base of soy sauce & lemon juice
• Salt & pepper
• Rosemary
• Hot honey golden syrup that I pre-heated in a pot to get nice and fluid

Lemon juice is a very important part of a good marinade, the acidity of the juice is vital to breaking down the muscle in the meat and vastly improving tenderness. 9/10 my marinades always begin with soy sauce and lemon juice.

Salt and pepper in a marinade is probably not going to make too much a difference, I'm a little concerned about adding salt to soy sauce which is already quite salty but only time will tell on that front. I'll be honest I was sort-of on a mental autopilot when I added these two.

Rosemary is always a great addition not just to a marinade, but more importantly to the steak itself. You can see in the photo attached that I have sprinkled some rosemary onto the meat itself.

For a marinade to really absorb into the steak, it's best to score the surface of the meat before soaking it in the marinade. Scoring exposes the inside of the meat to the marinade directly, allowing for much more direct absorption and a more effective marinade overall.

The hot "honey" is one of the two experiments I'm running this time, I've cooked steaks with honey in the past, but I've never incorporated it heated into the marinade. This came as a recommendation to try from a friend, and we're both eager to see the results.

The other experiment I'm running is that in the picture attached you can see I have inserted apple slices into the scoring. My thought behind this is that the apple juice would get absorbed into the steak and give quite a nice fruity note to complement the sweetness of the golden syrup and develop the flavour profile with the, rather salty, marinade.

24-hours later, it was time to cook.

Personally, I like my steaks quite rare, nothing more than a flash really to get the outside browned-off.

I began by pre-heating a large pan with olive oil, ensuring that the oil was spread-out relatively evenly across the surface.

Then, after first removing the steak from the marinade and the apple slices, using a pair of tongs, I placed the steak onto the pan.

About 5-minutes later after continuous turning to ensure an even sear, it was done.

Yes, really, 5-minutes, I told you I like it rare.

The honest review? It was fucking incredible, my family and partner both tried a piece or several too and they all had the following consensus: the taste is phenomenal, the flavour profile is quite well developed and the apple worked great and could be quite easily picked-out from the other sweetness from the hot "honey". However next time they recommended I cook it at a lower heat (I went straight to max-heat on the hob) and for longer, which I would agree with as, even though I do like mine quite rare, this was noticeably chewy still.

Thankfully though it was safe to consume, neither of us have fallen ill.

I am very happy that the apple and hot "honey" worked so well, I was concerned that the flavour of the apple either wouldn't be absorbed at all or would be completely overpowered by the golden syrup; thankfully though this was not the case.

I'll be taking this recipe forward as my new baseline for steaks, and will now work on my cooking methods as I feel very happy with the flavours that I'm able to put into the steak.