The Quickest Way to Tenderize Steak - How to Tenderize Steak with a Meat Mallet
Author: Whats4Chow
Recipe type: Steak
Tenderizing steak with a meat mallet is probably the easiest way to tenderize steak. It certainly beats using enzymes and chemicals which at best produce inconsistent results. Almost every kitchen has a meat mallet, most of which have never been used. The reason for this is that no-one has ever showed you how to use it.
Ingredients
- Steak
Instructions
- How hard do you hit? How long do you hit? Do you season the meat before or after tenderizing? Will the steak still look good if you beat the daylights out of it? These are all questions that this video will answer today.
- For this demonstration I am using sirloin steaks. The sirloin is an average cut that is certainly not revered for being tender, in the way that tenderloin is.
- We are going to season the meat before the tenderizing process. For the purpose of keeping things simple, I am only going to use salt and cracked black pepper. Whatever you decide to use, if it contains salt, then you have to add one extra ingredient, and that is sugar. Salt toughens meat, especially if the meat in question is not going to stand for anything longer than a few minutes before cooking it. The sugar counteracts the toughening effect of salt, with added bonuses… it also gives a wonderful crispy edge crust to meat when it is cooked and results in a rich deep flavor.
- Once you have seasoned both sides of the steaks, fold them in bread film of clingwrap and start with the tenderizing. This is where a bit of finesse comes in. You want to hit the meat medium to hard, certainly not hard enough to make holes in it, but hard enough to start flattening the meat out. This process breaks down the connective tissue in the flesh of the meat, resulting in a more tender steak.
- You also want to bash the fat cap as well as this is attached to the meat with the same connective tissue. Continue with the tenderizing until everything is uniform and the resulting steak is around half the thickness of the original.
- Now you are probably saying to yourself… “This is never going to look like the steak I started with when it’s cooked” --- all I can say is “hang around until the end of the video when you will see just how good it looks”.
- To cook the steaks, I have added 2 tablespoons of butter and a dash of oil to my pan. The pan is heated to 210c. You will see a time-lapse of the steak cooking where it will become clear how the tenderized steaks return to their original shape and size when cooked, but without the nasty tough connective tissue.
- Here we go…. These are only going to grill for 2 minutes per side…
- The steaks are a few seconds from coming out of the pan….. here is an overlay of the steaks that went into the pan, compared to the same steaks 4 minutes later. They have returned to almost exactly the same size and shape as they were before they were tenderized.
- Allow the steaks to rest for 2 minutes before serving.
