Grilling Flat Iron Steak

During

Oh buy the steak, said the little devil perched on my shoulder. The angel opposite said, It costs nine dollars! You've never grilled steak in your life! What a waste if you mess up! The devil won this argument and I took home a "flat iron steak" -- never heard of it before; it looked kind of like the flank steak I'd wanted. Surprised to learn that flat iron steak is a new and fashionable cut from the shoulder. Cut vertically, that muscle made gristly top blade steaks. Cut horizontally, it makes flat-iron steak, the second-most-tender beef cut after the tenderloin. More fascinating info about the invention of the flat iron steak here on a butcher's blog. And either I'd grill the boneless 1.1-pound steak that afternoon or be too intimidated and waste what I'd spent on the Lodge cast-iron grill. My reluctance might seem odd, but in my middle 50s I have never grilled anything except corn and a hamburger and that was last week. Steak is a big step up.

After

Online (source of all knowledge) instructions said to grill the meat for 16 minutes for medium rare. I didn't marinate or rub it with salt and pepper, just brought it out raw on a plate, laid it on the hot grill and watched and waited to flip it at the 8-minute point. Surprise again; turned over, it looked awesome. Finished grilling and tented the (clean) plate with foil for10 minutes so the meat could finish cooking and redistribute its juices, becoming easier to slice. Then I sliced, to throw some steak strips into a salad. It came out magazine-perfect and so tender and delicious I turned ecstatic cartwheels and wished you were here to share. There was no fat or waste to speak of. Feels good to be building a new skill and I can hardly wait to serve this to friends. There's a marinade that's supposed to make it spectacular.

Scared to Grill? Who, Me? Nahhh....

Grilling is counterintuitive: You don't put the food on while there's fire? You wait until the flames go out? I finally accepted this as a reality and chose this year to acquire grilling skills. I have had $10 tabletop grills whose bellies burnt through on the first use; no good. Can't lift the propane tanks for gas grills. My best previous experience was with a cast-iron hibachi, so the next step up was the Lodge Cast Iron Portable (sort of; it weighs 35 pounds) Grill. Followed the step-by-step "be a grilly girl" article in the latest issue of Taste of Home Healthy Cooking magazine: Get self-lighting coals. Pile them in a pyramid. Don't skimp. Light. Light. Light, darn it! Why won't they *#***@* light? (Tuck a sheet of newspaper underneath those coals, girlfriend!) Oil the grill so food won't stick. Go away for 45 minutes and return with food packaged in aluminum foil. Grilling seems to require lots of foil.

The magazine's recipe was for grilled corn with olive oil and garlic. In a cookbook I found the recipe for grilled potatoes with onions in a packet (not shown; they were cooking in the coals). Online were instructions to shape the beef patties with a small hole in their centers. This way you can ascertain when they are cooked through. To keep fat from dripping and flaming fat from charring the meat, cook in a disposable aluminum pan until the last few minutes; then move them directly onto the grill to get that smoky taste and grill marks. The corn is that "butter and sugar" bicolor cultivar so popular and good they almost don't sell anything else around here anymore.

While waiting for the food to grill, sit down, enjoy the beautiful Missouri spring day and perhaps a beer. I didn't have one because I now get plastered and loop-legged after a single bottle.

The result was not bad for a novice. Practice makes perfect. I see so many great grilling recipes and don't want to miss out. (P.S. The following week I grilled a flatiron steak, my first grilled steak, and wrote about it.)