If You Want A Decadent At-Home Steak, Consider A Butter Bath

It's difficult to pinpoint a food quite as delicious as a perfectly prepared, juicy steak. Though steak is often associated with expensive restaurants and the fine dining sphere, it actually requires a fairly basic cooking process. The best grilled steak recipes call for little more than salt, pepper, and a fat source.

Despite this relatively simple set of cooking instructions, chefs have long been experimenting with ways to make the perfect steak. You can give your cut of meat a reverse sear, which entails cooking it in the oven before charring it in the pan. Or, if you're feeling particularly adventurous, you can first freeze your steak, then drop it into the deep fryer, which some chefs suggest can result in a crispy exterior and a perfectly pink interior.   

Alternatively, preparing your steak in a rich butter bath could be the ticket to the absolute pinnacle of at-home decadent dining.

If you're tired of simple searing, you could try your hand at a more extravagant method of meat preparation: the butter bath. Essentially, if you fill a pot full of low-heat melted butter, it can serve as a sort of sous vide soup for your steak. Unlike actual sous vide, a relatively new culinary innovation that involves vacuum sealing meat in plastic packaging and slow cooking it in hot water, this method requires your steak to swim unprotected in the butter bath for a little under an hour. Then, it's just a matter of a quick sizzle on either side, and your succulent steak is ready to eat. 

However, with this recipe, it's important that you use clarified butter, which has been stripped of water and milk fats to raise its smoke point.

Though he isn't often associated with positive praise of people's personal cooking, celebrity chef Gordon Ramsay absolutely loved a TikToker's steak, and fans were stunned. In a duet of an @menwiththepot video Ramsay posted on TikTok, he complimented the perfectly pink steak interior the outdoor cooking channel achieved, using what Ramsay described as a butter bath method.

The thought of fully submerging your steak in a bath of butter may sound a bit excessive, but that shouldn't scare you away from butter basting altogether. Among the many ways to prepare a steak, it may very well be the best way to ensure a moist, evenly cooked cut of meat. Butter basting entails scooping melted butter over your steak while it's in the skillet, which helps speed up the cooking process while simultaneously imparting a beautiful browned flavor to your beef.

Several celebrity chefs stand by butter basting as the superior method of steak preparation. Gordon Ramsay cooks what he feels is the perfect steak by first searing it in olive oil before basting it in a generous serving of butter. Richard Blais, a former winner of the cooking competition series "Top Chef: All-Stars," went on the "Rachael Ray Show" to demonstrate his butter basting technique, wherein he uses small cubes of butter to create a prodigious pool for his steak to swim in. 

If you want to make a steak similar to the once Blais made for the show, try this pan-seared, butter-based rosemary steak recipe.