Day 69: The Tomahawk and the Paring Knife

The beef rib primal. Cut #103 if you care to order it in all its glory.

With beef, my preferred method for checking doneness is giving it a quick poke to test firmness. Unfortunately, when it comes to Fred Flintstone-sized cuts of steak, like the bone-in ribeye tomahawk steak, this will not do. The meat is too thick for this to be completely accurate.

We basically had three other methods for checking. There's the decidedly unsexy yet thoroughly practical thermometer method, the crude cut-it-open-on-the-bottom-and-see method, and then the method for the wickedly cool among us: jabbing it with a paring knife and feeling the temperature of said knife with your lips.

Seriously, how cool is that? Of course, for a novice like myself, it didn't turn out perfectly, as my ginormous hunk of weaponized cow ended up medium rather than the desired medium-rare. Still, the gist is this: insert a paring knife halfway down into the steak. Preferred point of entry is the non-presentation side a.k.a. whichever side will end up touching the plate. Give it a few seconds, then remove and place the flat of the knife against your lip.

A lukewarm to warm knife reflects a steak that's in the medium-rare to medium range, which is how one should eat this particular region of bovine musculature.

Cote de boeuf with beurre marchant du vin.