A Steak with the Best of Both Worlds!
A Boy, His Big Green Eggs & Sokol Blosser Wines
When you stroll up to the butcher counter and you are trying to decide on which steak to buy, the choices at times can be difficult. You know your wife loves the tenderness of filet and you love the texture and flavor of the NY strip. Well, there are two cuts of steak that can make both people happy, the T-bone and the porterhouse. These bone-in meats have the NY strip on one side of the bone and the filet on the other side. What’s the difference between the T-bone and the porterhouse you ask? Well, simply put, the porterhouse tends to have a larger portion filet than the T-bone. A great, grilled steak and a happy wife, the makings of a very enjoyable evening!
Preparation:
Season your T-bone with fresh cracked pepper, rosemary and olive oil. Cover and refrigerator over night. Remove from the refrigerator 15 minutes before grilling and season with sea or kosher salt.
Salad:
Caramelize some onions with herbs de Provence, add pitted olives and hold warm until the steak is resting off the grill. Just before serving the steak add baby arugula to the onion and olive mixture. Season with salt and pepper, drizzle with olive oil and balsamic vinegar. Mix together until arugula starts to wilt. This takes less than a minute. Divide the arugula salad on the dinner plates and top with blue cheese (we used Rogue Creamery Blue Cheese from Southern Oregon). While my first choice is fresh and local, Maytag Blue from Ohio or Colston Basset Stilton from England would do very nicely. Blue cheese not your thing? Try it with your local goat cheese, or Coach Farms in Hudson Valley, or Humboldt Fog from the Bay area.
Grilling:
Our Big Green Egg, Medford, grilled this well seasoned T-bone for about 3 minutes a side a 650˚F+. I grilled the steak without the rosemary on the meat for the first side. After I turned and flipped the meat and added the rosemary sprigs on top of the meat while the second side cooked.. We removed the T-Bone when the meat was medium-rare. We let the meat rest for a couple of minutes, then removed the meat from the bone. We sliced the filet into strips and fanned it out on the dinner plates. We then did the same with the NY Strip.
Wine:
Tonight it was my wife’s choice. Did she choose the Shafer Hillside Select, the Pio Cesare Barolo or our beloved Meditrina? No, tonight her choice was the Sokol Blosser 12 Row Pinot Noir 2003. For those of you who have had the rare pleasure of enjoying Pinot Noir from this 1 acre site, 12 rows, 60 vines per row, a little gem in the middle of our vineyard; it is a treat to say the least. During harvest 2003, Mother Nature gave us one of the warmest growing seasons of recent history. It took this usually expressive part of our vineyard and as Emeril would say, kicked it up a notch. Our winemaking team took the power and ripeness of this vintage and blended its strengths with the finesse and elegance that is Sokol Blosser Pinot Noir. I think of Sokol Blosser Pinot Noir as elegant, age-worthy and food friendly. The 2003 Sokol Blosser Pinot Noirs, especially the 12 Row, I think of a blend of power, restraint and finesse. This pumped up Sokol Blosser Pinot Noir from 2003 is a great steak Pinot Noir! Get some while the last bottles still exist. Call Rodolphe in the Tasting Room at 503.864.2282 x 10, he may have a few bottles stashed away.