Foods That You Just Have To Feed To Your Man

Wedge of iceberg and blue cheese dressing
The lettuce has to be ice-cold and the dressing room temperature. When creamy, salty flavors of the dressing tag-team with the crunch of the fresh iceberg, you’ll have your proof that the best taste sensations are often the simplest.

Kumamoto oysters 
Harvested from Japanese shores these small, sweet oysters are nothing like the bland, flabby Gulf oysters you’re used to. Kumamotos are salty, but not overpowering, and taste incredible with a craft brew IPA. Hold the cocktail sauce and slurp them straight up.

 

Escargot .  Go ahead. Turn up your nose and try to leave this one to the Frenchies—but  these luscious, tender, garlic-and-butter-loaded mollusks are delicious . Even better than eating the meat: using a hunk of garlic bread to sop the sauce.

 

 
Handmade pasta
Once you’ve had it, there’s no going back to the box. Making your own is an art that takes time to master, but the manpower pays off with pasta that doesn’t require a swamp of sauce to taste amazing. All you need is salt, pepper, a hit of high-quality olive oil and a hefty sprinkling of Parmesan. Can’t spare the investment? Make friends with an Italian grandma. Quickly.

Steak tartare

The Beauty of T-Bone & Tenderloins

The T-Bone

We do quite a bit of steak talk around here, but we’ve never covered the true basics: how to pick the one you want.

First, a definition. Steaks are basically any piece of meat that falls under the category of “fast-cooking” cuts—cuts that are low enough in connective tissue that they don’t require the long cooking times that “slow-cooking” cuts require. The difference between a steak and roast essentially comes down to size. Any good roast can be cut into individual steaks (although, unfortunately, it’s not possible to put together several steaks into a large roast without the aid of transglutaminase, or at the very least, a reliable time machine).

While cheaper cuts like sirloin, flank, and skirt, or cheffy cuts like hanger and flatiron are becoming increasingly popular and available these days (my favorite is hanger), the kings of the steakhouse are still those cuts that come from the Longissimus dorsi and the Psoas major. The Longissimus dorsi are a pair of long, tender muscles that run down either side of the spine of the steer, outside the ribs, all the way from the neck to the hip. The tenderness of a steak is inversely related to the amount of work that a muscle does during the steer’s lifetime. So as a relatively unused muscle, the Longissimus dorsi (commonly referred to as the loin or the backstrap) are extremely tender, making them an ideal candidate for steak (and also quite expensive).

Also Sold As: Porterhouse (when tenderloin section is 1 1/2-inches or wider)

Where It’s Cut From: The T-bone is a two-for-one cut—it’s comprised of a piece of tenderloin, and a piece of strip separated by a T-shaped bone. The regular T-bone is cut from the front end of the Short loin primal, just after the tenderloin starts, giving it a smallish piece of tenderloin (between 1/2- and 1 1/2-inches wide). A Porterhouse steak, on the other hand, is cut from further back and has a section of tenderloin at least 1 1/2-inches wide.

See how the two steaks fit together?

What It Tastes Like: The strip section tastes like strip, and the tenderloin tastes like, well, tenderloin.

The Best Way to Cook It: Grilling, broiling. Because of the irregularly-shaped bone, pan-searing is extremely difficult with a T-bone. As the meat cooks, it tends to shrink down a bit. The bone ends up protruding, preventing the meat from getting good contact with the pan surface, and inhibiting browning. Because of this, you’re much better off grilling it.

But even grilling isn’t completely straight-forward. Remember how the leaner tenderloin cooks faster than the fattier strip? That problem is compounded by the fact that the tenderloin section of the T-bone or Porterhouse is much smaller than the strip. The result is a tenderloin that ends up overcooking before the strip is even close to done.

But never fear! There’s an easy way to fix this problem. When grilling or broiling, just make sure you position the steak such that the tenderloin is further away from the heat source than the strip. Under a broiler, that means that the steak should be oriented so the strip rests closer to the heating element or flame. On a grill, this means building a modified two-level fire (that’s all the coals under one half of the grill, leaving the other half empty; on a gas grill, light one or two of the burners, leaving the other one off), then positioning the steak over the fire so that the tenderloin sections are closest to the empty side of the grill.