Ribeye with a Loaded Baked Potato
current situation: ribeye
Steak and a baked potato. There is no cleverness in it, which is why it has to be done properly.
The potato is the part worth talking about. It is baked naked on the rack with a salted skin, split, and then crushed open with a fork rather than mashed — that broken, fluffy, lumpy look in the picture is what you get when you fork it open and stop. And one quarter of the skin comes off, goes back in the oven with fat on it, and arrives at the plate as a crisp.
That crisped skin is the best thing on the plate. It takes four extra minutes and it is the difference between dinner and a nice dinner.
- Feeds
- 1
- Hands-on
- 20 minutes
- Potato in the oven
- 1 hour
- Steak
- 8 minutes
What you need
The steak
- 1 boneless ribeye, 14–16 oz, 1 1/2 inches thick
- Coarse kosher salt
- Coarse cracked black pepper
- 1 tbsp beef tallow
- 1 tbsp butter, 2 cloves garlic, a sprig of thyme — for the baste
The potato
- 1 large russet potato
- 1 tsp neutral oil, and coarse salt for the skin
- 2 tbsp butter
- 3 tbsp sour cream
- 1 tbsp chives, sliced fine
- Salt and black pepper
The au jus
- 1 cup beef stock
- 1 tbsp soy sauce
- 1 tbsp butter
- The browned bits from the steak pan
How it goes
1 — Salt the steak an hour ahead, oil the potato
Steak salted and left on a rack on the counter. Potato rubbed with oil, rolled in coarse salt, pricked twice.
2 — Potato on the bare oven rack, 425°F, an hour
No foil. Foil steams the skin soft and the whole point here is a skin that crisps. A skewer should go through with no resistance at all.
3 — Take a quarter of the skin off and crisp it
Split the potato, cut away one quarter of the skin in a single piece, brush it with the tallow or butter, salt it, and put it back in the oven for eight minutes while you cook the steak. It curls and goes orange-brown and crunches.
4 — Fork the potato open, do not mash it
Butter into the hot flesh, then break it up with the tines of a fork — twenty seconds, no more. It should look crushed and uneven, with whole pieces still showing. Sour cream on top, chives over.
5 — Dry the steak and sear it hard
Patted dry, peppered, into a cast-iron pan with the tallow at high heat. Three minutes without moving it, flip, two more. The fat edge held down with tongs for thirty seconds.
6 — Butter, garlic, thyme, baste for a minute
Heat down, butter in, pan tilted, and spoon the foaming butter over the top for sixty seconds. Pull at 128°F for a rested medium rare.
pro tip — Baste at the END and with the heat down. Butter in a screaming pan goes black and bitter in about twenty seconds.
7 — Rest the steak, make the jus in its pan
Steak on the board under foil. Stock and soy into the same pan, scraped, reduced by half, butter whisked in. Everything stuck to the bottom of that pan is the sauce.
8 — Plate with the skin standing up
Steak across the bottom, potato beside it, and the curl of crisped skin propped against the potato where it stays dry.
Eat the skin first. It is the best thing on the plate and it does not wait. LFG.