LA Chef Evan Funke’s Tips for Cooking a Good Steak

So if someone orders a steak, are you cooking steak? Are you sending them steak to cook? No, we're sending them prepackaged krav act steaks with instructions. You know, everybody likes their steak cooked differently. So we give general guidelines and pro tips of how to rest. And, you know, we send them salsa verde and we send them, you know, steak salt and whatnot. So are you telling them to cook on a frying pan? Like how are you getting them to cook it? High heat, either the grill or in the frying pan. Just high heat is your thing. High heat, man. High heat and then just intervals. High heat, take it off, let it rest. High heat, take it off. So you cook more like... Especially the T-bones. So when you do that, so you're not doing it in one shot? You're kicking it a little bit and then letting it rest and cooking? I'll take up to an hour to cook like a 35 ounce T-bone. Really? Absolutely. Wow. You bring up the temperature very slow and gradual in But you're doing it with high heat in these... Why high heat? Because that's all you got in restaurants, high heat. Low and slow is typically for braising. But if you're dealing with dry heat, it should be violent, it should be quick and then let it rest. Especially the T-bone. You got to start the T-bone on the actual bone, right? So vertical. Start it on your... Oh, yeah? Your strager, yeah? That's how you do it? You start it on the bone so that the heat can radiate gently through the bone and out towards the meat. So if you just throw the T-bone on side and then sign it, you have a part that's connected to that actual T-bone, the separation bone, it's going to be raw and everything else is going to be medium or medium rare. But if you start it on the bone, the heat is gently radiated through the meat. So now... And then halfway through, we take the filet mignon off and cook the New York side a little longer and then throw it back on the meat. So how long do you make it sit on the bone? How long do you have it stacked vertically like that? Probably like 10 to 12 minutes. Oh, wow. I never even thought of that. Yeah, man. Bisteca Fiorentina. The master is Dario. Who's that? Dario Cicchini. He's one of the most famous... You should look him up. He's one of the most famous butchers in all of Italy. He quotes Dante. He's a fucking maniac. But I went to his restaurant I think two years ago. Is that in Florence? It's in... I want to say... I can't remember. Oh, there he is. What's good, Dario? Look at him. Yeah. Amazing. Look at that face. Amazing. So happy. He's... Well, yeah, he's a wild man. He's a wild man. But he starts the T-bone on the bone. So he's... Oh, Jesus Christ. He's my child. He sized that fucking stick. Absolute master. That's preposterous. Absolute master. And so you learned from him? I did not learn from him. We've been cooking. I've been cooking for 20 years. So you pick things up along the way. Cooking is just like a practice. You got a doctor, you got a lawyer. You learn the fundamentals. And then throughout your career, you upgrade those fundamentals with new and relevant techniques or laws or whatever. Cooking is the same thing. You get a foundation, and then you upgrade new and relevant techniques. And so are you using a grill that uses wood? Are you cooking on wood? Yeah, we're cooking on California almond and white oak. Almond? Almond. Almond for the smoke, because it'll go to fire like that, because it's so saturated with almond oil, and then oak for long and slow cooking. So it burns super hot. So the almond burns really quick, and the oak burns very slow. And so you put different woods in for different times? So you started off with the almond? We start with almond, and then we add oak, and then we add almond, and then we add oak. And it's just kind of fire maintenance is 90% of wood fire cooking. So it's just about how hot it burns in the distance, how high the coals are. And how deep the coal bed is, and how evenly dispersed the heat is. We'll have a cool side and a hot side, and then a fire side, all within like two square feet. Is there images of your grill setup online? No, I don't think so. Evan, your 10% technique right now is not sounding like 10% of your cooking. That sounds a clodge, right? I'm like, hold on a second. How could that be 10%? You're rotating the food. It's a fatty 10%. So did you set up this grill this way? Because that's the only way you cook steak? You prefer to cook it over wood? The design of Felix, the actual shoe box of a kitchen that we have, the design was based on the restrictions of the size. So we've crammed a hell of a lot into, I think it's just under 220 square feet, something like that. There's a fucking pizza oven in there. There's a wood-fired grill. There's 10 burners. There's a fryer. And you cook it 500 meals a night in that? I think top end is like 350 people. So if you times that by three or four different plates per person. Wow. Somewhere than that. It's built for speed. I build restaurants for speed.