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I'm not interested in carbonizing the surface of the meat. To me that ruins the flavor.
- Alain Ducasse

It was a bachelor weekend of sorts. My wife mercifully let me pass on attending a wedding of an old family family friend, so I had the whole weekend alone in the apartment to get work done.  I had some crazy projects planned including a mad braise of a cow tongue, but the first night alone was all about pure unrestrained male gluttony.  I bought a bottle of wine, a potato the size of a shoe, and an enormous rib eye.

This should have been a simple meal, one requiring little skill beside turning on the stove and plopping a pan on a burner.  But somewhere along the way I realized I hadn't eaten much ribeye in my life and I began to wonder whether this stove-top method was the best way to do it.  The only "steaks" I tend to eat are skirt or flank, as they're about the only ones I can afford. This splurge had me stumped. Should a sear it on an iron skillet, broil it, or should I dump a bunch of charcoal into my little hibachi and try to get that sucker as hot as possible? Really, what is the best way to cook a ribeye?

My initial thought was to mimic the technique nearly every serious steak house in the Midwest does: broiling it under an inferno.  And I mean that.  They reguarly reach hellish temperatures of around 1800 degrees.  The quick sear blackens the outside while leaving the inside nice and rare.  Of course, much like the perfect New York pizza oven, one cannot easily recreate this temperature at home.  I could only try hard and hope to get close.  I was looking around on eGullet to see if there was a better way of doing this when I came across an article called The Best Way to Cook a Thick Steak.  I figured it would be a good place to start. 

But I was a little taken aback by what I read.  Instead of hellish temperatures, and visible flames, this article claimed that the best way to cook a steak was over medium heat in a skillet bathed in butter.  The reasoning is that while high temperatures do a good job of searing the meat, they create burnt flavors.  This more  moderate approach allows for even cooking and a great flavor because of the Maillard Reaction.  And suddenly, and without warning, my simple meal of meat and potatoes required a science lesson.   

By Blake Royer I hardly ever cook hot dogs at...

As we realized on our last post, it was time to stop talking emphatically about the cultural significance of cider, and start getting to the business of making it. Though we had read more websites, emails, and books than we could know what to do with, we were still confused, and more importantly, l didn't have a solid recipe. It was beginning to be a problem.

At its simplest, hard apple cider is pressed and strained apples that are left to sit around until residual yeast on the apples' skin turns the sugar into alcohol. That's the traditional way to do it, how it was done for a long time. But today, most people prefer to use packaged yeast: this ensures that the cider will taste right, rather than being subject to a wild yeast, and it is the only way to succeed if the juice has been pastuerized, which is usually the case unless you press your own apples.

The appeal of hard cider is enormous: all that's needed is apple cider, some yeast, and equipment to ferment it in. But the information available about each part of that process--the juice, the yeast, and technique--ranged from overly simplified to dorky and confusing. Finding good advice was proving difficult.

Our salvation came in two forms: first, the fact that Whole Foods Market carries 1-gallon glass jugs of apple juice, for $6.99, which would suddenly supply us with both the container and the juice to begin our adventure. And two, a confidence-boosting e-mail from a reader named Michael, who noted my tweet about using champagne yeast to ferment some cider, and who explained the process clearly via email.

And so we gathered four glass jugs, two kinds of yeast and juice, and some rubber stopper airlocks from the local Brew & Grow store near Bucktown. Our adventure would begin.