Planked Steak
Select a steak almost two inches thick, trim off fat and make the outline of the steak good. Sear it on both sides on a hot griddle or pan, using no fat of any kind. Butter a plank of the correct size, arrange a border of Duchess potatoes and place the steak on the plank. Also have on hand various kinds of cooked vegetables such as stuffed tomatoes or green peppers, small boiled onions, peas, string beans and cubes of carrot or turnip. Ar- 4 range these around the steak so that the board is entirely concealed. Place in the oven until the potato border is nicely browned and all the vegetables re-heated. On removing it from the oven, spread at once with butter into which has been rubbed finely chopped parsley, salt and paprika. Send to table upon the plank.
A restaurant showpiece translated for the home cook: the steak is nearly cooked before it ever reaches the plank, and the oven stage exists only to brown the potato border and reheat the garnish. Everything depends on treating the oven time as finishing, not cooking.
- The plankAn untreated hardwood plank, usually oak or hickory, an inch or so thick with a shallow groove around the rim to hold juices. A new plank should be rubbed with oil and heated in a low oven several times before first use; buttered and then loaded, it will smoke and scorch a little at the edges, which is expected. Do not use a thin cedar grilling plank or anything varnished, glued or plywood.
- Oven heatThe recipe gives no temperature; it says only to leave the plank in until the potato border is nicely browned and the vegetables are hot. A hot oven, in the region of 450F on an upper rack, suits that purpose: the aim is to colour the piped potato quickly rather than to go on cooking the steak.
- Time it by the steak, not the potatoesSear a two-inch steak hard on both sides, then pull it well short of done, since the oven stage is only meant to brown the border and reheat the garnish. Judge it by the steak: a few minutes in a hot oven should be enough, and if the border is not browning fast enough, run it under the broiler rather than extending the oven time.
- Duchess potatoesMashed potato enriched with egg yolk and butter, stiff enough to pipe. Use a large star tube and pipe the border directly onto the buttered plank; the egg is what lets it brown and hold its shape.
- Everything goes on hotThe vegetables are cooked separately and only reheated on the plank. Have them hot when they go in, or they will still be lukewarm when the steak is ready.
- The finishing butterButter creamed with chopped parsley, salt and paprika is maitre d'hotel butter in all but name. Spread it the moment the plank leaves the oven so it melts into the meat.
- Serving and yieldA trimmed two-inch steak — sirloin, porterhouse or a thick chunk of strip — runs 2.5 to 3 lb and serves four to six with this much garnish. Carve at the table across the grain; set the plank on a wooden tray or folded cloth, as it comes out oven-hot.
Planking is one of the few genuinely American cooking methods to make it into the standard cookbooks. It is generally traced to the Atlantic coast practice of nailing split shad to a hardwood board and propping it before an open fire, a technique that shows up in New England and along the Delaware and Connecticut rivers well before the Civil War. By the 1890s hotel and club kitchens had moved it indoors and applied it to beef, where the plank stopped being a cooking surface and became a serving platter that arrived sizzling, ringed with piped potato and enough garnish to hide the wood. The Butterick book, published for a mass audience of home cooks in the early 1910s, is passing along a restaurant presentation with the assumption that a reader might reasonably own a steak plank. The dish eventually faded with the fashion for elaborate garniture, though the plank survives in the American steakhouse and in the plank-grilled salmon that returns the method to the fish it started with.