I cooked three ribeyes last night using the super salt method Russel talked about and linked in his post above. It's a bit more aggressive than I usually do... more salt, and more time.
I wish I had pics because the steaks did bleed a lot of water and after the hour and half, the kosher salt I used was nearly dissolved completely. I rinsed the steaks (but not quite good enough i think) and dried them.
I grilled them direct for a total of 8 minutes. I was bit lazy and impatient and had a good amount of left over coals from the night before and just dumped a new chim over those. I don't think the coals were quite hot enough... I should of let them burn up a nother 15 minutes... but beyond all that, I'd say the results were pretty good.
I'd say that the steak was just barely too salty for me... like I said though, i think I didn't rinse them well enough.
They were perfectly on the rare side of medium rare. The steak was very tender, but the texture was noticibly different. Much smoother almost prime rib like. You could definately see the result of the salt's work on the meat.
I'm not opposed to it, but I think after trying yet another method, that I still prefer just taking a quality steak at room temp S&P-ing it a few mintues ahead and tossing it on a raging hot fire for a few minutes is till the way to go. It just seems more like "real" steak to me.
You can't make a choice cut a prime cut. You can maybe get the tenderness from the salt breaking down the meat, but you loose the texture... the bit of the meat if you will. I'm pretty fortunate that my local SAMs puts out pretty nice higher end choice cuts. They cut them how I want and i'm usually not dissappointed at all. When I do get Prime steaks, it's definately a noticible difference... it's just different. You don't have large pockets or strips of fat, just tiny little dots of it all over. You just can't dupulicate that.
All in all though, the "super salt" technique came out pretty **** good. I enjoyed it and so did the family. To the OP, give this a shot one night. You may find it's the perfect way to prepare a steak. If not, keep searching and asking questions until you get it right for you.
I think Saturday night we're going to do some surf and turf. I have two nice 10oz Prime filets and some nice jumbo scallops. I've been staying true to just salt and pepper for a couple of months now, but I think I'm going to make a nice Kona espresso rub for the filets for a change. dusting the scallops with it will work too. We'll see how it goes.
