Salt-Grilled Rib Steak

Next up, two classics of Spanish grilling

Salt-grilled rib steaks and grilled Spanish leeks. I give you chuletón y calzot

And to grill both, a wood-burning grill that means business. This is a front-loading wood-burning grill

It's lined with fire brick, the fuel, hardwood logs. And as you place the logs inside the grill, leave space between each one so the air can circulate

You need to leave yourself plenty of time to preheat this grill, a couple of hours to bring it up to temperature

First up, the romesco sauce. Romesco sauce is a sort of Catalonian salsa

It starts with red bell pepper, tomatoes, onions, garlic, grilled bread, and anura or pasilla chili

Now, I'm going to prepare the grill. Start by brushing and oiling the grill grate

Grilling time on the chili real quick, 10 to 15 seconds per side

You can see it sort of puffs up and smokes. Grill the bread until darkly brown on both sides

Keep the tomatoes and peppers turning. The idea is to blister the skins over the wood fire

And as each vegetable is browned and tender, take it off the grill

Soak the passilla chili in water to soften it

This is what it looks like And you want to cut it open and scrape out the seeds

Take the onion off the skewer and cut each onion quarter in half

I love wood-grilled vegetables. The heat brings out their sweetness. then remove the toothpicks from the garlic

and on the tomatoes you just want to scrape off if there's any burnt skin

and scrape off the stem end cut the tomato in two or three pieces

and you can cut the bread slices in quarters and finally scrape any really burnt skin off the peppers

You can leave a few little bits for color. Cut the pepper open

Scrape out any seeds. Next, place the wood-grilled vegetables and bread in the food processor

Then add toasted almonds and finely chopped flat leaf parsley

And process the mixture to a smooth paste. You just want to scrape down the bowl a couple of times

to puree all the vegetables. Next, add red wine vinegar, extra virgin olive oil, salt, and freshly ground black pepper

Now, transfer the romesco sauce to a serving bowl. and clean and oil the grill one more time and now the fun part grilling the steaks these are beautiful rib steaks each one about two inches

thick and certainly more than a pound. So lay the rib steaks on the grill, all going the same

direction. I said these were salt grilled and I meant it. On top of each rib steak, place a good

handful of sea salt. Don't be alarmed. You're not going to eat all of this salt, but it will

help give the meat a great flavor and a savory crust. Give each one a quarter turn to lay on

a crosshatch of grill marks. and while you're at it, grill the calzots, the green onions

Cooking time for the steaks is pretty quick. It's about four to six minutes per side

The way you tell when the steaks are ready to turn, you can see the blood start to curl up on the top of the steak

So at this point, you want to turn the salt grilled steak over and salt the other side

of the rib steaks the same way. And don't forget to turn the calsotes

They should be darkly brown on all sides. The calsote is grilled dirt and all

What you do is you extract the sweet, smoky onion from the dirt and the roots and dip it

in romesco sauce, which is a grilled vegetable and nut sauce. There are calcso societies and great calcso dinners where people get hideously messy in the process of eating this dish So how do you know when the rib steaks are cooked I prefer to use the poke test That is you poke the steak and by

feeling the resistance, you know the doneness. Now you have a built-in instant read meat thermometer

at the end of your arm. Make the okay sign and feel the pad of flesh at the base of your thumb

In this position, it feels soft and squishy. That corresponds to the feeling of a rare steak when poked

Move your thumb over to your middle finger. That is what a medium rare steak feels like

Move it over to your ring finger, pretty firm. That would correspond to a medium steak

Finally, over to your baby finger, hard and springy. That corresponds to a well-done steak

We do not cook steaks well done here on Primal Grill. Okay, so I think we can take the steaks off

And what you want to do with each steak is stand it up and knock off all that excess salt

salt-thrilled rib steaks with cow's oats and romesco sauce let's see how we did

and it's nice and rare the way I like it. Mmm

It's incredibly flavorful and not the least bit over-salted. Let's try the calzots

Now, in Spain, you'd eat these with your fingers. Very messy process. Mmm

Great smoky flavor from the vegetables. So there you have it. Basque salt-grilled rib steak

caltots with romesco sauce. It's an apotheosis of smoke and fire