Kendra Makes Skillet Cheesesteak

This is the best bite.

This is all I want, really.

It's like the top of a pizza.

[upbeat music]

So today we're going to be making a skillet cheese steak

with broccoli rabe, and pickled peppers.

This is definitely not a traditional cheese steak

because it's in the skillet and not on bread.

You've got this broccoli rabe garlic, pickled pepper base,

this shingled steak over the top.

And then we're gonna grate some Pepper Jack,

my favorite cheese, over the top of that.

Everything melts over in this like gorgeous blanket

to cover your meat.

Okay, so we're gonna prep all of our ingredients first

because once we get to the stove,

it's kind of like flash, boom, bam,

you wanna have everything ready.

So, first thing is we're gonna roughly chop

our broccoli rabe.

This looks like a lot.

This is one bunch,

but it's really gonna wilt down in the pan.

The stems we're including.

if you don't include it,

you're really wasting a key part of the vegetable.

Broccoli rabe is a little bit bitter,

so it's a really good foil for these bright flavors,

the cheesy flavors,

It's really nice, sort of like anchor

to all those other ingredients in the dish.

So these are peppadews.

They are like a sweet briny pepper.

You can find them jarred or like sometimes in the olive bar

at a grocery store.

And they're gonna just provide

like a really nice briny, bright bit,

and also pop a little red.

We're leaving the seeds in and everything.

These are just mostly sweet and picky flavored, not hot.

And then the next thing we're gonna do after these peppers,

is just thinly slice some garlic.

Dealer's choice how much garlic you wanna add here.

If you're a garlic girl and you wanna do

like five or six cloves, live your life.

I'm not here to judge you.

So when you're slicing garlic,

you can start on like whatever side you want.

Then after a couple slices,

you will have created a nice flat edge

and that's much easier to cut again.

So just turn it so that the flat edge

is down on your cutting board,

and that's easier for you to hold it steady

while you can continue to cut through.

And then the last thing we're gonna do at this stage

is season our steak.

This is a strip steak.

You can see it has this really nice fat cap,

which we're gonna render out in the pan.

I think beef is a special occasion food.

Obviously, it's luxurious, it's rich, it's not inexpensive,

especially if you're buying from a butcher

that prioritizes sustainability.

So for me, every time that I have a steak,

which I try to make few and far between,

I really want it to be special.

I really want it to be worth it

and to me, this dish really does that.

It really highlights the steak in a right way, I think,

and makes it worthy of like you're once in a blue moon

beef consumption moment, in my opinion.

So we're just gonna liberally season this bad boy

with salt and pepper on all sides.

And then instead of heating oil in the pan,

we are gonna oil the steak itself.

The steak, obviously, as I mentioned, has a bunch of fat.

So you don't need to be adding a lot of fat to the pan,

but you do need like a little bit to get things going.

So I'm just going to add a table spoon to the steak here

and rub it kind of across all sides.

All right, we're ready to hit the pan.

[laughs] Here we go.

[steak simmers]

So you wanna use a pan

that can go from your stove to the oven

because we are gonna put it under the broiler after,

and this is a cast iron skillet.

It looks like too small for all that broccoli rabe,

but again, the broccoli rabe's gonna cook down just fine.

And you wanna give it an extra minute to heat up

because cast iron takes its sweet time.

I just don't have any feeling in my fingers anymore

so I can be like, it's fine.

[steak sizzling]

Yeah, nice sizzle.

Okay, so we're really going for like rare steak here.

Like rare, rare,

something that you would not normally eat.

And that's because we're gonna cut this steak up,

shingle it over vegetables,

and then throw it under the broiler

where it will finish cooking.

If you cook to your perfect degree of doneness here

and then you put it under the broiler,

you're gonna hammer it.

It's gonna be totally overdone.

This will take, I mean, it really depends

on the size of your steak, like four to seven minutes total,

but the majority of that time can be spent

with the fat cap facing down in the pan.

This is the moment to turn on your hood fan,

if you have one, open a window

I can't do this in my apartment.

All I ever do is set the fire alarm off.

You can see it's getting nice and crispy.

That's what you want.

All right, we're gonna go like one more minute

and then we're gonna pull it.

All right.

Delightful.

Now we've got our fat here.

You want about two tablespoons worth.

It's so great, you're using all the pieces.

Also, it's so flavorful,

so much more flavorful than olive oil or vegetable oil is

and you're really imbuing the other parts of your dish

with the flavor of the meat.

If your steak wasn't super fatty

and you didn't render out a bunch of it,

you can just add as much olive oil as you need

to get to about two tablespoons in the pan.

Okay, so we reduced our heat a little bit

'cause it's pretty hot in this pan.

And we're just gonna add our garlic

just for a couple seconds to it going,

and then we're gonna add all of our broccoli rabe.

This one the garlic starts to go

a little bit golden at the edges.

[broccoli simmers]

I like to add about half and then fold it

so that you get that garlic off the bottom.

I'm not gonna lie to you, we crowded, but that's okay.

It's gonna be it perfect once it's all nice and wilted.

You don't wanna like meager looking greens

at the bottom of your pan.

So now we're gonna add a little bit of water

and that's just gonna help steam

these thicker, more fibrous parts of the stem.

A lot of times people will like blanch their broccoli rabe

in boiling water before they saute it,

and this is kind of like combining those two steps into one.

I think there's like a lot to love in bitter vegetables.

And especially if you know what to make it not so bitter

then it will feel like less like,

oh my God, what am I eating?

And more like a sort of balanced part of your dish.

Not that I ever feel that way about broccoli rabe.

I could eat it plain.

All right, so we're gonna turn our heat off

and then we're just gonna stir in our pickled peppers,

and then a little bit of lemon zest.

Just a little more salt to that.

We are gonna move back to the station and slice our steak.

I'm just creating a nice bed for our steak to land on.

Now we're gonna slice our steak,

and you wanna go like quarter inch

to third inch thick pieces against the grain.

You can definitely start your steak on the stove

and finish it in the oven.

That's like a very common cooking technique for steak,

but we're slicing ours first

because that way it's really easy to eat,

it's really easy to share.

And also we wanna get this cheese

on as much of the steak as possible,

and you want like maximum cheese per meat bite.

Now we're gonna shingle,

and that is just a fancy word for lay the steak in the pan.

Just lay each of your pieces out like slightly overlapping,

but you can kind of like go like woo, woo, woo.

Okay, gorge!

[sighs] Pretty!

All right, Pepper Jack time.

I love Pepper Jack so much.

I think it's an underrated cheese.

I think we should always be using Pepper Jack.

The is Cabot, and I love Cabot.

I don't think we have it in California,

so I didn't grow up with it.

And then when I moved to New York, someone was like,

Will you bring me the Cabot?

And I was like, I don't know what that means,

but now I have seen the light and I am a Cabot aficionado.

And will give you that like gorgeous browning bubbling

sort of like blistered look after we put it in the broiler,

which is what you want.

Like the garlic, amount of cheese here is kind of like

choose your own adventure.

You don't wanna like create a solid blanket

'cause then you're kind of like, when you're serving it,

you'll be cutting through this very solid blanket of cheese,

which is not as enjoyable.

So you try to be like a little bit sprinkly.

And then I'm gonna tuck some in between,

some of those slices too, just because why not?

Hide some cheese down there for myself later,

and now we're gonna throw this in the broiler.

This is not the moment to like walk away, read an email,

because the broiler is gonna cook this really quickly.

Keep an eye on it.

Like literally like two minutes and it'll be done.

Depending on the strength of your boiler,

it might be less time, it might be a little bit more.

The other thing is we have our rack kind of high up

and that's another way that's gonna speed up

your broiler process.

The closer that your rack is to the broiler,

to the heat source,

the faster this cheese is gonna melt,

everything's gonna cook, et cetera.

The farther down, the opposite, the longer it's gonna take.

All right.

Bye.

I'm not going anywhere because it's gonna happen quick.

Okay.

So we're at like lunchable pizza, melty cheese stage.

You know where like you can still see the shape

of the string of cheese, but it's soft,

that's where we're at.

So we need a little moment longer.

All right, we're like golden,

but I wanna get us to golden brown.

We're bubbling and brown and golden.

Gorgeous.

Look at that.

Yum. Gorgeous!

We've got like the melty cheese bits

and then the super crispy cheese bits.

It's like, you wanna scoop into this

and you see now with the slices,

it's just so easy to share this.

You can put this pan straight from the stove to the oven,

straight from the oven to the table

and people can serve themselves.

Really easy and truly one pan dish I dirtied, nothing else,

which is a delight.

And we're just gonna finish it

with a little bit of lemon juice

and I'm gonna concentrate my juicing on the vegetables.

And there you have it.

This is our skillet cheese steak with broccoli rabe

and pickled peppers.

Sorry to whoever I'm sharing this with,

but I stole all the good pieces,

which are the ones where the broccoli rabe

and the peppers are like stuck together with cheese.

Can I eat this now?

Am I allowed?

Okay, great.

It's tender, it's juicy,

extra so because it's sitting in all these gorgeous juices,

and the vegetables are perfectly done.

Not limp and soggy, but just tender enough

that there's a little bit of a bite still in them

because you like tuck some of that cheese

underneath the steak.

You really have like all these awesome pockets

that you're not expecting.

So when you're scooping it out, you're like, oh, Eureka!

A little pot of cheese.

And that is a great thing to find.

If you are do a steak moment

and you want something that's quick and easy,

but really flavorful,

I think this is absolutely the move.

[calm upbeat music]

[indistinct]

Zee?

Yeah. Hi, Zee.

[Zee] Hi.

[Man] Woo!

[indistinct]

Woo! [laughs]