Cooking meat fuels Guga Tosta's fire – and the Brazilian-American chef's millions of fans can't get enough of watching him do it on YouTube.
"I love making videos, I love the interaction with my audience. I love that they're asking me to do these crazy experiments," he tells Kathryn Ryan.
Gustavo ‘Guga’ Tosta Photo: Penguin Books New Zealand
There are many different ways to cook a steak properly, Guga says, but his "most foolproof" methods are reverse searing – if you're low on time – and direct searing.
How to reverse-sear a steak:
"First, go ahead and season your steak perfectly. Once it's perfectly seasoned, put it on the barbecue in indirect heat - that means not right over the fire - and make sure your grill is at about 250F (121C). Cover it up and let that steak come to temperature – about 125F (52C). Take the steak out, dry the steak really, really nice as much as possible, and crank up the heat crank up as much as you can ... The steak is already fully cooked. We don't want to overcook the steak. But because you cooked it in indirect heat, it's going to have this greyish appearance on the steak and it's not going to look that great. So we're gonna go ahead and sear the steak until it looks good. When it looks good, it's time to take it off. Let the steak rest for about two to three minutes. As the steak is resting, grab a little bit of butter and just put it right on top and let that melt. I'm telling you right now it's going to be a fantastic steak. Now, here's the deal. This takes a little bit longer because you've got to wait for the steak to come to temperature, I would say a reverse-sear steak like this will take anywhere between 25 minutes to 45 minutes, depending on the thickness."
How to direct-sear a steak:
"The first thing you want to do is season the steak nicely with salt and pepper and garlic powder. Once that's done, then you want to crank up the heat as much as possible and put a sear on it as fast as you can. It's very important for you to have your grill hot because if it's not hot enough then you might end up overcooking the steak. Once you get the sear and it looks exactly the way you want it, you want a thermometer. Check the temperature and see where you're at. 90% of the time, depending on the thickness of the steak, it might be already perfectly cooked. You are looking for 135F (57C) final temperature. If it's not at that temperature by the time you're done searing then you want to cook it in indirect heat until the interior reaches that temperature. Let it rest, slice your steak and enjoy."
The sous vide method of cooking steak – which involves vacuum-sealing food in a bag and then cooking it gently in water – is "bulletproof" and impossible to mess up, Guga says.
"With sous vide, there's no variation. It's the same exact steak every single time you cook and it's perfect every single time. So it's literally bullet-proven. There's no way it is impossible for you to mess up. That's why I love it."
Dry-ageing – in which meat is dried in an environment where humidity and temperature are completely controlled – creates a better overall steak, Guga says.
"Whenever you're letting something dry, it immediately removes all of the moisture of the steak, and it allows the steak to concentrate its flavour."
With chicken, dry-ageing can too easily take you to "funkytown", Guga says. He recommends butter-ageing.
"It doesn't allow any of the flavour, the moisture to evaporate ... It's basically very similar to if you vacuum-seal your chicken and you put it inside of your refrigerator, it's good to go. But butter obviously makes it better because you develop an additional type of flavour and so forth. It makes the chicken better."
When it comes to cooking steak on a grill, butter is king, Guga says, but milk powder is a great substitute that creates the "exact same" flavour.
If you put a little bit of baby milk powder on your steak, it will literally give that creaminess of the steak itself, it actually gets a better crust on the steak. And it just turns out fantastic ... Luckily everyone that ever tries has the same exact results that I had, which is actually fantastic.
As a side, Guga likes to serve smoked mac and cheese made in a smoker. (find his recipe here).
"It's going to turn out fantastic. Use different types of cheeses, whichever cheeses you like. Another way that you can achieve smokiness through your mac and cheese is by having smoked cheese on it … and different smoked cheese will give different flavours and so forth."
Guga, who spent his early childhood in a very small Brazilian farming town, says that he's "always been around beef".
"I used to tell my uncle all the time 'If we don't eat beef, it's literally not considered a meal, we're just like having a snack'. Even if there were other proteins such as chicken or fish, it didn't matter to me. We really had to have beef."
Later, Guga's family immigrated to the US and he worked as a web designer.
Gustavo ‘Guga’ Tosta Photo: Penguin Books New Zealand
Then, around eight years ago, Guga realised taking colleagues and clients out to eat at the expensive Brazilian steakhouses he loved didn't make financial sense.
"I said 'wait a second – I love to cook. I can cook in my office."
Unable to use fire at the office, though, he got the idea of cooking steaks via a then-little-known method of sous vide.
His cousin recorded the experiment, they posted the video on YouTube and it got 20,000 views in 24 hours.
"I was like 'Wait a second, people actually enjoy watching my videos? And then they asked me for more. Can you do another steak, a different type of steak? So I kept my web design business and kept doing these videos because my audience was constantly requesting me different things."
Making videos for his YouTube channel Guga Foods, Guga says he's "constantly learning".
"Every time I do an experiment, if it's a good one, or if it's a bad one, we always learn something no matter what. So it's always inspiring to me."
Guga Tosta is the author of Breaking the Barbecue Rules.
