Steak, Baked Potato and the Sizzler Salad Bar...
A fancy meal. And a ribeye steak recipe.
I cooked Puerto Rican food on the Rachael Ray television show. Besides looking like No Face (Kaonashi) from Spirited Away because my lighting was weird and made my makeup look weird, I actually had a lot of fun doing this! I’m super grateful that I haven’t burned all my bridges and pissed everyone off enough to still have friends and colleagues who allow me these opportunities. Thank you.
SAZON IS SOLD OUT!
I just want to thank everyone that has been purchasing my sazon and adobo blends! I just got my quarterly payout and it was more luxurious that I anticipated.
770 bottles of adobo and 807 bottles of sazon were purchased from Burlap & Barrel between 10/1/2022 and 12/31/2022. It’s because of y’all contributing to this partnership that provides me with an income when times are rough, which is right now. I wish that I was doing more freelance writing. It feels like I went away for two years to write the book, came back, and everyone forgot who I was. Or, hell. Maybe I just got myself into so much trouble in those two years that finally getting the book published was the trade off. Perhaps I didn’t recognize that I was at the crossroads bargaining for my élan vital.
My goal for 2023 is to try and convince Burlap & Barrel and some supermarkets to carry my adobo and sazon. I have no idea what all of that incompasses. But, going in blind has never stopped me before.
Keep buying the seasonings, y’all!
The steak and potato go back to the turn of the century.
In 1885 it was standard for potatoes to come free with a meat order. As noted then, “An unordered boiled potato, with the skin on, is the second grand characteristic of an American dining saloon. It matters not what meal it is, the boiled potato will always appear, if the establishment is truly legitimate.”
By the early 1960s sour cream and chives were considered essential additions to baked potatoes. By that time, the favorite All-American meal was shrimp cocktail, followed by steak, baked potato with sour cream, an iceberg lettuce salad thickly coated with Thousand Island dressing, and cheesecake for dessert.
Every once in a while I’ll get a craving to have a steak. But, I never go out for it. I may go to the local boutique butcher to invest a portion of my IRA into a steak that was beer-inebriated, daily massaged and lived its life roaming the Northern California coast consuming salted grasses and endemic wildflowers. Sometimes I just go to Walmart. It really depends on the amount of lint I have in my pockets.
I treat both steaks the same. I remove the steaks from their wrapping, rub a little olive oil on the steak, sprinkle a liberal amount of sazon and rub the oil and sazon into the steak until the fat marbling takes on the sazon color. Next is an uncomfortable amount of Montreal Steak Seasoning that I pat into the steak until the course granules embed themselves into the meat like tiny sodium shrapnel. I crank the heat up (as per yoush), add a pat of butter and a little oil into the pan (flavor + high smoke point), lay the steak into the searing hot pan and partially cover with a lid to let the meat warm through, check to see if that side is brown and crusty and if it is…flip the steak. I turn off the heat and let the steak sit in the pan until I’m ready to eat. There’s something satisfying about cutting into that char-crust and piling bits of the cold lettuce leaves from my salad onto the fork with the piece of steak and eating them together.
We did not eat steak when I was a kid. I don’t remember eating a steak until I was well into my late twenties. I traveled to Paris, alone, in 2009 and one of the first meals I had was steak frites at Bouillon Chartier. Similarly with Mami, she ate her first steak in her early twenties whilst on a date at the Firehouse restaurant in Sacramento where she ordered milk as her beverage. And she ordered her steak well done because “pink” in your meat was seen (and communicated) as being raw and raw meat meant you were risking your life. As soon as anyone from my mom’s generation who lived in the states heard about botulism, any hint of pink was off the table. Mami likes her coffee and food hot, “hirviendo.” And she likes her steaks well done, “chicharron,” she tells the cooks at Benihana. She also likes her toast black! That char flavor is something that I’ve come to appreciate. She still believes in “pink meat” equating to danger and I don’t judge her for liking steaks well done or eating them with A1. It’s a belief that isn’t harming anyone, so fuck off.
Steak was and is expensive. “All countries eat more meat when their incomes grow and they have the economic wherewithal to eat more meat,"Mark Rosegrant, an economist with the International Food Policy Research Institute.
There wasn’t even an option most times to see steak on the menu of the places we frequented for special occasions when we dined out. Because most of the places were we would dine were buffets! We frequented buffets often as a family, mostly at Nana’s request. It just seemed to be more of a popular option when I was a kid. Nowadays it seems like buffets aren’t necessarily forgotten, but they’re definitely not treated as the epicenter of gastronomic adventure like I remember.
Steak was treated as a fancy fancy affair and it’s because…the shit was expensive. That’s it. It was even more expensive when chosen as your main at Sizzler; the fanciest of buffets.
Sizzler could have be reserved for the most celebratory of celebrations, such as Mother’s Day and Your-uncle-beat-the-case-and-avoided-life-in-jail type of celebration. Because not only did Sizzler offer a microscopic, but decent buffet (or, what they call a “salad bar”)…you could also order a steak dinner that came with a baked potato and the salad bar. By design.
On January 27, 1958, Del and Helen Johnson opened "Del’s Sizzler Family Steak House" in Culver City, California. A sirloin steak dinner was just $0.99. This allowed guest to enjoy a great steak dinner without spending the weekly dining allowance.
Sizzler quickly nested itself in suburban shopping centers across the United States, with most of its location centered on the west coast. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, Sizzler promoted steak and combination steak dinners with an optional salad bar. In the beginning they even had in-house meat cutters that would cut steaks and grind beef and this helped to control costs. When they saw competition from other steak buffets, they decided to expand the salad bar into a full buffet and that’s when people realized they could make a whole ass meal out of just the buffet. And they did.
I still make Mami the steak, baked potato and salad combination for her when it’s been one of those weeks where she doesn’t feel like eating anything. Something about the combo immediately gets her interested.
SAZON ENCRUSTED RIBEYE STEAK
As with almost everything I cook start with a cast iron pan. And you know how they say to start by letting your meat come to room temperature? I also don’t do that. Look, 2023 is about not being precious with our food. Just get the shit done.
12 ounce bone-in ribeye
1 tablespoon Burlap & Barrel x illyanna Maisonet Sazon
1 tablespoon Montreal Steak Seasoning
1 tablespoon of butter, unsalted or salted.
Olive oil
Rub a little olive oil on the raw steak, season with sazon and rub the seasoning into the steak. Season with Montreal Steak Seasoning and push the seasoning into the steak.
In a cast iron skillet big enough to fit your steak, over high heat, wait until your pan is smoking. Add a pat of butter and a little oil into the pan and immediately lay the steak into the searing hot pan. Partially cover with a lid to let the meat warm through, this step is optional, 5-7 minutes or until that side of the steak is brown and very crusty.
Flip the steak. Let steak sear for 3 minutes and turn off the heat. Let the steak sit in the pan, uncovered, until you’re ready to eat.
Listen, if you’re ready to eat right then and there…fucking eat right then and there. If you’re more worried about letting the steak rest because of precious juices, let that mafucka rest for 5-7 minutes.
When I’m cooking Mami’s steak to well done (165°F), I don’t bother with a thermometer because…we know when it’s dead. For me, I cook it until the the thermometer reads 140°F
Serve with a baked potato and a big salad.
Let me tell you, Sizzler salad bar was the jam when I was younger. It was cheap and I could eat a lot of food.
I have fond memories of dinner at the Sizzler near the Capitola Mall, including the toast that came with your meal, the plastic doneness stakes in the steaks, assembling my own bacon-bits coated salad - and Chicken Malibu! Thanks for writing this piece!