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Welcome to the Art of the Drink my name is Anthony Caporale and this week we are doing a special grilling out episode for Labor Day. I went ahead and invited some of my good friends over for dinner. I have Kate over here, hi Kate. Claire on my left, hi and Valerie and we are to be going ahead in making a steak and I am using Master Distiller Dave pickerels recipe from the Makers Mark Distillery in Loreto Kentucky so let us go ahead and get started all right?

I am actually going to make a marinade first and I am going to use as a base Makers Mark Bourbon. I am going to use about two cups of Makers Mark Bourbon. I went ahead and got a nice about two and a half pound London Broil. You want to do this in advance all right. You want to have this marinated at least overnight. When I do start is put about two cups of Makers Mark in the bowl and you could smell that already and then I will add about half a cup of orange juice and then about half a cup of honey which is going to sweeten this up. Now I am going to finish off my liquid ingredient with the juices of two fresh limes. Okay, so now I am going to put in about a tablespoon of crushed red pepper, I am going to put in the zest of one whole lime and the zest is the outer green part of the lime, that is where actually of the lime flavor is, you can throw that in there. I took one white onion and I sliced it into rings, I am going to throw that in and last but not certainly not least is, about two tablespoons, two good heaping tablespoons of garlic, minced garlic. Okay, so now I will stir this up, I like to do this in a zip lock bag so, in a nice big like a one-gallon zip lock bag, go ahead and throw your steak in there, not too bad right? So all of this goes into your zip lock bag and you want to get as much air out as if it is you can and then seal it.

Here we have a London Broil that has been marinated over night and it is time to grill out. Couple of things when you are grilling, I always like to when I am doing steak. I like to start everything on high. Cook on high and that is going to sear the steak and it is going to seal all the juices in so I have my grill-cranked way up high and I will go ahead and put this on and you can smell that. That is some extra onions in here so I will just lay those on top. You could see there is not nearly as much liquid in here as there was on the bag. I actually took the liquid out and we are going the use liquid to make a little bit of sauce for this. The key with doing a good steak as I said you want to start it on high, once it has seared you want to turn it down to medium and then cook on that side you are only going to turn that once. This is just about ready to flip and the way you can tell is it is starting to sizzle around the edges and you are getting some juices coming up to the top and that usually means it is about ready to flip. If you want to go for a medium rare, which is to me the only way to cook steak so I will just go ahead and turn this and you can see as I turn, you can see the juices that are coming out of the top and that is how you know that it is ready to turn. It has some nice grill marks on there and I am going to let this sit but what I am going to do is move it to this side of the grill because I have some stuff that I want to do over here. I want to start making the sauce for this and I am going to make the sauce out of the remains of the marinade. I will do it right on the grill.

What I have in here, this is all the liquid from the marinade and I am going ahead and just season it up just a bit with some salt and then a little bit of fresh ground pepper and I always like to use fresh ground pepper, makes a big difference. Stir that up and I am going to take this and put this right on the grill on high. What I want to do here is break this to a boil and when you boil it, what you are actually doing is you are evaporating the water out of it so that concentrates it and reduces it.

Okay, so while waiting for the steak to cook, this is our Art of the Drink so I will go ahead and make Makers Mark Lemonade perfect for the deck. We are going to do this in pitcher, which we have never done a drink on a pitcher before but we are sitting on a deck and I am not going to make individuals drinks. We do not want to make individual drinks at barbecues. I am going to start with about four ounces of Makers Mark and then have some fresh mint and what I want to do is I want to bruise the mint so that the oils can come out. I will just take the mint, and just kind of bruise it in my hands and then drop that in and I will do two good sprigs of mint and this is one fresh lime that I have just cut up into nice thin slices. Go ahead and put that in as well. Top this whole thing off with a good quality fresh lemonade, stir it around a little bit, let that stiff for about thirty minutes and it should be just about perfect for when the steak comes off the grill.

Our sauce is starting to boil, it is reducing really nice. I want to go ahead and thicken it up though and what I am going to do is, put some cornstarch in there. Now when you use cornstarch as a thickener if you just take the cornstarch and sprinkle it in you are going to end up with crumbs, so you want to dissolve it in some water first which is what I did. Now the other thing that will give you crumby gravy is if you go ahead and put this in the sauce while it is on heat. You always want to take it off the heat first and then put the cornstarch in and I put it back and once this now comes to a boil, the cornstarch will thicken it and you will end up with a nice sauce.

Now the other question I always get is how do you know what temperature the steak is at? So a lot of people will cut the steak and that is actually the worst thing to do, if you cut the steak all the juices are going to run out and you are going to end up with a dry steak no matter how well you cooked it. The other thing that we have is meat thermometers and that is also punctures the steak. The key to grilling well is to never break the outer seal of the meat, which is what I have created when I turn the heat up high. You want it to sear it and that sear and that seals the meat so all the juices stay inside, so anything that you do after that until you actually cut it to eat you do not want to break that seal. So how do you tell what temperature the steak is at? Well there is a neat little trick that chefs use, this fleshy area between your thumb and your first finger, nice and soft, there is a muscle right here. If you completely relax your hand and you touch that, that is actually, what raw steak feels like and you will see chefs poke the meat and that is what they are feeling for. They are checking for doneness, so that is raw if you take your fingers and just lightly put them together that is just going to put enough tension on that muscle and you push on that, that is going to medium and if you push them together as hard as you possibly can, that is well done. Okay, and that is what a chef will do so that is kind of like just your--you always have it with you right? I can actually kind of tell with just by the thongs, pressing the thongs that I can tell that this pork part over here is a little bit less done right here. I am probably looking at about medium to medium well and right here it should be about mid rare so I have a couple temperatures in there and for different guess, so I will move ahead and take this off the grill now.

I just took the London Broil off the grill and this is another common mistake that people make, they cut into it right away, you do not want to do that, you want to let the meat rest. This is especially important with red meat and what you are doing is, when it is cooking, the temperature of the meat is actually rising. The high temperature inside the steak is trying to force all of the fluids out of the steak. You want to even it. Exactly so what you want to do is you want to allow that steak to now start to cool down just a little bit and then the liquids are going to go back into the meat and now when you cut it you are going to get a nice juicy piece of meat. Instead of the first cu