Porterhouse Peter Luger Style — The 137-Year-Old Brooklyn Method, Recreated in a Home Oven

Transcript

Anna Park: On a Friday night under the Williamsburg Bridge, in a small unmarked dining room with a black-and-white tile floor and a wooden bar that has not been refinished since the Truman administration, a waiter in a starched white jacket sets down a heavy black oval steakhouse platter, tilted on a chrome plate-stand at a precise fifteen-degree angle. On the platter sits a single dry-aged forty-eight-ounce porterhouse, charred mahogany-brown on the outside, rosy-pink medium-rare inside, already sliced thickly across the bone, glistening with rendered tallow and a melting cube of cold butter sliding slowly down toward the low end of the tilted platter where the juices have pooled into a glossy reservoir of pure beef. This is Peter Luger's, in business in Brooklyn since eighteen-eighty-seven. The Michelin Guide stripped it of its star in twenty-twenty. The Forbes ranking dropped it. Nobody in Brooklyn cared. There is still a six-week wait for a reservation. Tonight we walk through how to cook one of those steaks at home. I am joined by third-generation Brooklyn master butcher Tony Pellegrino from Park Slope, and New York Times restaurant critic Patricia Whitfield.

Patricia Whitfield: A brief history is essential before the technique, because the institution explains the steak. Peter Luger's opened in eighteen-eighty-seven on Broadway in Williamsburg, originally as Carl Luger's Café, Billiards, and Bowling Alley. By the nineteen-forties the place was failing, and the family put it up for auction in nineteen-fifty. The only bidder was a Brooklyn restaurant supplier named Sol Forman, who bought it for thirty-five-thousand dollars, primarily because his factory was across the street and he wanted a guaranteed lunch spot for his employees. Sol's wife Marsha trained as the buyer at the Fourteenth Street Wholesale Meat Market and personally hand-selected every USDA Prime short-loin section delivered to the restaurant for the next forty years. They charged in cash, kept the menu obsessively narrow, refused credit cards until two-thousand-eighteen, and built one of the most enduring brand-equity stories in American restaurant history. The most-ordered dish for one hundred and thirty-seven years has been the porterhouse for two.

Tony Pellegrino: Awright, listen, lemme tell yuh about the cut, because if the cut is wrong, fuhgeddaboudit, the rest don't mattah. The porterhouse — yuh know what it is — is the king cut from the rear of the short loin, the porterhouse contains both the New York strip on one side of the T-bone and a substantial filet mignon on the other, which is what makes it a porterhouse and not a regular T-bone. By federal USDA spec, the filet portion has gotta be at least one-and-a-quarter inches across at the widest point, otherwise it's just a T-bone, kid. For two people, yuh want at least a forty-eight-ounce porterhouse, three pounds, two-and-a-half to three inches thick, c'mon, this is the Luger-style, no thinner. USDA Prime grade, marbling score moderately abundant or higher, the top two percent of all American beef. And dry-aged thirty to forty-five days minimum, twenty-eight at the very least. Dry-aging at thirty-four degrees Fahrenheit, eighty-five percent humidity, breaks down muscle proteins and concentrates flavour. Without the aging, you got a steak. With it, you got a Luger steak. I'm tellin' yuh.

Tony Pellegrino: Now the prep, listen close. Take the porterhouse out of the refrigerator one full hour before cooking, c'mon, this is non-negotiable — a cold steak from forty degrees Fahrenheit will not sear properly, the surface protein needs to come up to room temp around sixty-five Fahrenheit. Pat the steak completely dry with paper towels, both sides and the edges, fat cap and all — moisture on the surface is the number one enemy of a good crust, take it from me. Now season heavy with coarse Diamond Crystal kosher salt only — about three teaspoons total, sprinkled high from twelve inches above the steak so it falls evenly. Salt only. No pepper. No garlic powder. No olive oil. No marinade. No nothin'. Pepper burns under a high broiler at eight-hundred Fahrenheit, turns bitter. Garlic burns. Oil smokes. The Luger philosophy is: the dry-aged Prime beef and the fire are the show. Yuh add nothin'. Let the salted steak sit on a wire rack for thirty minutes more before cooking — surface dries even further, that is the magic dry surface for a perfect Maillard crust. Fuhgeddaboudit. Ready.

Tony Pellegrino: Now the broiler science, this is the most important part because you don't have a Peter Luger broiler at home. Their custom overhead salamander broiler runs at eight-hundred to eight-hundred-fifty Fahrenheit, which is hotter than any home oven. To replicate it at home, the trick is two heat sources stacked. Number one — preheat your home oven to five-hundred Fahrenheit, the maximum, with a heavy twelve-inch cast-iron pan or a heavy steel sheet pan inside, for thirty full minutes. Yuh hear me, kid, thirty minutes. The pan needs to come up to at least four-hundred-fifty Fahrenheit on the surface. Number two — five minutes before cooking, switch your oven to BROIL on high, position your top oven rack four to six inches below the top broiler element. Now your home oven approximates Luger's heat — radiant five-hundred-Fahrenheit-plus from above, four-hundred-fifty-degree contact heat from below. Do not skip the cast-iron preheat. C'mon. The preheat is everything.

Tony Pellegrino: Now we cook. Pull the screaming hot cast iron out wearing a heavy oven mitt — this pan is at five-hundred Fahrenheit and it will burn yuh, take it from me. Place steak gently in the pan — yuh hear that scream? That's the sear, that's good. Sear two minutes total, no peeking, no moving. Then transfer the entire pan back to the top rack under the broiler for four minutes. Pull it out, flip the steak using long-handled tongs, and broil the other side four to five more minutes. Now check internal temperature with an instant-read thermometer through the side, deepest in the strip-side meat — pull at one-hundred-twenty Fahrenheit for rare, one-hundred-twenty-five Fahrenheit for medium-rare, the way Luger serves it. The temperature will rise five to seven degrees during rest. Do not overshoot. Remove from broiler. Now the magic finish — drop two tablespoons of cold cultured butter on top of the steak, return to broiler for sixty seconds — the butter melts, browns to a deep amber, and bastes the surface in nutty rendered fat. Pull. Mamma mia, beautiful.

Tony Pellegrino: Now the rest and the platter, this is the final move, c'mon. Transfer the steak immediately to a heavy metal serving platter, ideally an oval steakhouse platter, that has been preheated in the warm oven for twenty minutes — yuh wanna keep it warm but not still cooking. Tilt the platter at fifteen degrees on a small chrome plate-stand or even a folded oven mitt, propped at one end. Rest the steak ten full minutes — yuh hear me, kid, ten minutes — the rendered tallow and beef juices will pool to the low end of the tilted platter, which is exactly the Luger presentation. After ten minutes, slice the steak across the bone in thick three-quarter-inch pieces, separating the strip side from the filet side, then arrange the slices fanned across the T-bone on the same platter. Drizzle the pooled tallow at the low end back over the slices. Crack a generous amount of fresh black pepper over the top now, never before. Serve immediately while the platter is still warm. Bellissimo. That is a Luger porterhouse.

Patricia Whitfield: And the sides matter as much as the steak. Peter Luger's sides menu has not meaningfully changed since nineteen-fifty. The opening course at every table is the famous thick-cut bacon — three slices per person, three-quarters of an inch thick, broiled briefly under the same eight-hundred-Fahrenheit overhead broiler. Then comes the iceberg-and-tomato salad with their proprietary Luger Steak Sauce — a sweet-tangy ketchup-and-horseradish-based sauce that the Forman family has bottled and sold since nineteen-forty. The two canonical sides ordered with the porterhouse are the German fried potatoes — boiled Yukon Gold potatoes broken roughly into chunks and pan-fried in beef tallow until deep golden-brown — and the creamed spinach, made with heavy cream, butter, garlic, and nutmeg. Order schlag, the unsweetened whipped cream, and slivered chocolate gold-coins for dessert. Drink a Cabernet Sauvignon from California or Bordeaux. The total bill for two with wine at the restaurant runs roughly two-hundred-eighty dollars before tax. The home version, with one good dry-aged porterhouse from a Brooklyn or Lower East Side butcher, runs about ninety dollars and is honestly ninety-five percent of the way there.

Anna Park: Three takeaways. First, the porterhouse cut itself does most of the work — USDA Prime grade with a federally compliant filet section at least one-and-a-quarter inches across, three pounds and two-and-a-half inches thick for two people, and dry-aged thirty to forty-five days at thirty-four Fahrenheit — these specifications are non-negotiable. Second, the home-oven adaptation of Peter Luger's eight-hundred-degree salamander is the cast-iron-plus-broiler stack: thirty-minute preheat at five-hundred Fahrenheit with a heavy cast-iron pan, then switch to broil-high four to six inches below the top element, sear two minutes in the pan, broil four minutes per side, finish with cold butter and a final sixty-second broil — pull the steak at one-hundred-twenty-five Fahrenheit for true Luger medium-rare. Third, the tilted steakhouse platter rested ten minutes, the pooled tallow drizzled back over the sliced meat across the bone, no pepper or anything else before cooking, served with creamed spinach, German fried potatoes, and a glass of California Cabernet — that is the Luger way. Salt, fire, dry-aged Prime beef, and patience. Thank you, Tony. Thank you, Patricia. Until next time.