Tonight I decided to try something I have seen on Pinterest many times but had never made it for some reason: Sheet Pan Steak.
Since this was the first time I have ever made this (and I’m not a professional chef :P), it did not go as smooth as I had hoped. I had read many recipes regarding this idea so I just made up my own way of doing it. I learned that all broilers are not made equal…
I must warn you now; This post is a little longer than my other ones because there was a learning curve for me. I hope that someone else learns something from this just like I did!
Aldi had ribeye on sale this week so that is the cut I used. After researching lots of recipes I realized that most of them called for flank steak or flat iron steak, but I wasn’t really going to adhere to a specific recipe anyway. I figured, what’s the big deal?
The first thing I did was cut up my large red potatoes into smaller pieces and parboiled them about 10 minutes. I figured that this would get the cooking process going so that everything could really cook together on the pan.
My vegetable of choice was broccoli. I cut this up while the potatoes boiled and tossed them together with lemon juice, garlic, olive oil and a little bit of salt. I also shared some of the scraps with my broccoli beggars.
Once the potatoes were done enough to just be able to stick a fork in them a bit I drained them and tossed them with olive oil, rosemary, salt and seasoned pepper.
I laid both of them onto an olive oil rubbed sheet pan and roasted them at 425 degrees for 10 minutes, tossing them again at the 5-minute mark.
Meanwhile; I seasoned the steaks with a little salt and pepper and some Smokehouse Rub from The Tea & Spice Exchange. (If you have never checked one of their stores out I suggest you do so. Just walking in and getting hit with the smell of spices makes you feel inspired to cook something!)
Once the broccoli and potatoes were mostly done I put the steaks between them and turned the broiler on low.
Now, this was where my mistakes were made. I have one of the double ovens where the top oven in much smaller than the bottom, but it still has a broiler setting called “speed broil”. I don’t use the broiler on my top oven often. The only thing I really use it for is to brown cheese that is on top of something I’m making. I had already been using it to bake everything so I decided to use it for this purpose as well.
Through my recipe research, I had read most people had said to broil around 5 minutes per side of the steak for medium rare. I set the “speed broiler” to low and did exactly that and tossed the veggies when flipping the steak. Let me tell you; If you like RARE steak then you would have been happy with the result. We were going for somewhere between medium-rare and medium with crunchy crispy edges. There was not a crispy part on that steak.
This is when I decided to put it back in just to peer into the oven window to see exactly what was going on. Not much was happening… low means LOW on that broiler.
I took the broccoli off of the pan because I noticed that it was starting to look a little overdone and turned the broiler up to high. At this point, I was getting my squats in for the day by looking into the oven window. If I may add, this is not easy to do when you are about 8 months pregnant.
Putting it on high was what I should have done all along! Things were really cooking now! See what I did there? 😉
Once I flipped the steak over I put the broccoli back on the pan to crisp up again. The house smelled AMAZING!
The steak had nice crispy spots and the potatoes browned perfectly. Why hadn’t I figured this out earlier?!
The steak was juicy and the flavor was delicious, but since I had it in and out of the oven so much it was more done than we usually like it. It was still juicy and we couldn’t stop eating it though! Now I know for next time!
I am excited to try this again now that I know my oven better. I’m sure it will be in the near future and I will update this post with the final recipe.
In the meantime, please let me know what your favorite sheet pan dinners are. I would love to try some different combinations.
