While sugar steak is Bastien’s Restaurant’s signature menu item and its claim to fame, you don’t need to travel to Denver, Colorado, to enjoy it. The recipe for your rub might not be exactly the same as Bastien’s, which describes itself as “home of the sugar steak,” but there are a few copycat contenders. And, all that’s required is sugar, salt, and a quality ribeye.
There are a few recipes that claim you can use any cut for sugar steak, but most agree that you want a piece that’s fairly well-marbled. As well as adding flavor (because fat is flavor), the fat will contribute to the caramelization process and keep the meat moist and tender.
The menu at Bastien’s asks diners to select between a ribeye or New York strip for its signature, sugary rub. The restaurant knows a lean cut such as filet mignon will not produce the browning and caramelization needed for its best sugar steak.
Why sugar?
Although it might seem counterintuitive to add sugar to a savory steak, sugar does more than make life a little sweeter. Sugar can make foods more palatable, interacting with other ingredients to make flavors less bitter, spicy, or sour — consider how adding sugar to tomato sauce is not a food crime and can sharply decrease its excess acidity. More importantly, in the case of sugar steak, the sugar rub aids the Maillard reaction, that seemingly magical chemical reaction between amino acids and sugar that browns food and boosts flavor. Recipes for sugar steak rubs are often as simple as salt and sugar in a 3:4 ratio respectively, with the salt acting to balance out the sweetness in the sugar. For a little sweet and spicy, other recipes will include red chili powder, onion and garlic powders, and cayenne pepper.
Feel free to mix and match, even replacing or adding brown sugar into the mix to create your own sugar steak rub. It’s also beneficial to let the steak sit in the rub for anywhere from a couple of hours to overnight, allowing the flavors to penetrate through processes called osmosis and diffusion. Osmosis is when a solution moves through a semipermeable membrane. When meat is salted, water will be drawn out of the protein cells, but if left long enough, the salty/sweet water will be brought back in through diffusion, where molecules move back through the membrane, evenly distributing the solution across cells i.e. spreading the dry rub seasonings throughout your steak.
