Kimchi Blue Cheese Strip Steak
Kimchi Blue Cheese Strip Steak sears strip steaks and tops them with a bold compound butter of sautéed kimchi, blue cheese, and sesame oil.
Kimchi and blue cheese sound like two people you would avoid seating next to each other at Thanksgiving, which is exactly why they work on a strip steak. Both are funky, salty, and assertive, but in completely different directions. The steak brings enough beef and fat to keep the whole thing from turning into a shouting match. Start by cooking the chopped kimchi in a dry skillet for three to four minutes. Squeezing and cooking out that excess moisture is important; wet kimchi mixed straight into softened butter gives you something closer to a dairy puddle than a compound butter. Once cooled, it gets folded with blue cheese, toasted sesame oil, and scallion. That mixture is potent, so the steaks themselves need nothing beyond kosher salt, black pepper, and a hard sear in neutral oil.
Cook the New York strips to 125–135°F depending on the doneness you want, then rest them for eight minutes before the butter goes on. The heat softens the blue cheese and butter while the kimchi keeps a little chew and acidity. You get seared beef, fermented tang, sesame, creamy funk, and enough contrast in one bite to make plain steak butter seem like it has stopped trying.
