If you love smoky-tasting meat (and have the patience to build a fire): Finish your steak on a charcoal grill—preferably with hardwood lump charcoal. We seared ours over mesquite lump, which burns clean, produces a lovely aroma, and allowed the grill grates to hit a 700 °F surface temperature. At that temp, the steak acquired a beautiful crust (complete with pronounced grill marks) in just three minutes, including a full minute we spent searing the fatty edges. The flavor was wonderfully smoky, and this method also produced the skinniest gray ring of all thanks to its especially brief contact time. The big downside here, of course, is that you have to plan ahead to build a fire before searing, which can take up to an hour. But, hey, if your steak is going to cook for a couple of hours, that’s plenty of time for you to get the coals going. It can also feel wasteful to build a whole fire just to sear a few steaks—not to mention make you question whether you should’ve just cooked them on the fire to start with—but in my opinion, it’s a great excuse to grill more stuff. Take it from me: If you’re not grilling some asparagus, onions, peppers, or cabbage (yes, cabbage) to go with your steak, you’re doing it wrong. You can, of course, use a propane grill, if that’s what you own or prefer; in that case, you won’t have to spend time building a fire, but you won’t get the same smoky finish.
