The “recipe” for cooking a steak is so simple, it’s hardly worth writing. Season. Sear. Rest. Serve. Within that framework lies an infinity of variation.

Cooking steaks well takes experience and an almost instinctive understanding of what’s going on inside the steak as it’s cooked. Everyone’s approach is different, but for me there’s a very clear picture in my head of what’s going on at the core of the meat. Does it take years of cooking to develop this? Well, no. But it does take a bit of commitment, some effort and organisation.

What follows is a brief course in steak cookery, in which you’ll cook five similar steaks in five different ways. All the steaks will taste good, but some will taste better to you than the others. This will help you develop your own mental model of what’s going on. By the time you’ve cooked all five steaks, calmly and scientifically, you should have a much more developed grasp of what’s happening inside. This should enable you to cook pretty much any steak to your own degree of perfection.