What makes the perfect steak? Grilled or pan fried based on your preferences, this is a tricky question to answer as it all depends on your personal taste. Beef steak can be prepared as a fillet or bone-in depending on the cut. The exact choice of cattle breed, how well the cows health has been maintained by the farmer, and the way in which the meat has been cured or seasoned all has a huge bearing too. The choice of sauce, condiment or wine can have a significant effect on the experience too. Where chefs in the finest French restaurants may scoff (or even become offended) at the word ketchup being used around one of their rare cooked fillet mignons, there are plenty of us out there that love peppercorn sauce with our medium rare sirloin steak and chips. Traditionally what makes the best choice of meat comes down to the trade off between tenderness and flavour. The leanest cuts which melt in your mouth tend to be less flavourful, compared to the meat which come from the harder working muscles on the cow. Those however, are tougher to chew meaning that they either need manually softening up with a meat tenderiser (prior to cooking), or cooking in a way which allows the muscle fibres to break apart. Steaks which still include a section of bone, also tend to have more flavour to them, as the juices from the marrow permeate into the meat itself while it is cooked. Medium rare is commonly considered the best all round way to cook a steak – seared on the outside for flavour, but pink in the middle.