Make Your Next Tomahawk Steak Like Marcus Samuelsson With This Boozy Butter

Tomahawk steak isn't something you eat every day. It tends to be quite large, a bit expensive, and relatively hard to find — but super tasty, according to those who've taken the plentiful plunge. As an infrequently served specialty cut, tomahawk perfection can be challenging for home-kitchen chefs and grill-meisters. Fortunately, we spoke to Marcus Samuelsson at his restaurant Marcus at Baha Mar during the Bahamas Culinary & Arts Festival, where he shared an intriguing approach to cooking tomahawk steaks, namely by infusing the meat with a boozy ingredient.

Samuelsson serves the tomahawks at his own establishment along with cornbread with spiced rum butter — and therein lies the secret. It's all about the rum and the boozy butter you can create. This chef notes that the tomahawk "would be perfect with a little rum butter," which will add masterfully to the flavor, and he walks us through the process.

"Let's say we have shallots in the rum butter," the chef explains. "We chop that down, and then we deglaze the pan with rum. We deglaze that, then we let that cool, and mix it with butter." When using your rum butter on a tomahawk steak, you could also add a little marrow to it as well. Then, grill the tomahawk and let it rest. "Finishing with that rum butter on top, deglazing, and then a little bit on top, yet you get those umami flavors in there that are high notes of rum, but also the marrow and everything."

Samuelsson offers more insight into how rum works in butters and sauces. "We use rum a lot when we deglaze in a pan, when we do a nice little sauce," he explains, noting how alcohol, plus tobacco notes, adds flavor to the sauce. That, in turn, influences his version of rum butter. Though an award-winning chef, restaurateur, author, and television personality, Samuelsson often shares insights with everyday cooks. You can glean more from his 11 best cooking tips for home chefs.

Of course, Samuelsson isn't the only professional to recommend butter-based finishes for tomahawk steak. Chef K.C. Gulbro suggests serving a "cowboy cut steak" with an herbal compound butter made from the likes of rosemary, thyme, and garlic. This gets melted over the steak at the end, enhancing the tomahawk with an herby flavor. While there's no rum in Gulbro's approach, it's a similar butter-based finishing technique worth exploring.

Likewise, in an exclusive Tasting Table interview with Chris Santos, he shares how to perfect cooking a 64-ounce tomahawk steak, which includes a secret steak butter. The cooked steak rests in warm pan drippings with French cultured butter and roasted black garlic and is later flambéed with cognac. It's no wonder that renowned chefs spend time perfecting the art of cooking tomahawk steaks — we're just glad they share it with the rest of us.