One of my favorite things to do at a restraunt is tell the waitstaff "knock off the hooves, pull off the hide and run through the kitchen with it. I want it really rare!" Mostly I do that because there are too many dining establishments that don't seem to understand what rare is.

Making steak at home I normally use a rib-eye cut that I prepare with an herbed butter smeared on it right before it gets put on the grill over lump charcoal at a real high heat. The outside gets seared well and the insides remain good an juicy and stays the way I like it.

This technique is not for the faint of heart because as the butter melts off the steak from the heat flames that reach as high as 8 feet leap from the grill adding to the searing effect. Hair on fore-arms can become a casualty if you aren't careful. My neighbors have given up on panicking about it and no longer call the fire department to report a forest fire behind my house.

I am also fond of cooking steaks over a wood fire when camping. Just don't make the mistake that a friend of mine did by building a fire from pine branches and trying to cook with it. The results taste like turpentine and are a perfectly good waste of a good steak. Perefectly good waste of a bad steak (if such a thing exists) as well.

Use hardwood, bonus points if you can find fruit woods such as apple or cherry and even hickory, pecan or walnut work well. For that matter any hardwood will do.

Blue Cowdawg's Herbed Butter