Dry-Aged Strip Steak with Peppercorn Sauce
One pan, two stages. The steak rests while the sauce is made from the fond it left. The table shows what joins what.
A pan sauce is not a separate recipe. It is the second half of cooking the steak, made from what the steak left in the pan.
| 2 steaks, 12 oz each Signature Strip Steak | 1 salt, rest uncovered 40 min | 2 sear 3 min a side | |
| 2 tsp coarse salt | |||
| 1 Tbsp beef tallow | |||
| 2 Tbsp black peppercorns, cracked | 3 soften in the same pan | 4 reduce by half, then finish | |
| 1 small shallot, minced | |||
| 1/2 cup beef stock | |||
| 1/3 cup heavy cream | |||
| 1 Tbsp butter | |||
| 5Rest the steaks on a board while you build the sauce. The sauce takes about as long as the rest does. | |||
| 6Slice across the grain and spoon the sauce over at the table, not in the pan. | |||
Numbers show the order to work in. Each cell spans exactly the ingredients it uses.
Do not wash the pan
The browned residue left after searing is the entire flavor base. Stock goes in, you scrape, and that residue becomes the sauce. A clean pan makes a thin sauce.
“We used to just kind of not try to outsmart God, let the animal do what it's supposed to do and stay out of the way.”
Gray Shipley
Timing the two halves
The steak needs about eight minutes of rest, and the sauce takes about eight minutes to build. That is not a coincidence you need to manage, it is the recipe working as intended.
“There's a saying that farming isn't rocket science. It's way more complicated than that.”
Gray Shipley
The searing itself is covered step by step in how to sear a steak, and the pull temperature is in the temperature chart.
“Yeah, no shortcuts just means, you know, it's a mindset, the mindset of looking for a shortcut. You know, it doesn't mean that we don't look for improvement. It doesn't mean we don't look for ways to do things better.”
Gray Shipley
A clean grain and a fat cap that renders into the sauce.
View Product- Cook to a Safe Minimum Internal Temperature, FoodSafety.gov
Food-safety temperatures and storage times on this page are cited to the agencies above rather than to us.
Written at Shipley Farms in Vilas, North Carolina: a family cattle farm raising and dry-aging beef in the Appalachian Mountains, now in its fifth generation. No shortcuts since 1872.
Every quote on this page is Gray Shipley talking, the man who runs this farm. We sat down with him, turned on a recorder, and kept his own words. Hesitations are trimmed so they read on the page. Nothing else is added or reworded, except where Gray revised his own words in review.
Nobody knows this beef better than we do. On food safety we leave it to FoodSafety.gov, and we have linked their page above. Reviewed 3 October 2026.
Shipley Farms
Stories, recipes and news from Shipley Farms.