As long as the cooking surface is hot enough, all that turning will yield a magnificent crust and a much-improved interior: juicy and pink throughout, without the usual gray ring under the crust. According to the food scientist Harold McGee, this is because the juices keep flowing instead of collecting in the middle, which makes the interior cook evenly.

Keep in mind that this is stovetop steak, not steakhouse steak; it will not have the visual punch of a three-inch-thick porterhouse. Grilling bloggers (and there are many) spend days attempting to replicate legendary cuts like the Playboy at Jess & Jim’s in Kansas City, Mo., or the Longbone Cowboy at Nick & Sam’s in Dallas.

But steakhouses have professional-grade equipment and exhaust systems. The broilers at Peter Luger in Brooklyn heat up to a rumored 1,800 degrees. Some steaks at Carnevino in Las Vegas are dry-aged for eight months. At the chef Michael Mina’s Bourbon Steak restaurants, the steaks lounge in a 120-degree bath of clarified butter before touching the grill.

That sounds pleasant, but all you really need is a heavy skillet and the right cut of meat. The experts on home-cooked steak are not chefs but butchers — particularly butchers who were raised by butchers and grew up on a steady diet of meat.

Pat LaFrieda, a fourth-generation meat purveyor in Manhattan, would rather you didn’t buy his sirloin steak. “Sirloin is one of my least-favorite cuts,” he said; it’s usually lean, making it difficult for home cooks to get just right. “It comes from the love handles of the animal on down,” one place where the fat collects under the skin, instead of working its way into the muscles.

And intramuscular fat makes cooking steak at home far easier. “If it’s good quality steak, and you don’t cook it for more than five minutes per inch, you really can’t mess it up,” said Richard Schatz of Schatzie the Butcher on the Upper West Side (his bloody lineage goes back five generations). “Steak is nothing to be scared of.”