Place the steaks and compound butter on the counter and allow them to come up to room temperature for about an hour.
Light grill and set up for high direct heat. You’ll want to get the coals as hot and as close to the cooking grate as possible. If using a gas grill, allow the grill to preheat with the lid closed for at least 15 minutes.
Evenly coat strip steaks with olive oil and season them liberally with kosher salt. Put two pats of compound butter on each plate and set aside.
Place steaks directly over hot coals and flip every 20 seconds. With each flip, place the steaks in a different spot on the grill grate. This allows the best searing to take place through conductive heat. The steaks below have been on the grill for about 2.5 minutes total, and you can already see that nice crust forming.
After about five minutes of total cook time, use a reliable quick-read thermometer to check the internal temperature of the steak. Remove steaks from the grill when the internal temperature reaches 115 °F for a medium rare steak.
Place steaks directly on top of butter pats and tent the steaks with aluminum foil. Allow them to rest for five minutes. Carry-over cooking will continue, and the final serving temperature of the meat will be in the neighborhood of 125 °F or so, the perfect medium rare.
The New York strip steak is probably the easiest of the more popular cuts to grill. Why? For a few reasons.First, it’s pretty uniform in shape, unlike a skirt steak, for example. It’s nearly impossible to cook a skirt steak to a uniform doneness because of the shape and inconsistent thickness of the cut.Second, the strip steak isn’t typically cut too thick, like a filet mignon, for example. The thickness of the filet mignon makes it difficult to cook evenly throughout unless you’re using some of the more advanced cooking techniques. Finally, the strip steak doesn’t consist of more than one muscle, like the ribeye for instance.The ribeye cap cooks much faster than the eye of the ribeye, so it’s challenging (but not impossible) to get a consistent doneness on that cut as well.