The best thing I've found for cooking steak is "mesquite carbon". When I've found it it came in bland paper bags looking like some really cheap, suspect brand of charcoal briquettes perhaps from Mexico. It was charcoal made from chunks of mesquite branches, still in the original "branch" shapes. You use it just like other types of charcoal: throw it in a pile, add something to get it hot enough to get burning, spread out the glowing coals, then cook the meat suspended over it.

A steak cooked over mesquite carbon with not a pinch of anything added, not even salt, tastes better than the best marinated, seasoned steak I've had. The steaks I've cooked over this so simply were even better than the steaks I've had at one of the best (now all closed) steak chains in Texas that cooked over mesquite wood.

So simple and so cheap (quite a bit cheaper than regular charcoal, as I recall) and yet I've never seen anyone else using it. I should see if I can buy that stuff this far north. I haven't had a good steak in a while.