For some reason the recipe for Steel requires Meteoric Iron, and only seems to accept Meteoric Iron, as it doesn’t switch to different types of iron as NEI (not actually sure which is installed, NEI or JEI) does when indicating that you can use any material of this type. Unless I’m being an idiot or the configs are borked, Steel is basically impossible to craft.
I will try the recipe that Greg suggested though, in case it’s just NEI that’s decided to bork itself.