Serious Eats - seriouseats.com

EXCELLENT ARTICLE!

sending this to my non-foodie, impatient, meat cutting husband right now!

Kenji, have you heard about denaturing the meat at room temperature with a dry salt cure 30-45 minutes before cooking? The process turns a tough, choice piece of meat into a tender, prime cut that melts in your mouth. This only works with Rib-eye, T-bone, New York Strip, Porterhouse or other very thick cuts. The idea is to rub 1-2 teaspoons of kosher salt on each side of the steak and let it rest. Ten minutes through, the liquid is expelled from the steak onto the plate that's holding it, but then something magical happens! All of that juice with some of the salt is sucked back into the center of the steak, thus seasoning it perfectly from the inside.

Of course, you won't be eating all of that salt. Just before cooking, you should rinse off the salt with cold water then pat the steak completely dry. Rub it with some oil and season with black pepper. Cook as desired and wait 5 minutes before cutting. 10 minutes seems a little long to wait, and we don't wait this long in restuarants before we carve our beef or venison.

Try the salt method. It really yields perfection in a steak (especially if you add garlic, herbs, lemon zest to the salt cure). The steak can be finished with herb-butter too!

@ ChefRObert

Yes - salting is great! I wouldn't go so far as to say it can turn a choice steak tender, but it certainly helps it retain more moisture and become a litle more tender around the edges.

When I was at Cook's, I did some pretty extensive testing on salting different cuts of meat for various periods of time. The videographer and I actually put together a short timelapse video of a salted steak in which we took a still every minute over the course of an hour to show the steak expelling then re-absorbing the water.

It workse essentially like a brine. First, the salt draws liquid out of the meat through osmosis, at which point it dissolves in the liquid that is expelled, forming a brine. This brine then starts to work on the meat proteins, dissolving them and making them capable of retaining more moisture, just like in a normal liquid brine. Since the meat can hold more moisture, it then re-absorbs the liquid that was exuded, along with some of the salt.

The process takes at least 45 minutes or so, so you have to be sure that all the liquid was re-absorbed before you start cooking the steaks.

I often salt steaks overnight in the fridge (which is actually what I did with the ones in the photos above).

Thanks!

I'm not sure if you need a subscription, but here's a link to that Cook's Illustrated video: http://www.cooksillustrated.com/video/default.asp?newVideo=y&docid=10808

Kenji, you rock. I love reading these articles, they're always so interesting and informative!

You write my favorite articles on the site, I HAVE to read every single one.
I have a friend who doesn't know ANYTHING about cooking and he always made fun of me when I let my steak rest and always thought his well done steaks were "perfect" and "medium rare". *facepalm*

Great information! Much obliged.

@pcsanwald

I'm still a contributing editor at Cook's, so I'll generally have one recipe/story per issue, and have a hand in editing some of the other stories.

Good call pcsanwald, I also really love Kenji's stuff on CI. In fact, I recently wanted to use the vodka pie crust recipe from CI, but I don't own a big enough food processor and I was hesitant to make it by hand. I'm pretty sure that it was Kenji himself on an informational video on CI that saved me the night before Thanksgiving, telling me how to adapt the recipe to make it in my Kitchenaid mixer. The crust turned out spectacular. I think a lot of us would be happy members of a J. Kenji Lopez-Alt fan club. Keep up the good work, and thank you!

@berbuck

120 degrees only 5 degrees lower than a rare/medium-rare steak, so it's still hot enough to steam when you slice it open. If you like your meats hotter and more well done, you end up driving more juices out of them in the cooking process anyway, so you don't need to allow them to come all the way back down to 120. A rule of thumb is to allow the meat to rest down to 5 degrees below the final temperature you cooked it to.

So if you like a very well-done 150 degree steak, allow it to rest to 145, and it won't lose any more of the (little) juices that are left.

@Daniel Zemans

It doesn't need to go in the oven. In the kitchen on a board covered in foil is fine, as long as your kitchen is kind of warm room temperature. Above your stove if your stove has pilot lights works too. I'd say you're just looking for 70 degrees or a little above.

Ideally, uncovered at 120 degrees would be perfect, since that's the target final temp for your steaks, but mos tpeople don't have a way to ensure that constant temp, unless you've got a really great convection oven that doesn't cycle on and off.

As you can see on the graph, the biggest advantages occur at the beginning. Resting it for the initial 5 minutes gives you much greater results than the next five minutes, and so on, so make your call. Even after 5 minutes, you're saving around 6% of the juices. Rest it for ten minutes, and you save an additional 1%. Is waiting that extra give worth it for you? Probably not, because as you say, you like dipping your veg in that juice any way. There's no reason to ever change something that has worked for you and you've enjoyed in the past.

Finally, I think I briefly answered this in the previous comment. Look up.

@film_score

See my response to @berbeck a few posts up.

By letting it rest, the meat does not really cool down that much - it is only 5 degrees lower in temperature than it was when you pulled it out of the oven. Sure you can heat it up again, but that will cause the muscle fibers to once again contract, returning it to the state it was in right when you pulled it out of the oven. I'm afraid that hotter = more-well-done = less-juicy, no matter how you slice it...

@patrickamory

Having not been to luger's recently, I can't say for sure, but I'd guess that it's the latter. They serve them sizzling more for effect than for perfection.

It's also possible that their steaks are so fatty and well-aged that even without resting they are better than anything you can get in the supermarket. I wouldn't be surprised if that were the case.

Plus, those things are massive, so by the time you get through the first few bites, the rest of the steak will have rested enough anyway, so maybe it only affects the very beginning.

Excellent - well-researched + methodical + data-based = delicious. Now that I'm armed with this knowledge perhaps I won't be so afraid of screwing up steak and cook it at home.

@dprice

as @northwoodschef said, for larger cuts of meat, there will be carryover cooking, so with a cut like a tritip, the very center will probably rise 3-5 degrees after you pull it off the grill, while a prime rib could rise as much as 7-10 degrees. The 5-degree rule of thumb still works - you want the final temp before slicing to be 5-degrees below the finished cooking temp.

So, if you pull of a prime rib at 120 degrees and it rises to 130 degrees, let it cool back down to 125 before slicing. For large roasts, this can take as long as half an hour or so - which is luckily just as much time as you need to roast the vegetables you're going to serve it with :)

I enjoyed reading your article, I like the salt-for-45-minutes before cooking idea, I'll try that next time.

I have one question about the pictures - When meat is resting, it tends to exude a fair bit of juice just sitting there. The difference in the pictures is dramatic, but was there much juice left on the cutting board where the 10-minute steak rested before moving it to the plate?

Not questioning the resting technique, I've used it for ages and I cook at a nice restaurant where we rest every piece of meat that comes off the grill. Also the difference in weight loss percent says a lot. I was just curious about the pics.

Now we have concrete data on resting the meat! Now we can rest easy. This can also fuel the argument against searing to seal in the juices. This will go into my 'important' file. Thanks for the info.

Kenji, you're correct about steakhouse steaks--besides the inherent difference between grades "prime" and "choice," diners are counted on to let their steaks rest naturally while they're doctoring up the baked potato, slathering the bread with butter, sprinkling salt, grinding pepper and pouring the A1 before making the first cut.

I got lucky and found a nice 1-1/2" slab o' choice sirloin at the grocery store. I wish I could have grilled it, but I don't have much luck with the Weber when it's this bitterly cold so I pan-fried it. I served my grandkids right away and the steak looked like it sprung a leak. By the time they were seated and happily eating, I was able to slice the adult portions without the steak bleeding to death on the board.

Now, if you could only work your science on "select" grade meat to make it palatable and juicy, I'd be happy to do your grunt work forever.

Great post thx. Did I miss it or does it state somewhere how you kept the steaks warm? I like my steaks very thin and flash fried, verry tender ;-)

Beginner here. I tried this with a burger pulled off the heat at 150 but after letting it get down to 120 it wasn't warm enough so ended up having to microwave it a bit. I understand letting the meat rest but I'm wondering if down to 120 is too long for a burger?