275 will be faster, of course, but you’ll want to watch the temperature closely.ģ. The lower the heat, the more evenly cooked the steak will be. If you can do this a couple of hours or even overnight before cooking, perfect. Season the steak liberally, then put it on the wire rack over the baking sheet and stick it in the fridge. Salt and pepper will do, and a good steak seasoning is even better, provided it has enough salt to act as a “dry brine”: The salt draws moisture out of the meat, the moisture dissolves the salt, and the steak then reabsorbs the juices. To reverse sear a steak on your kitchen range-you’ll actually be using your oven, too-you’ll need a baking sheet with a wire rack, a cast-iron skillet, tongs, an instant-read meat thermometer, and about an hour of cooking time. So some inventive food professionals came up with a steak reverse sear method using standard cooking equipment: the indoor kitchen range and the outdoor grill. Sous vide is now much more affordable, but it’s still not inexpensive…and many people don’t care for cooking their food in plastic bags which then wind up in landfills. This technique has been around since the 1970s, but the equipment was so expensive that it was virtually unavailable to the home cook. ![]() Using sous vide, a chef could bring a number of steaks to rare, hold them for an indefinite period of time, then sear them to order for any customer. It is impossible to overcook food in this method, since the water bath is held at the exact temperature at which you want your food. Sous vide (pronounced soo-VEED), which translates to “under vacuum” in French, involves vacuum sealing food in a plastic bag, then cooking it to a precise temperature in a water bath. The steak reverse sear began in professional kitchens outfitted with sous vide equipment. Alton Brown, of Food Network’s “Good Eats” show, uses the reverse method for roasts, too: slow-roast at 200 degrees until the roast is 10 degrees below the target temperature, then remove it from the oven, crank the oven up to 500 degrees, put the meat back in and let the crust develop. You slowly cook the steak until it’s the right temperature in the center-or close to it-then quickly sear the outside. Reverse-searing is, well, the reverse of that. You want that nice brown, flavorful sear on the outside, so you start it in a hot oven…but you don’t want it to overcook or be raw in the middle, so after the initial hot roast, you turn the oven down and let it roast slowly until it’s just right in the center. Let’s take a bone-in prime rib roast, for instance. Conversely, the larger the cut of meat, the lower and slower you want to cook it. Get that sear on it quickly, then take it off the heat before it has time to overcook. The concept here is simple: The smaller the cut of meat, the hotter and faster you can cook it. (Before we get any further, let’s note upfront that this is not something you’re going to do on a weeknight when you’re pressed for time.) Instead, consider changing your cooking method and learn to master the reverse-sear steak. Well, you could just stop buying thick-cut steaks…but that’s no fun. If you want the center medium-rare, it’s going to have to stay on the grill or in the skillet for a longer period of time…and the sections of meat closer to the surfaces are going to cook beyond what you may find acceptable. ![]() But if you’re grilling a thicker cut (say, one and a half or two inches), cooking it for the same length of time will leave the middle very rare. It’s true that a tender cut like rib eye, New York strip or filet mignon is best cooked quickly over high, direct heat…and if your steak is an inch thick or less, that’s still your best bet. The simple answer is that your steak was too thick to cook by the usual method. To your horror, a good-sized portion of your precious steak is medium-well to well done! What happened? But there’s a transitional layer on either side of the center where the meat has turned to-gasp-a dull gray. And when you cut into it, you find that the center is indeed a deep, rosy pink…or, at least, the middle half-inch or so. It was carefully grilled with a perfect sear on the outside you even used an instant-read thermometer to ensure it would be exactly medium-rare in the center. You sit down to a beautiful thick-cut rib eye steak. Reverse-seared steak is all the rage these days…but what is it? Learn how to reverse sear rib eye and other thick cuts for the best steak of your life.
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