The article actually doesn't refute the idea of resting meat to retain the juices. In fact, it supports it. It just provides a reason for why this works which is perhaps different than conventional wisdom.
Retaining the juices in the meat has to do with the temperature at which the meat is cut. Resting allows the temperature to drop, which creates less pressure, so the juices aren't forced out of the meat nearly as strongly.
The title is click-bait. The major rule is correct, not wrong. But, now we know a little bit more about why this rule works.
> As the meat rests (and therefore cools) that vapor pressure decreases, and so does the juice loss. It's not about reabsorption or thickening as the juices cool, which is another common explanation that's been offered over the years. It's simply about pressure. Control for final internal temperature, and—rested or not—the juice loss is the same.
The article categorically refutes the idea that resting is important for juiciness but that's not the same as saying resting will not improve juice retention. Proof that a relationship once though to be causal is not is a pretty big deal, and the conventional wisdom is wrong.
As a counterexample: let's say the only things I care about are juiciness of the center of the cut of meat and the time it takes me to make it. By the conventional wisdom I'd have to rest the meat, adding time, but now we know that I could simply keep cooking the meat for longer, since that will raise the center temp faster, and then cut it immediately after cooking.
Or another scenario: if I know the precise internal temperature for my preferred level of juiciness, I know exactly what temperature to set a sous vide to.
Someone that only cares about juiciness at the center, and doesn't care how much is lost from the rest of the meat, sounds pretty unrealistic to me. If you keep pouring in heat until the last moment everything outside the center will be much hotter and lose much more juice.
There are many ways to cook a steak, and what you say doesn’t hold true for the way I cook it, which is a reverse sear, and in fact the Serious Eats article even mentions that a rest is unnecessary: https://www.seriouseats.com/reverse-seared-steak-recipe
Sous vide steak, as mentioned by your parent post, is similar.
That depends on the heat applied. Which brings up another good counterexample: knowing this, someone could cook longer at a lower temp to get a juicer edge for the same juiciness center.
Yes, my example is unrealistic when you apply your own unrealistic constraints on top of it.
But when you remove your unrealistic constraints, it is absolutely realistic. There is a wide temperature band where a cut of meat will reach a given center temp faster than carryover cooking with a difference to edge temperature that is trivial enough that someone is unlikely to notice.
It was your example, I was just trying to stick within it. I'm not intentionally adding constraints "on top". I'm just saying that "cook longer" is outside the scope of my response.
I disagree that the edge temperature difference would be trivial. The difference between the last 20 degrees in the middle coming out of the edges while they also lose heat to their surroundings versus making the edges even hotter as you continue cooking is quite a lot.
"cook longer" at the same temperature is my original example (though admittedly I was thinking that cook temp would be another variable, but I didn't write that):
> now we know that I could simply keep cooking the meat for longer
Cooking longer at the same temperature is also pretty much exactly what the experiment in the article was, which found no statistically significant correlation between testing and juiciness.
The experimental group pork chops took less time from when they were put on the skillet to when they were cut (and when they would have been consumed if they were cooked by someone making a meal for themselves).
You're welcome to disagree, but the facts disagree with your stance.
That's an inaccurate and unnecessarily critical take on the article.
First, at the end of the article he does a taste test. In the taste test no one was able to tell whether the meat had been rested or not, so that's a reason you might not want to bother resting meat.
Second, yes he devotes a lot of the article to the discovery that juice retention is happening for different reasons than we thought. To quote him directly, he thinks this is important because "Food and recipe writers like myself have been dispensing inaccurate meat-resting time and temperature guidance for ages." If you choose to continue resting your meat, as many will, these insights provide you with better guidance in terms of how you should do it.
As a home cook, the taste test is convincing enough to me that if I'm making food for myself, I should probably skip the resting stage, focus on other taste factors, and see how it goes, as I'm always happy to save 10 minutes and taste is rather subjective anyway. A professional or commercial chef will likely have a very different but no less useful takeaway from this article.
All this to say, it was a great article and the headline's not clickbait.
"Resting allows the temperature to drop, which creates less pressure, so the juices aren't forced out of the meat nearly as strongly."
I was always under the impression that if you pull your meat at let's say 128, resting it will bring the internal temperature up, finishing at like 132-134. Is this wrong?
Note the article explained: "leading to an overall cooling even as the center warmed", that's what I think you are missing above. If the internal temp comes up to 132, but the exterior drops to 95...
Overall the steak is cooling (as the outside air is cooler). At the centre of the steak the temperature will go up first (as heat from the outside of the steak which has been in contact with the pan transfers in) then down again.
Unless I’m mistaken (and that’s quite possible!), this should be trivial to test. Sous vide some meat for an overly long time to a precise temperature, then cut each piece at set intervals.
If you sous vide for a long time, the entirety of the steak will be at the same temperature, while pan searing cooks the outside to a higher temperature than the inside, which results in the core temperature going up a few degrees during resting.
Yes exactly. It all has to do with the thermal conductivity of the meat. Meat tends to be a fairly good insulator which means it takes a long time for heat to conduct through a thick piece of meat (such as a large roast or a pork shoulder). This means that cooking at a temperature above your target internal temp (most conventional cooking methods, not sous vide) will produce a fairly steep thermal gradient between the outside of the meat and the core. Resting the meat allows heat to flow down the gradient to bring the overall temperature closer towards equilibrium.
Another important effect during cooking is the breakdown of collagen fibres (present in tough connective tissues which make some cuts of meat very tough to chew). This occurs in the presence of moisture at temperatures above 170F. When collagen breaks down the meat tenderizes and the collagen itself turns into gelatine which absorbs moisture and retains it within the meat. A gelatine-rich cut of slow-cooked meat (such as oxtail) can be very sticky and packed with flavour. This is one case where food can taste juicier with longer cooking times.
This is not a very quick test because you can hold sous vide food up to 4 hours at the target temp. So you will need to account for that 4 hour gap in all the testing before it starts to break down.
Well, yes, as soon as you take meat off the heat, temperature continues to raise for some time, but it starts dropping off during the rest period.
I cook til 125F, take it off, let it rest, cut. I have a probe that measures it in multiple points, allowing it to more accurately estimate core and surface temperature.
There are so many cases like this in cooking because no one bothered to actually test validate science as long as it produced claimed results (i.e. juicy steak in this case)
Off topic, and please forgive the way my mind works, but having read your comment I couldn't help thinking that the interpretive ambiguity would be resolved if the unit stated was "pulls" per minute (128 ppm while vigorous, is still plausible).
In steak/chop sized pieces, carry-over cooking of the center finishes very quickly. If you get a really fast probe thermometer like a thermapen, you can watch it in real time. The entire piece will have cooled sufficiently after common resting times (e.g. 10 minutes.)
It's not wrong, it's incomplete. It will briefly bring the temperature up as everything stabilizes but then it will start going back down. How quickly is entirely dependent on the environment it's in as well. Keep it in a warming oven? It's gonna a be a much slower process than sitting on a cool countertop.
That is indeed exactly what the article says — I’m not certain GP is right on this.
Kenji’s original tests seem to confound this as well: every 2.5min of slicing produces steadily less juice, despite the fact that the steak’s internal temp should be rising for some of that time.
“Internal” temperatures are measured near a single point. Some internal, watery, parts will be hotter than other internal, watery, parts. On average, the temperature goes down over time even if it increases in some local parts.
So the average pressure will decrease.
(Yes, for an ideal cavity, pressure is equal everywhere, but for meat which contains highly tortured paths and a three-phase state mixture for the vapors to escape from - there can be different pressures in different areas especially once there’s any flow at all)
Resting increases internal temperature. Immediately after you take the meat off the heat it'll have a cooler internal temperature than after five minutes of resting. The crust of the meat is much hotter than the core and heat moves from the outside to the inside during resting.
If perfect doneness requires immediate consumption as soon as it leaves the pan I'd argue you've still overcooked it, unless you're fine with only ever being able to reproduce your dish alone, just for you.
This is a good point, and highlights that there’s an additional variable somewhat out of scope from this test.
1. finish temperature (as mentioned in this article)
2. peak temperature
In these tests, the finish temperature and peak temperature were the same - he sliced while carryover cooking was still climbing. However, when resting, most people achieve a peak temperature (due to carryover cooking), then roll down the other side of the curve to a lowered temperature.
As you imply, a longer rest - in conjunction with protein pulled at just the right time - can likely result with both the perfect (to taste) peak temperature, and a lower (and more juicy) slicing temperature
This is sort of a neat microcosm of the story of the interaction of science and engineering over time.
The original meat resting rules were essentially engineering, when it is forced to run significantly in advance of science, in this case due to lack of sufficiently accurate measurement tools (instant-read themometers that can be left in the meat). They were discovered ad-hoc. They worked. But the theories behind them turned out to be incorrect.
Thermometers improved, the ability to control the cooking environment improved, and experiments could be run that contradicted the old theories about why it worked, and led to an improved methodology that could be used with more equipment.
This in turns leads to engineering better meals, even if only from the point of view of doing somewhat less work to the same result.
Interesting take, true-ish I think? But Meathead had this right, as I recall from first principles (his writing partner at the time was a physicist), I think without the measurement apparatus.
Rules for resting meat are more like religion than science or engineering…resting meat is a morality play of socially acceptable and unacceptable behavior. Eating without resting is labeled crass because it is the sort of thing a starving peasant might do.
That’s how the results can be contrary to tradition.
Yeah makes sense, fits with how I was taught working in serious kitchens too. People will have different justifications for it or models for how it works but professional cooks generally take resting pretty seriously especially for bigger pieces of meat.
I don't really like the article title though, the rule seems pretty much correct?
> Carryover cooking is greatly underestimated in both its speed and degree, and this has a huge impact on whether resting meat does or does not work well.
That has long been my main reason for doing it and my guide for how long to rest. Until the carryover has nearly or just stopped and the internal temp is about to or has just begun dropping. For thin skirt steak or grilled shrimp this could be about as long as it takes to walk inside, for a pork shoulder or standing rib roast it might be nearly an hour.
Also long been understood that there's no benefit to resting sous vide meat, since there's no carryover to manage.
Note that a major point in this article is a pretty serious team of cooks (the Meathead folks are competition BBQ people) arguing against resting (but cooking in such a way that resting doesn't matter).
The resting hysteria in low and slow BBQ has gotten out of control. Many BBQ YouTubers now promote overnight resting, I've even seen some suggesting a two day rest. I'm glad to see some sanity returning.
Completely different style and purpose of resting. The long hot rest is for fat and collagen rendering. Nothing like this kind of rest after high temperature grilling or roasting.
Yeah I just clicked through and realized I've read that article several times over the years. It's old and quite well known in certain parts of the food world. Now that I know that, is there anything new in this serious eats one? Is it just a verification of the meathead OG?
It's kind of a counterpoint to it! Meathead actively advocates against resting; Gritzer argues for a cooking method that relies on carryover time and thus resting to slice at target temps. Both Meathead and Gritzer agree that moisture retention is not the reason to rest, and since there's a lot of pop science out there (complete with animations and physical models) for why moisture loss demands resting, it seems worth writing about.
Gritzer actually ran a relatively serious tasting experiment for this article, though I'm not sure how much it mattered to the point he's making.
It is not. Much of the SE article is about testing a newer hypothesis that the amount of juice loss on slicing is entirely explained by the temp of the meat at the moment of slicing, and that the various other explanations for what resting does are irrelevant.
The meathead article argues:
- Resting doesn't change perceived juiciness the way you think it does.
- Meat that you will slice on your plate continues cooking on plate.
- Therefore recommends just cook to temp and dive in and don't do any traditional rest.
The Serious Eats article:
- Tests the temp at slicing theory.
- Says this means that appropriate resting time only has to do with aligning the carryover cook time with the temp you brought it to while cooking with the temp it will be at slicing
- Suggests that the real benefit of resting is that it is easier to time and stick the landing with desired temp because of the gradual glide at the end
- Therefore recommends: Using a rest, but shorter than traditional, just long enough as appropriate for temp control.
I cook (and eat) a lot of steak. Probably 3-4 per week, 1.5" thick ribeyes. For me, resting has always been about temperature normalization.
I like to sear my steaks in a cast iron skillet. I use an induction cooktop and tend to start at medium-high and ramp up to as hot as the stove will get. I think the ramp-up is important to render some of the fat without just letting it all evaporate.
I turn the steaks over frequently (30s intervals), which keeps the inside from cooking too much while the outside gets nice and crispy. I take them off the heat probably 2-3 minutes (but keep flipping! The pan is still really damn hot) before they go into the oven (at 400F).
I take the steaks out when they hit 120 and pull them out of the pan ASAP.
During the “rest” that follows I add pepper and butter to the tops of the steaks. The outsides of these steaks become way, way hotter than the insides. But the size of the layer that is so hot is very thin due to the frequent turning. So they don’t need to rest long, and the temp doesn’t rise too much once they’re out of the oven.
peer pressure used to be a pretty important (and efficient) tool for society to control itself.
not every decision needs a cost-benefit analysis. though chomping down that many pounds of nice ribeye steaks has a not insignificant cost. to me it seems normal to ask about it.
It varies between individuals, but there are absolutely cases where steak and other red meats can have health concerns. Hemochromatosis is one that immediately comes to mind.
Not specifically, no. I think the benefits for me personally outweigh the risks, anyway. Everyone's physiology is different, so I don't expect everyone else to eat the way I do.
It is actually the reverse. Keto & carnivore(with only fatty read meat) is the best. If you have diseases like diabetes/epilepsy/mental-illness/food-addiction/etc it (may) help a lot. I eat 6-7 days/week red meat.
> FWIW, I hear there could be issues with (too much) iron especially for men.
Too much iron can cause serious systemic issues, especially for the liver, and yes, men tend to have worse symptoms for the simple reason that one of the treatments for high iron is bloodletting. Unlike women, men don't have a natural built in mechanism to do so regularly.
It's for sure not the "reverse", even if for some people with certain diseases the benefits may outweigh the risks. It's undeniably linked to certain cancers and arteriosclerosis
It's actually the reverse. "some people" is every person that is overweight (50% of USA). "cancer" are studies where it includes other things, like fast food etc. Haven't researched arteriosclerosis, but we'd have to see studies being done on healthy patients with strict keto/carnivore and not dirty diet.
I'd highly recomend you give reverse sear a go. It definitely works best with thick steaks but a nice low oven temp 120C (250F) and pull when the steak is 40C (120F), then into a ripping hot pan with oil in it gives a fantastic sear.
I'm not suggesting it's better than your method or anything but well worth trying imo!
You just set the oven super low and cook it until it’s a certain amount under (I forget, maybe 30F under). It’s honestly probably easier to overcook by your method. You get an even better crust because all the surface moisture has evaporated in the oven before it hits the pan.
"Searing the meat seals in the juices" -- every chef on every cooking show.
Can we do a study on that too?
hmmmmm. I want to grill two steaks, the same size, and to the same internal temperature on the same grill. Let one rest for ten minutes in a pie pan and cut the other into 4 pieces letting it also rest for ten minutes in a pie pan. Probably also wrap them in tinfoil. Then weigh the released juices at the end.
There is a huge difference between eating a steak that has rested allowing the vapor pressure decrease vs one that hasn't rested even though the internal temperatures in the middle are the same.
Real cooks know the point of the sear is to create browning (maillard). Anyone who says otherwise either doesn't understand or is just speaking to a basic audience
the flavor enhancement of the maillard reaction does not mean that searing is not also sealing the meat. I'm not saying it is either, just, saying your statement is not an answer to his question, as anyone can see. almost anyone.
> "Searing the meat seals in the juices" -- every chef on every cooking show.
This was debunked a long time ago. You do want to sear the meat, but only to give it a nice and tasty brown crust due to Maillard reactions. Searing does not seal in any juices.
I can recommend the book Cooking for Geeks, it has some nice scientific explanations about this and some other stuff too.
> "Searing the meat seals in the juices" -- every chef on every cooking show.
I could be wrong on this but I think Kenji was the first prominent writer to debunk this. I bring it up given the context of who all we're talking about.
I'm not arguing in favor of "searing is sealing", but that whole article is trash imho. I can see flaws in every empirical test he sets up. (ok, not every one, i quit reading in horror after I read a few)
Sous Vide taught me resting meet was a farce. There's zero rest time when cooking that way, and it causes the meat, especially steak, to come out perfect every single time. There's a reason why it's pretty much banned in most cooking competitions.
That's like saying jet engines are banned in IndyCar. Umm . . . yeah? Because they're competing to see who makes the best SMOKED meat, and sous vide would be using the wrong cooking technique.
I wonder if it's banned simply because it doesn't feel enough like BBQ. Similar to why FIA banned CVTs in racing. It's kind of arbitrary but also I get it. Racing and BBQ have culture behind them, and dare I say 'vibes' that their practitioners will want to retain.
I would be a bit disappointed if I went to a BBQ and saw them pull up a big tub of water in which they dumped the meat. My caveman brain wants to see fire.
If they’re trying to measure skill, I can understand the rationale. The competition is more of a spectacle than an attempt at finding the most reliable and best tasting rib making process.
Imagine a glassblowing competition where participants were judged on how consistently they could make a certain piece. The people using moulds would end up winning, and they would do so with a fraction of the skill and effort.
Yes? It lowers the degree of difficulty tremendously.
And most people, even bbq judges, probably can’t taste the difference between a sous vide with smoke finish and a full smoker preparation.
But bbq competitions are about making the best ribs the same way car racing is about going around an oval the fastest. Equipment rules matter more than bare outcomes.
I get what you're saying but I don't just mean that it's unsporting or defeats the purpose of the conversation, but rather that it suggests the outcomes are judged on a rubric that doesn't capture what makes extremely good BBQ good, but rather basic textural and visual things. Like, Green Street in Chicago is, IIRC, combi-cooked before it's smoked; it's also just OK.
IIRC, wine tasting isn't bunk, wine pricing is. People can tell the differences between wines, and reasonably reliably if they are trained, but those differences (and the tasters' preferences) have weak/no correlations with $$$.
Not as much as you'd think. In this article [1], one expert failed to identify that a white wine dyed red was the same. They used different descriptors for the same wine.
And none of this should be too surprising. Our brains are complex things that like to hallucinate details. If you tell someone a bottle of wine cost $1000, their brain will happily invent reasons why it's one of the best wines they've tasted.
I wonder whether something similar applies to spirits. I feel absolutely sure that I could tell the difference between, say, a long-aged rum and an unaged one. But if you added food coloring to an unaged one and told me it was aged, would my brain invent oak barrel flavors behind my back? Who knows.
You can always give yourself a blind taste test. Get two (or more) opaque bottles, add the various rums in test, mark the bottom of the container for the type of rum, mix it up and see if you can reliably tell the difference.
My assumption is you could because that oak flavor is pretty strong, but who knows.
Worst case scenario is you find out you still prefer expense alcohol :)
I naively thought it was about delivering the best plate of food, regardless of equipment and technique. A “rib” competition, not a “smoker” competition.
You are really this shocked that some competitions ban certain methods of achieving the goal? Are you shocked that traditional wood chopping competitions ban chainsaws?
No, my surprise has nothing to do with fairness and everything to do with how unlikely I feel it is that circulated ribs would hold up to ribs smoked end-to-end. But people downthread with more information disagree, so...
Just a random tip: When I rest meat I put it on a mesh and keep it in the oven set to 50 degrees Celsius. That have given me pretty good results I feel and then you can finish off whatever else you want to do after cooking the meat (like vegetables or sauce from the same pan).
I have a warming drawer in my kitchen that is always at about that temp. It's perfect for keeping prepared food warm while I do another dish, or for warming plates in there on which I will serve hot food
A trick I've been doing since I got the Combusion thermometer is, if I'm trying for a 205 temp target: I run it until the surface temp reaches 205, then turn down the heat to get the ambient temp to around 205 for the rest of the cook until the interior gets up to 205. I've tried it a couple times and had really great results.
> In Young’s tests, he controls for that crucial variable: the final core temperature at the moment of slicing. Rather than pulling all his meat samples at the same temperature and then slicing them at different times, he uses his Predictive Thermometer to ensure that each piece is sliced at the same final internal temperature, whether it was rested or not. This approach isolates the effect of resting itself. The result? Juice loss is the same either way, no matter if the meat rested or not.
Doesn’t this approach necessarily mean that some of the meat will be cooked longer than other meat?
Summary: The temperature will continue to rise after removing meat from a grill. The thicker the meat, the more temperature is retained. You want the cut the meat when the proper temperature is reached.
So if the meat is at the target temperature - slice it right away.
If the temperature is below the target temp, and the meat is thick, wait until the target temperature is reached, then slice it.
The trick is knowing how thick the meat is, how much the temperature will continue to rise after removal, and therefore when to remove the meat.
I've noticed a major difference with resting when I'm doing tri-tip roasts, not with juiciness but with tenderness. Letting it rest for 10-30 minutes after hitting around 130F internal temperature results in a much more tender results, which has gotta be due to carryover cooking continuing to break down collagen, etc.
The opening line:-
"The traditional wisdom says resting meat keeps it juicy. But when we put that idea to the test, we found a different reason to rest—one that has nothing to do with juice."
I don't rest meat to keep it juicy. I rest it to finish the cook. It's not quite ready when it comes off the heat.
There is an entire realm of culinary science which actually goes into stuff like this and has actually been demonstrating these things for years rather than pretending sous chefs are raised on mysticism and folk lore.
Unfortunately most of that is undone by self proposed experts on cooking shows, blogs, tiktok, ...
They should be weighing the final cuts rather than trying to quantify the amount of fluid on the plate. Otherwise they are simply failing to account for the amount of water that is evaporating away. And given how much my food steams while cooling, its not a trivial amount.
Highly clickbait title. The conclusion is that you rest meat because it keeps it juicy and lets it finish carry-over cooking. This is already the common wisdom. The only new part is a different explanation for why resting makes it more juicy.
No, the article concluded that resting meat does not influence juiciness. In the blind test the author ran, the tasters could not identify a difference in juiciness between rested and unrested meat.
Do you cook steak? I do, multiple times a week (my kids love it). If you cut it right away, you end up with a pool of meat juice. If you wait a few minutes, you don't.
I call bullshit. Resting the meat keeps the juice inside. This is objectively the case, whether or not some blind taste test agrees. (I'm not even sure why a blind test is relevant here...)
No, cutting into the meat when it's at a particular temperature determines how much juice spills out, not how long you've rested it. Yes, resting it changes the cutting temperature (acknowledged by the article), but that's not really the point being made or the effect being investigated.
Cooking to, say, a medium-rare and cutting in right away will spill a lot of juice, whereby cooking to below medium-rare and letting it get to the medium-rare temp will leak hardly anything. It's dead simple to reproduce and obvious in practice.
I am aware of what SeriousEats is, but this particular article is sensationalist and was written for clicks.
I’m talking about the article, not my (or your) experience cooking. The points you raise are addressed in the article, which is very thoughtful and thorough.
Did you read the article? This is absolutely addressed. “Resting the meat keeps the juice inside” is obviously correct and he is not arguing against that point. The question is whether there is another way to keep the juice inside.
On one side we have Kenji and Chris young (modernist cuisine books) and the other side we have guy making well done steak for his kids, several times a week.
In Chris Young's video, the suggestion is to stop carry over cooking by slicing the meat when the internal temperature reaches the target temperature.
A corollary to that is that if the meat is closer to target temperature when it leaves the pan, you should rest the meat for less time. I don't think this is part of the conventional wisdom.
You don't slice individual portions of meat before serving. If I order a pork chop or a ribeye at a restaurant, I'd be horrified if it came pre-sliced.
And for something like an entire roast, you want to slice shortly before serving so it doesn't get too cold.
Just account for carry-over cooking and cook it less initially, or sous vide.
Many times I've ordered a large cut of meat, like a porter house or a tomahawk (usually intended to be shared with the table), they have came pre sliced. I'm pretty sure even Peter Luger's will pre slice it for you even for an individual.
I have been served plenty of pork chops and ribeyes that have been pre-sliced. It is a pretty common presentation when the cut has the bone on. The meat will be cut off the bone, sliced, and then placed back nestled next to the bone. Slicing and fanning gives you more surface area for some finishing salt. This is even more widespread when it is a large steak intended to be shared among two guests.
I think there are plenty of dishes that have pre sliced pork chops or rib eyes. The exception, sure. But it would not be hard to find even one example where this is not a rule. Your position is too brittle to take seriously.
No, the conclusion is that the specific act of resting has no bearing on juiciness. The juice spillage depends on the temperature the meat is when you slice it.
Resting of course does lower the temperature, which reduces juice spillage, but a) that's a secondary effect, and b) blind tasters turned out to not know the difference between meat that lost more or less juice due to cutting at a higher or lower temperature, so it probably doesn't matter.
Carryover cooking is what matters, and we should care much more about what temperature we allow the meat to rise to after removing heat, because we will overcook the meat if we allow it to come to the target temperature (or even within 10-15F of it, depending on meat/cut/thickness) before removing heat. The article advocates for removing heat much earlier than most people probably do.
So I just let it sit on a cutting board for five minutes before I slice it or I put it in an ice bath like a molecular gastronomist weirdo and slice it 4 minutes earlier?
Unless you get some enjoyment from being a weirdo, don't do the weirdo molecular gastronomist crap. I mean, it may be fun to figure out how to make water gravy, but if you try that with my hamburger steak you're getting tossed out like DJ Jazzy Jeff.
> Inside the meat, heat was flowing from the hotter exterior towards the center, cooking it further, a phenomenon colloquially called "carryover cooking.
Yes, this is the exact reason I always rest mine.
When you cook a steak on a cast iron, if you wait to pull it until the internal temp is reached, you'll end up either burning it or drying it out depending on temp.
The best way is to cook it as absolutely hot as possible to get a good sear, then just let it sit. As long as it's fatty enough(or you use enough oil, depending), the center will continue to heat long after you remove it.
Same with cakes. Whenever my friends bake a cake, they remove it from the oven when a knife inserted inside comes out clean. I've read this advice many times on cooking sites, too. But it's wrong, and the cakes in question are always dry.
You should remove the cake from the oven when the knife comes out slightly dirty. The cake will finish cooking outside the oven.
Not sure why you got downvoted, but this is exactly what I thought. Add the mini video that follows you down along the page, this site already has two of the worst features of the internet.
it's funny watching cooks and amateur chefs come to the same conclusion that professionals reached over one hundred years ago, I assume nobody asked, but with steak for example you use resting in a controlled environment to ride the temperature up to chosen doneness, nobody has ever (to my knowledge) thought it to do with preserving juices.
No! The meat internally is already cooking, and resting it a bit doesn't make it cold. It does cool down, but the resulting temperature is pleasant, not cold.
Well it's great that they are writing down reasons for resting that aren't total nonsense. The old folk wisdom about resting for the juice never survived any amount of critical thinking. But, it's unfortunate that they've still fallen short of learning anything about heat transfer, because they still aren't mentioning anything about the conditions under which the meat rests. The air temperature, the material the meat is resting upon, and the initial temperature, size, and other properties of that material are going to make a large difference in the outcome.
Meat is typically exsanguinated as part of the slaughtering process[1], so no. The juices that come out of e.g. a steak are a mixture of water and proteins such as myoglobin, but can also include fat.
Adam Ragusea has a video[2] on the topic that goes into more depth, though the same information is repeated across a lot of sources of varying quality if you do a quick web search.
Something that has always sounded really stupid to me about resting meat could be summed up by asking, “Are all of you people seriously letting your freshly cooked food get cold for a quarter of an hour before eating it?”
I might be able to understand if you unintentionally rested meat because you poorly timed the finish of sides, but as soon as food is cooked, it should be served hot immediately, preferably with warmed plates from the oven if it wasn’t in use for your cook.
Completely asinine to me that people are letting food sit to get cold before eating it.
Its not really getting cold, a big part of the resting is about the internal temperature increasing (at the cost of the outside dropping from 80 to 50 celsius, which is still more than warm enough)
There’s considerable difference between food sitting out for nearly 20 minutes and food served immediately after having been cooked on a cast iron surface, or a side out of a stainless steel pot.
I mean there’s no comparison. Same with fresh bread rolls out of the oven.
People are just overwhelmingly OK with literally cold food.
tldr: Resting meat after cooking is traditionally believed to retain juices and enhance flavor. However, new evidence suggests this isn't true. Resting doesn't affect juice retention; instead, it helps manage carryover cooking, allowing the meat to reach its target temperature without overcooking.
This is not news to anyone who actually cooks and knows how. (prepared for the downvotes for sounding snobbish but idk how else to say it)
Yes, the article points out that this is what you should be doing: removing heat 5-15F below your target temperature (varies greatly depending on the meat type and cut and thickness) and allowing carryover cooking to bring it to your target.
They show it in the article but thats why I love my Combustion thermometer. You can do it with any of them TBH but their app just makes it easy, tells you when to take it off. Cooking is a lot faster than I was used to, especially on the grill. Quality of my cooks has gone way up.
Why do people always have such completely nonsensical responses when it comes to stopping eating animals? It's not extreme. My family, including 2 young children, has not eaten meat for 4 years and we are super healthy, healthier and happier than most around us. I said "sentient" for a reason. I never said to stop eating everything.
my take away after wasting minutes of my life reading this is that you remove meat slightly sooner, rest for 5-6 minutes. that way juice is retained and internal temperature is on target when sliced.
No it isn't, and everyone is talking about those thermometers (there's a couple competing ones, all of them are leave-in, liquid and oven-safe, and have an array of sensors instead of just one) because they rule a lot and because Chris Young is a pretty outstanding presenter.
I'm sure there are people paid to talk about them, like about everything else, but that's not why people like Kenji and Gritzer are. Sorry, it's just a good product, and Chris Young is just an interesting guy.
> Young offers a different and credible explanation for the juice loss observed by many. It's not caused by whether or not meat is rested, but by the internal temperature of the meat at the moment it's sliced. According to Young, it comes down to vapor pressure: The hotter the meat, the more energy the internal moisture has, leading to higher vapor pressure that pushes liquid outward when the meat is cut.
So... you want to rest to bring the temperature down before slicing. The rule about resting isn't wrong in practice, it just had an incorrect explanation as to why it works.
> But my 1.5-inch-thick chops completely defied this: Even when I pulled one a full 15°F before hitting its target temperature of 140°F, it had reached 140°F and threatened to surpass it in under three minutes. Follow the conventional resting advice, and in many cases, you're going to blow right past your target temp.
This article is conflating different things. Obviously, don't overcook your protein. The best way to guarantee this is with sous vide. But in any case, the conclusion isn't to avoid resting. It's to pull the meat earlier to avoid overcooking, and then rest for the reason explained at the start of this comment.
They are contradictions. Let me be clearer, citing the end:
> The bottom line is this: It's a good idea to pull meat early from the pan or oven and let it rest, but only long enough to give it the time to slide up via carryover cooking to the target internal temperature, which you need to track closely.
Wrong. You need to let it slide up and then slide back down. The target internal temperature is for doneness. It's too high for slicing, very often.
> What resting is not: a fixed amount of time for the meat to sit, which risks it overcooking and losing its crust. Once again, it's all about temperature, not time.
This is a strawman. You've always rested meat until the temperature came down. The reason it takes time is because time is what brings the temperature down. The fix is not to not rest, it is to not overcook in the first place.
>Wrong. You need to let it slide up and then slide back down.
This is correct. Pulling the meat early means it will continue to cook while resting until the temperature comes down. It may slide up, but what you absolutely shouldn’t do is pull it early, wait 5 Mississippi, then cut into it. It needs to cool down at least 20 degrees C. 50 degree F. Still hot but won’t burn your fingers if touched. Put on some latex gloves, and cut away…
The article makes (or at least repeats uncritically) the same point about letting temperature come down. Ctrl-F "vapor pressure". It's just not in that exact sentence you picked out (where it's arguably still implied, since you're not going to eat meat still at cooking temperature). As for the second point: it's not a strawman. The version I heard years ago was the one about needing time for chemical changes that soak up the juice in the muscle fibers or whatever, not plain temperature.
What does that mean? Why is a particular temperature better or worse for slicing?
If it's juice retention, that is, lower temp = more retention, then the article seems to agree with this, but argues that juice retention isn't particularly important when it comes to final taste.
Retaining the juices in the meat has to do with the temperature at which the meat is cut. Resting allows the temperature to drop, which creates less pressure, so the juices aren't forced out of the meat nearly as strongly.
The title is click-bait. The major rule is correct, not wrong. But, now we know a little bit more about why this rule works.
> As the meat rests (and therefore cools) that vapor pressure decreases, and so does the juice loss. It's not about reabsorption or thickening as the juices cool, which is another common explanation that's been offered over the years. It's simply about pressure. Control for final internal temperature, and—rested or not—the juice loss is the same.
As a counterexample: let's say the only things I care about are juiciness of the center of the cut of meat and the time it takes me to make it. By the conventional wisdom I'd have to rest the meat, adding time, but now we know that I could simply keep cooking the meat for longer, since that will raise the center temp faster, and then cut it immediately after cooking.
Or another scenario: if I know the precise internal temperature for my preferred level of juiciness, I know exactly what temperature to set a sous vide to.
Sous vide steak, as mentioned by your parent post, is similar.
But when you remove your unrealistic constraints, it is absolutely realistic. There is a wide temperature band where a cut of meat will reach a given center temp faster than carryover cooking with a difference to edge temperature that is trivial enough that someone is unlikely to notice.
I disagree that the edge temperature difference would be trivial. The difference between the last 20 degrees in the middle coming out of the edges while they also lose heat to their surroundings versus making the edges even hotter as you continue cooking is quite a lot.
> now we know that I could simply keep cooking the meat for longer
Cooking longer at the same temperature is also pretty much exactly what the experiment in the article was, which found no statistically significant correlation between testing and juiciness.
The experimental group pork chops took less time from when they were put on the skillet to when they were cut (and when they would have been consumed if they were cooked by someone making a meal for themselves).
You're welcome to disagree, but the facts disagree with your stance.
I meant cooking significantly longer is outside the scope, since that implies different temperature (or a rubber brick).
Yes, cooking different times at the same temperature is exactly what I was responding to. The outside will be a lot hotter if you do that.
If the juice loss is the same, there's a missing factor here, why does only the middle temperature matter and not the edge temperature?
First, at the end of the article he does a taste test. In the taste test no one was able to tell whether the meat had been rested or not, so that's a reason you might not want to bother resting meat.
Second, yes he devotes a lot of the article to the discovery that juice retention is happening for different reasons than we thought. To quote him directly, he thinks this is important because "Food and recipe writers like myself have been dispensing inaccurate meat-resting time and temperature guidance for ages." If you choose to continue resting your meat, as many will, these insights provide you with better guidance in terms of how you should do it.
As a home cook, the taste test is convincing enough to me that if I'm making food for myself, I should probably skip the resting stage, focus on other taste factors, and see how it goes, as I'm always happy to save 10 minutes and taste is rather subjective anyway. A professional or commercial chef will likely have a very different but no less useful takeaway from this article.
All this to say, it was a great article and the headline's not clickbait.
I was always under the impression that if you pull your meat at let's say 128, resting it will bring the internal temperature up, finishing at like 132-134. Is this wrong?
Another important effect during cooking is the breakdown of collagen fibres (present in tough connective tissues which make some cuts of meat very tough to chew). This occurs in the presence of moisture at temperatures above 170F. When collagen breaks down the meat tenderizes and the collagen itself turns into gelatine which absorbs moisture and retains it within the meat. A gelatine-rich cut of slow-cooked meat (such as oxtail) can be very sticky and packed with flavour. This is one case where food can taste juicier with longer cooking times.
I cook til 125F, take it off, let it rest, cut. I have a probe that measures it in multiple points, allowing it to more accurately estimate core and surface temperature.
There are so many cases like this in cooking because no one bothered to actually test validate science as long as it produced claimed results (i.e. juicy steak in this case)
Please state units. In en_GB (at least) "pulling your meat" is ... ambiguous.
That's ~2.1Hz - Pretty normal. Perhaps get some soothing balm on hand, just in case 8)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vxsPLXX1QLI
Kenji’s original tests seem to confound this as well: every 2.5min of slicing produces steadily less juice, despite the fact that the steak’s internal temp should be rising for some of that time.
So the average pressure will decrease.
(Yes, for an ideal cavity, pressure is equal everywhere, but for meat which contains highly tortured paths and a three-phase state mixture for the vapors to escape from - there can be different pressures in different areas especially once there’s any flow at all)
And when you achieve that was-lower-then-higher-but-now-lower-again temperature, it should be more juicy
1. finish temperature (as mentioned in this article) 2. peak temperature
In these tests, the finish temperature and peak temperature were the same - he sliced while carryover cooking was still climbing. However, when resting, most people achieve a peak temperature (due to carryover cooking), then roll down the other side of the curve to a lowered temperature.
As you imply, a longer rest - in conjunction with protein pulled at just the right time - can likely result with both the perfect (to taste) peak temperature, and a lower (and more juicy) slicing temperature
Click-bait!? On HN's frontpage? Oh, say it ain't so!
I always thought the whole point of resting is to do with temperature rather than time.
See the chart halfway down here:
https://blog.thermoworks.com/coming-heat-effects-muscle-fibe...
The original meat resting rules were essentially engineering, when it is forced to run significantly in advance of science, in this case due to lack of sufficiently accurate measurement tools (instant-read themometers that can be left in the meat). They were discovered ad-hoc. They worked. But the theories behind them turned out to be incorrect.
Thermometers improved, the ability to control the cooking environment improved, and experiments could be run that contradicted the old theories about why it worked, and led to an improved methodology that could be used with more equipment.
This in turns leads to engineering better meals, even if only from the point of view of doing somewhat less work to the same result.
And the wheel will keep turning.
https://amazingribs.com/more-technique-and-science/more-cook...
Science requires measurement. Engineering requires cost benefit analysis.
Rules for resting meat are more like religion than science or engineering…resting meat is a morality play of socially acceptable and unacceptable behavior. Eating without resting is labeled crass because it is the sort of thing a starving peasant might do.
That’s how the results can be contrary to tradition.
I don't really like the article title though, the rule seems pretty much correct?
> Carryover cooking is greatly underestimated in both its speed and degree, and this has a huge impact on whether resting meat does or does not work well.
That has long been my main reason for doing it and my guide for how long to rest. Until the carryover has nearly or just stopped and the internal temp is about to or has just begun dropping. For thin skirt steak or grilled shrimp this could be about as long as it takes to walk inside, for a pork shoulder or standing rib roast it might be nearly an hour.
Also long been understood that there's no benefit to resting sous vide meat, since there's no carryover to manage.
Meathead is a singular dude who runs amazingribs.com. Wrote a good book too [1].
[1] https://www.amazon.com/Meathead-Science-Great-Barbecue-Grill...
Gritzer actually ran a relatively serious tasting experiment for this article, though I'm not sure how much it mattered to the point he's making.
The meathead article argues: - Resting doesn't change perceived juiciness the way you think it does. - Meat that you will slice on your plate continues cooking on plate. - Therefore recommends just cook to temp and dive in and don't do any traditional rest.
The Serious Eats article: - Tests the temp at slicing theory. - Says this means that appropriate resting time only has to do with aligning the carryover cook time with the temp you brought it to while cooking with the temp it will be at slicing - Suggests that the real benefit of resting is that it is easier to time and stick the landing with desired temp because of the gradual glide at the end - Therefore recommends: Using a rest, but shorter than traditional, just long enough as appropriate for temp control.
I like to sear my steaks in a cast iron skillet. I use an induction cooktop and tend to start at medium-high and ramp up to as hot as the stove will get. I think the ramp-up is important to render some of the fat without just letting it all evaporate.
I turn the steaks over frequently (30s intervals), which keeps the inside from cooking too much while the outside gets nice and crispy. I take them off the heat probably 2-3 minutes (but keep flipping! The pan is still really damn hot) before they go into the oven (at 400F).
I take the steaks out when they hit 120 and pull them out of the pan ASAP.
During the “rest” that follows I add pepper and butter to the tops of the steaks. The outsides of these steaks become way, way hotter than the insides. But the size of the layer that is so hot is very thin due to the frequent turning. So they don’t need to rest long, and the temp doesn’t rise too much once they’re out of the oven.
not every decision needs a cost-benefit analysis. though chomping down that many pounds of nice ribeye steaks has a not insignificant cost. to me it seems normal to ask about it.
Who determines the diet for sharks or gorillas?
Source: I do ketovore for 2.5+ years.
At any rate, do be aware that human biology is quite diverse and diets that work for one may not work for others.
Too much iron can cause serious systemic issues, especially for the liver, and yes, men tend to have worse symptoms for the simple reason that one of the treatments for high iron is bloodletting. Unlike women, men don't have a natural built in mechanism to do so regularly.
> At any rate, do be aware that human biology is quite diverse and diets that work for one may not work for others.
Only these type of diets may work for the diseases that I mentioned. Like it only works for some types of epilepsy.
All your studies are people just talking about their diet, eating meat & stuff. And that "meat & stuff" never works on treating any diseases either.
Feel free to link anything from "everything I've ever read about high red meat consumption" and we'll see if it's true keto/carnivore/ketovore.
I'm not suggesting it's better than your method or anything but well worth trying imo!
Can we do a study on that too?
hmmmmm. I want to grill two steaks, the same size, and to the same internal temperature on the same grill. Let one rest for ten minutes in a pie pan and cut the other into 4 pieces letting it also rest for ten minutes in a pie pan. Probably also wrap them in tinfoil. Then weigh the released juices at the end.
There is a huge difference between eating a steak that has rested allowing the vapor pressure decrease vs one that hasn't rested even though the internal temperatures in the middle are the same.
edit: I found a video of the experiment https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pYA8H8KaLNg
This was debunked a long time ago. You do want to sear the meat, but only to give it a nice and tasty brown crust due to Maillard reactions. Searing does not seal in any juices.
I can recommend the book Cooking for Geeks, it has some nice scientific explanations about this and some other stuff too.
I could be wrong on this but I think Kenji was the first prominent writer to debunk this. I bring it up given the context of who all we're talking about.
0 - https://amazingribs.com/more-technique-and-science/more-cook...
1 - https://amazingribs.com/more-technique-and-science/more-cook...
This is debunked. See myth #2 and #4 here:
https://www.seriouseats.com/old-wives-tales-about-cooking-st...
cauterizing a wound, btw, does seal in the juice.
In what competitions is it banned? There’s a lot more to an award winning plate than just a perfectly cooked steak.
If you mean those TV shows, then I would speculate it has more to do with being slow and boring to watch.
https://www.texoassociation.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/O...
And, atleast with a pressure cooker, comes out amazing.
I had assumed that correlated to the temperature... I would be smoking first, then sous vide if I was going for smoke and internal texture.
But if you're going for a bark/crust, I am not sure sous vide helps, as the moisture coming out of the meat is part of that process.
Imagine a glassblowing competition where participants were judged on how consistently they could make a certain piece. The people using moulds would end up winning, and they would do so with a fraction of the skill and effort.
And most people, even bbq judges, probably can’t taste the difference between a sous vide with smoke finish and a full smoker preparation.
But bbq competitions are about making the best ribs the same way car racing is about going around an oval the fastest. Equipment rules matter more than bare outcomes.
That's why silly things like plating often matter more in a restaurant than actual taste.
And none of this should be too surprising. Our brains are complex things that like to hallucinate details. If you tell someone a bottle of wine cost $1000, their brain will happily invent reasons why it's one of the best wines they've tasted.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2013/jun/23/wine-ta...
My assumption is you could because that oak flavor is pretty strong, but who knows.
Worst case scenario is you find out you still prefer expense alcohol :)
Green street is just ok for lots of reasons. I don’t think the sous vide is one of them.
Doesn’t this approach necessarily mean that some of the meat will be cooked longer than other meat?
So if the meat is at the target temperature - slice it right away. If the temperature is below the target temp, and the meat is thick, wait until the target temperature is reached, then slice it.
The trick is knowing how thick the meat is, how much the temperature will continue to rise after removal, and therefore when to remove the meat.
I don't rest meat to keep it juicy. I rest it to finish the cook. It's not quite ready when it comes off the heat.
Now I'll read the rest. :-)
Unfortunately most of that is undone by self proposed experts on cooking shows, blogs, tiktok, ...
Fun fact, Chris's co-author is Nathan Myhrvold.
I call bullshit. Resting the meat keeps the juice inside. This is objectively the case, whether or not some blind taste test agrees. (I'm not even sure why a blind test is relevant here...)
Cooking to, say, a medium-rare and cutting in right away will spill a lot of juice, whereby cooking to below medium-rare and letting it get to the medium-rare temp will leak hardly anything. It's dead simple to reproduce and obvious in practice.
I am aware of what SeriousEats is, but this particular article is sensationalist and was written for clicks.
A corollary to that is that if the meat is closer to target temperature when it leaves the pan, you should rest the meat for less time. I don't think this is part of the conventional wisdom.
You don't slice individual portions of meat before serving. If I order a pork chop or a ribeye at a restaurant, I'd be horrified if it came pre-sliced.
And for something like an entire roast, you want to slice shortly before serving so it doesn't get too cold.
Just account for carry-over cooking and cook it less initially, or sous vide.
Many times I've ordered a large cut of meat, like a porter house or a tomahawk (usually intended to be shared with the table), they have came pre sliced. I'm pretty sure even Peter Luger's will pre slice it for you even for an individual.
There are many, many instances where you do.
The context of the article is obvious. It's about things like steaks and chops served in an American/European style.
Saying that they can technically be served sliced is to miss the point entirely. This isn't about stir-fry or salads.
Resting of course does lower the temperature, which reduces juice spillage, but a) that's a secondary effect, and b) blind tasters turned out to not know the difference between meat that lost more or less juice due to cutting at a higher or lower temperature, so it probably doesn't matter.
Carryover cooking is what matters, and we should care much more about what temperature we allow the meat to rise to after removing heat, because we will overcook the meat if we allow it to come to the target temperature (or even within 10-15F of it, depending on meat/cut/thickness) before removing heat. The article advocates for removing heat much earlier than most people probably do.
Even that is not new. I've known this for long enough that I don't remember where I learned it.
Yes, this is the exact reason I always rest mine.
When you cook a steak on a cast iron, if you wait to pull it until the internal temp is reached, you'll end up either burning it or drying it out depending on temp.
The best way is to cook it as absolutely hot as possible to get a good sear, then just let it sit. As long as it's fatty enough(or you use enough oil, depending), the center will continue to heat long after you remove it.
You should remove the cake from the oven when the knife comes out slightly dirty. The cake will finish cooking outside the oven.
and another delicious L for James Lopez.
Adam Ragusea has a video[2] on the topic that goes into more depth, though the same information is repeated across a lot of sources of varying quality if you do a quick web search.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meat#Slaughter
[2]: https://youtu.be/gLvQzwjI-IM
I might be able to understand if you unintentionally rested meat because you poorly timed the finish of sides, but as soon as food is cooked, it should be served hot immediately, preferably with warmed plates from the oven if it wasn’t in use for your cook.
Completely asinine to me that people are letting food sit to get cold before eating it.
I mean there’s no comparison. Same with fresh bread rolls out of the oven.
People are just overwhelmingly OK with literally cold food.
This is not news to anyone who actually cooks and knows how. (prepared for the downvotes for sounding snobbish but idk how else to say it)
But you go on believing. Frankly, your intransigence tells me that they're more sentient than you.
It is about internal temp and managing carryover cooking.
So... you want to rest to bring the temperature down before slicing. The rule about resting isn't wrong in practice, it just had an incorrect explanation as to why it works.
> But my 1.5-inch-thick chops completely defied this: Even when I pulled one a full 15°F before hitting its target temperature of 140°F, it had reached 140°F and threatened to surpass it in under three minutes. Follow the conventional resting advice, and in many cases, you're going to blow right past your target temp.
This article is conflating different things. Obviously, don't overcook your protein. The best way to guarantee this is with sous vide. But in any case, the conclusion isn't to avoid resting. It's to pull the meat earlier to avoid overcooking, and then rest for the reason explained at the start of this comment.
> The bottom line is this: It's a good idea to pull meat early from the pan or oven and let it rest, but only long enough to give it the time to slide up via carryover cooking to the target internal temperature, which you need to track closely.
Wrong. You need to let it slide up and then slide back down. The target internal temperature is for doneness. It's too high for slicing, very often.
> What resting is not: a fixed amount of time for the meat to sit, which risks it overcooking and losing its crust. Once again, it's all about temperature, not time.
This is a strawman. You've always rested meat until the temperature came down. The reason it takes time is because time is what brings the temperature down. The fix is not to not rest, it is to not overcook in the first place.
This is correct. Pulling the meat early means it will continue to cook while resting until the temperature comes down. It may slide up, but what you absolutely shouldn’t do is pull it early, wait 5 Mississippi, then cut into it. It needs to cool down at least 20 degrees C. 50 degree F. Still hot but won’t burn your fingers if touched. Put on some latex gloves, and cut away…
What does that mean? Why is a particular temperature better or worse for slicing?
If it's juice retention, that is, lower temp = more retention, then the article seems to agree with this, but argues that juice retention isn't particularly important when it comes to final taste.