As you already know, just a few days ago I published a new book “Flawless Steak: Cooking from A to Z”, dedicated, no matter how strange it may sound, to cooking steaks. To give you a partial idea of what you’ll find under the cover, I’ve decided to post here an excerpt on steak rest – an important step after you’ve finished cooking a steak, but it is still cooking itself. In the foreseeable future, I plan to post other excerpts from my book, but for now –
Rest for a steak
While you were cooking the steak, you probably had the thought more than once or twice that you are about to fry the steak, put it on a plate and cut off a small piece of quivering pink, fragrant and juicy meat. By the time you take the steak of your dreams from the pan or take it out of the oven, this thought will most likely have time to reach its climax and displace everyone else. In no case do not succumb to temptation, otherwise all your work will go to waste: before getting on the plate, the steak must be allowed to rest.
Without going too deep into the physics of the process, there are two main reasons not to pounce on a steak with heat, with heat: When you fry a steak, the meat heats up unevenly: the surface is exposed to much more heat than it penetrates inside, as a result of which the outer layers of the meat shrink. releasing moisture – it is she, evaporating, squirts at the very beginning of frying.
As long as moisture remains in the pan, its temperature cannot rise significantly above 100 degrees, but when the crusting becomes less loud and intense, this means that the moisture in the pan becomes less and less. The temperature rises higher, reactions between amino acids and sugars begin – the very Maillard reaction that leads to the formation of a fried crust. But by this time, the steak had already begun to cook in the middle, the inner layers of meat also began to shrink and literally push the juices out.
If you cut a steak right after you take it out of the pan, all these juices that break free will immediately flow onto your plate.The second reason is the temperature difference between the outside and inside of the steak: immediately after cooking, the surface of the steak is very hot. while inside it has not yet reached its maximum. If you do not cut the steak right away, but leave it in a warm place for a few minutes, its surface will immediately begin to cool down, since the ambient temperature will be much lower.
At the same time, the temperature in the middle of the steak will continue to rise slowly at first because the outer layers are much hotter than the middle. After a while, the temperature will even out, which means that the cooking will continue .. Thus, technically, the steak continues to cook for a few minutes after you have finished frying it, and it is worth waiting for the meat to reach the required degree of roasting.
In reality, both of these processes are interconnected: as the temperature equalizes outside and inside the steak, muscle fibers relax, as a result of which their ability to retain moisture improves. Meat juices, first pushed into the outer layers of the steak, gradually come back, again evenly distributed inside. When you cut through a “rested” steak, you will no longer find a pink puddle on the plate: instead, the juices, and therefore the taste, will remain inside the steak.
Now a little more about what the word “rest” means in relation to a steak. There is nothing complicated in this: the finished steak just needs to be removed in a warm place and left for some time in order to complete the processes described above. The perfect example of this “warm place” is a baking dish, which must be covered with a sheet of foil and a tea towel to keep it as warm as possible. But leaving the steak to cool in the same pan where it was fried is a bad idea: even when removed from the heat, the pan is still much hotter than the steak needs to comfortably rest, and it will continue to slowly fry.
It is quite difficult to accurately determine this very waiting time, but the general rule is: the higher the degree of steak roasting, the less time it needs to rest. The logic here is very simple: the temperature of the surface of the steak is in any case about the same (and very high), but the temperature inside the lower, the lower the degree of roasting. This means that the longer the steak must rest in order for the temperature inside and outside to equalize. One way or another, there is no point in resting for more than 2,5 minutes for a steak about 7 centimeters thick, and if we are talking about Medium roasting and above, then 4 minutes of rest will be quite enough.
At first glance, there is nothing complicated in the process of rest, and it proceeds completely without our participation. Even so, we can help the steak reveal its qualities even better. To do this, before covering the steak with foil, season it with freshly ground black pepper and put a piece of butter on top – plain or with finely chopped herbs.
Once on the surface of a hot steak, the oil will immediately begin to melt, thereby preventing the crust from drying out and contributing to the juiciness of the meat. And when mixed with the small amount of juice that flows out of the steak during rest, the oil forms an emulsion, which can then be poured over the steak when serving. In addition to oil, you can sprinkle the steak with a few drops of sauce or vinegar (for more information on why to do this, see the “Steak Spices and Condiments” section).
I note that any steak needs rest, but if the steaks were cooked in sous form and quickly fried, they do not need a long rest, because the temperature inside the steak is already uniform, and the fried outer layer will cool down very quickly.