- In front of me, I have
two great-looking steaks. They've got these beautiful crust. You can't smell 'em but I
can, and they smell great. We all know you can't
judge a steak by its crust so let's have a peek inside. So both of these strip steaks looked great on the outside, but cut 'em open, and what you see is this
one doesn't look so great. It's got that ring of gray meat that's overcooked, dry. It's just not what you want. This one, however, looks fantastic. It's nice and rosy from edge to edge. You're thinking, this
is "Cook's Illustrated," you reverse seared it, right? We love our reverse sear, but I didn't use that this time around. I didn't bother with a sous
vide circulator either. I used a method that was
faster and it was easier. This steak was cold-seared. (upbeat music) Before we get into cooking steaks, let's talk about our goals here. What we want is a really
great sear on the outside, great browning, a good crust, that's where a lot of the flavor is. We also want the center to
be cooked from edge to edge. I shoot for 125, 'cause I
like my steaks at medium rare. You like your steaks cook a little more, take 'em a little higher. There's also the bonus points. I want a method that is quick. I want a method that doesn't make a mess. And I don't wanna use
any special equipment. (upbeat music) So I came up working in restaurants and I learned how to cook a steak with a very traditional method. My chefs would have me put
a skillet on the stove, put a good amount of oil in there, crank the heat, and wait
for it to start smoking. So when the pan is hot
enough, screaming hot, lots of smoke, the steak goes in. And the thing they all tell
you is do not touch that steak. You get to flip it once, just once. Let's be honest, everyone peeks to make sure it's time to flip. What's happening, it's
developing a really great crust. You're getting a lot of Maillard browning. Once you get great
browning on the first side, you flip it over. Again, you wait and
wait and wait some more. By then, the steak is mostly cooked. It's pretty close. You slip it in the oven,
let it finish there. And you're just waiting for the center to hit 125 or 130, whatever
you're serving temp is. It's fast. You don't need special equipment. The crust it puts on a steak is fantastic. They look gorgeous. So the cons for this
method, it's kind of messy. It's kind of actually really messy, and you're gonna trash your skillet. And it's gonna take a lot of
scrubbing to clean it up again. And you might wanna have a
lot of windows open, fan on, pull the batteries out
of your smoke detector. It's not great. But even worse, if you cut into the steak, what you're gonna see
is a big ring of gray around a rosy center. As you're cooking the meat, you're pumping a ton of
heat into the surface and that heat will slowly work
its way towards the center, cooking the steak, which is what we want, but because it takes so long to do that, you end up overcooking the edges and that's why you get that gray band. Even professionals have a
hard time with this method. So enter sous vide. (upbeat music) Now, short digression. I was a chemistry major
before I started cooking. And it was really weird
to be in the restaurant and see lab equipment floating around. There were these immersion circulators, which are these machines
that can hold water at very specific temperatures. And they were being used in the kitchen. What they were being used
for was sous vide cooking. Now, sous vide means under vacuum. And what's happening is
you're taking your steak, sticking it in a bag,
sucking all the air out, and then you drop that
bag into your water bath. And then you wait, you wait some more, maybe a couple more hours,
depends on what you're cooking. But over time, the water
is gently cooking the meat so that it is at the
perfect temperature inside. After it gets there, you
take it out of the bath, out of the bag, pop it in a pan, and give it a quick sear on each side. You build up a great
crust in almost no time so you're not making much of a mess. It's pretty great. But, you know, there are
some drawbacks as well. You have to invest in
a sous vide circulator, and they can be pricey. You're going through a
bunch of plastic bags to cook your meat. Takes up some space on your counter and it's gonna take up
that space for anywhere between 1 1/2 to three hours. You compare that to a traditional method, that takes 10 minutes. It's a big time investment. Sous vide cooking is great but it wasn't always
accessible to everyone. Restaurant chefs could afford
to spend thousands of dollars on chemistry lab equipment, but you weren't doing that at home. Back in 2007, Kenji
Lopez-Alt developed a recipe for "Cook's Illustrated" based on this hack of sous vide cooking. And he dubbed it the reverse-sear. Here's how it works. (upbeat music) Take the steaks, pop
them on a cooling rack, put that rack on a rimmed baking sheet, and stick the whole setup
in a 275 degree oven. You wait for 20, 25 minutes. And what you're looking for is the center of that steak to hit 90 to 95 degrees. After that, you take them out, put them in a skillet and
give them a hard sear. And that sear doesn't
just build the crust, it's taking the steaks up
to your serving temperature. So you need to make sure
you're temping the steaks both while they're in the oven and then again when you're searing to make sure that they don't overcook. So the reverse sear method will get you what you can get with sous
vide, and it'll do it faster. You won't need to have
special fancy equipment for it, which we love. But on the downside, you do have to use a couple
extra pieces of equipment and you do need to heat your oven. So with a reverse-sear, we're getting closer to what we want. How do we shave off even more time? Enter cold-searing. (upbeat music) The only piece of
cooking equipment we need for cold-searing is
this non-stick skillet. I've got a strip steak here. And you can use any steak you want. Boneless steaks are ideal. The key is to make sure your
steak is 1 1/2 inches thick. I'm gonna pat this steak dry. I wanna get rid of all the
moisture on the surface. Next up, I'm going to pepper this steak, looking for maybe about 1/2
teaspoon of pepper or so. You can kind of do this to taste. (pepper grinder whirring) What I'm not doing is salting this. I'll salt this later with
one of my favorite salts. If you want and you have
the time and you remember, you can salt this guy
45 minutes in advance or up to a day in advance,
but you don't have to. The important bit is
that you don't wanna salt right before cooking. Salting draws out moisture,
and that will impact the sear. So next up, we sear. We've got my cold pan,
no oil, it's perfect. All right, let's get cooking for real. I've got the heat set to high, and I'm not worried about the fact that I'm in a non-stick skillet at all. The meat is gonna suck
some of that heat up and I'm gonna turn it down pretty soon. We need to heat up that skillet. And I wanna start driving
off some of the water that's on the surface of the steak so that we can get good browning. (meat sizzles) So what I'm hearing is
actually really good. Some of the juices are
starting to come out. The fat is rendering out of here as well. And that sizzling is the water, starting to get driven off by the heat. We're gonna cook the steak in its own fat. There's plenty of fat in here. It's more than enough. It also limits the amount
of fat that can splatter out of the pan and keeps this really neat. Now it's just a matter of waiting for this side to fully heat up for more of that fat to render out. It's been two minutes. Let's give it a flip
and see what's happened. Great, okay, don't worry. There's no browning, and that's
the way it's supposed to be. We're not trying to get all
of that color on the first go because it's actually easier to build up layers of color as we cook. So I'm just gonna let this
pan keep going at high heat for another two minutes on this side. We're gonna do the same thing to the second side of the steak. So this first four minutes
of blasting the heat and just letting the
steak kind of go gray, think of it as setting
yourself up for success. You're getting fat out of that steak, it's gonna be really flavorful, and you're searing your meat. You're also pulling those juices out. Those juices have the
proteins and amino acids you need to build a beautiful crust. As those juices cook down
and reduce in this pan, they can't stick to the pan. So they're gonna stick to the steak and that's what helps us build a beautiful, beautiful surface. Two minutes has passed. Give this another flip. Now what I wanna do is reduce the heat. What I'm looking for here is a nice medium and I'm not just looking for it, I'm listening for it as well. What I wanna hear is this gentle sizzle. I don't want like a really
loud, aggressive sizzle. I also don't wanna see any splatter. I don't want to see any smoke coming up 'cause that means we're
going a little too hard and a little too fast. The meat that's just below the surface is picking up a ton of
heat from that skillet. We want to let some of that
heat move towards the center so that the steak is cooking, but we want the rest of that
heat to get out of there, because if it hangs out there
it's gonna overcook the meat, and that's when the gray band develops. Every two minutes, what
I'm gonna do is flip it. Look at that, we're
starting to get some color. This is great. Still not a ton of drama. We're slowly building
up our layers of crust. And the heat that got built
up just below this surface while this side was touching the pan, some of it is dissipating into the air. The rest of it is moving
towards the center of the meat. None of it is staying
just below the surface and turning the meat gray, and
that's exactly what we want. (meat sizzles) Nice, I am four minutes
into cooking at medium heat. And sometimes, depending on
what you think medium heat is and how thick your
steak is, could be done. This does not feel done to me. If you've got an especially large steak, it could take up to another six minutes, 10 minutes total cooking at medium heat. So keep an eye on it. Check it with your thermometer as you go and it'll take as long as it takes. One of the things I like about this method is I'm kind of fidgety. I don't like looking at my
food and not touching it. And it's totally fine
to move this one around. If there're a little patches of fond, you can kind of mop 'em up with the steak so they stick to the
meat instead of the pan. (meat sizzles) Yes. (meat sizzles) I love watching that crust kind
of develop with every flip. There's something so satisfying about it. If I were searing a regular steak, my hands could not be right here. It would be way too hot
and way too splattery. This method is so neat. Makes clean up a snap. I'm about seven minutes in. It is feeling firm, which is a good sign that you should kind of start picking up the thermometer and checking. I don't like to go straight down. It's really hard to figure
out where the center is. Instead, I come in from the side. And to make sure I don't
overshoot the center, I'll kind of like mark
off where the middle is and then just stick the thermometer in until my thumb hits the meat. We are at 125. Let's get this out of
the pan and onto a board. Like all seared steaks, this
needs a five minute rest. If you slice into them right away, the juices are really
active and they're flowing, and they're gonna flow right out of there. By resting it, they kind of slow down. The steak cools a little bit. So all those juices, they're in the bite
instead of on your board. So this steak has rested for five minutes. Time to slice it open. Look at that cook. I like to use a coarse salt for this because it adds some crunch. It's not gonna dissolve right away. And that bit of texture is awesome. This is so good. It's juicy. It's tender. It's got great flavor. Pops of salt are wonderful. This is all I want in a steak. You can see why this
is my favorite method. It's quick, just as quick
as the traditional method. You get that great sear
and that edge to edge cook. And you nail the temperature, which is what sous vide and
the reverse-sear do for us, but no special equipment, no mess. We've modified this
method to produce recipes for pork chops that are perfectly brown and nicely cooked, super juicy. You can can even use it to make really great salmon
fillets with crispy skin. It's a great method. It is my go-to. Now just one more bite. I kind of like my steak sliced super thin. They're just extra tender that way. Mm. (upbeat music) So how do you cook your steaks? Are you a traditionalist? Have I convinced you to give
up sous vide for a cold-sear? Let me know in the comments
below, drop a like, and be sure to head over
to cooksillustrated.com to check out some other techniques.
I just came across this video but have yet to try it.
TLDR:
Advantages:
What do you guys think?
I've tried it several times, and it works as promised. Hands down the best, easiest to control, easiest clean-up way to cook steak I've ever used. Amazing results - it's like a magic trick. Highly recommend.
Follow her exact instructions. Cold pan, no salt, flip every two minutes...etc. You'll be blown away.