The Best Way to Cook Steak: The Reverse Sear | Kenji's Cooking Show

hey everyone it's kenji uh i'm going to show you how to reverse sear a big steak so um the reverse sear and i know people are going to start talking about this in the comments but the reverse here is a process that i developed when i was working at cooks illustrated around 2006 or so um and when i say i developed i just want to be clear when i say i developed i'm not claiming to be the first person to ever do this um because i'm pretty it's pretty clear that i'm not um but um at the time the reverse seer was not really a known technique um in in the in the period since we published that in 2007 um some people have brought it to my attention mainly meathead over at amazingribs.com where you can find a full history of the reverse here um it was brought to my attention that um a guy named chris finney uh was for i think it was the barbecue team is called iron pig barbecue but he was he was writing on barbecue forums about doing the reverse here a couple years before um i published it in cooks illustrated um so um i'm confident in saying that um well i came up with the process independently um i i sort of modeled it after sous vide because we were cooking sous vide in restaurants a lot those days um and that until we published it in cooks illustrated it was definitely not like a mainstream process certainly not what it is now we didn't call it originally call it the reverse sear um we just called it i don't remember what we called it we called it a new way to pins depends here stakes um anyhow the process regardless of the origins of it the process is um based on the idea behind sous-vide which is where rather than the traditional method of cooking steak where you would um in a restaurant what you would do is you would sear it over very high heat either on a grill or under a broiler or in a pan and then you would slide it into an oven to finish cooking that method works really well if your goal is to cook steaks fast which is usually your goal in a restaurant but what it does is it ends up giving you a sort of gradient a temperature gradient where the very center is it might be medium rare or whatever temperature you want it and then as you get closer at the edges it gets more and more well done so you get this kind of bullseye pattern and what the reverse sear does is you reverse the order of those things so you start it in a low temperature oven in this case we're going to go with a 250 degree oven you start with a low temperature oven uh and then you let it come up to temp um and then you take it out and sear it at the end and what that gives you what you'll see at the end is that it gives you a very perfectly even doneness from all the way from edge to center so what i've got here is a this works especially well for thick sticks by the way it's not really worth it for anything thinner than like an inch and a half this is about two and a half inch thick um two and a quarter two and a half inch thick uh tomahawk so that's a rib steak um comes from the loin uh with a good chunk of spinalas here which is my favorite part of a steak uh and uh yeah so we're gonna we got it seasoned salt and pepper that's it plenty of salt and pepper we're gonna put it on this rack on a sheet tray i'm going to slide a temperature probe into it okay you want to go in the side and get it towards the center as close to the center as you can um i have this temperature probe alarm set at 125 degrees fahrenheit and then i'm going to slide it right into a 250 degree oven and it's going to stay in there until it gets to 125 degrees fahrenheit which is going to be medium rare um it should take a steak that thick is probably gonna take about two hours uh at this temperature so this is a technique you use when you got some time on your hands in fact you could also add some time to the steak if you want if you have too much time on your hands all right so i will see you back here once this goes off which should be in just about an hour and 45 minutes so not quite two hours actually we're at 123.8 degrees so getting pretty close to 125 you could let it go all the way to 125 anywhere between 120 and 125 even up to around 130 is going to be in that medium rare range um all right so now that we're getting close to done we got to get ready for the searing portion so what i've got is this baking steel griddle um i'm only using this big one because uh that's a tomahawk steak and it's not going to fit inside a normal pan so with the tomato steak like that you would either do it on something like this like a a flat griddle with a channel or uh you could finish it on your grill um of course with a smaller steak that fits in a pan you can do this on a pan so cast iron but what you want to do is you want to really really preheat it until it's ripping hot so like smoking hot okay because the idea is that now you're going to spend as little time as possible actually searing the meat you want to build up a crust and that's about it so the longer a tank the longer it takes over high heat like that the longer it takes on a burner the more sort of that gradient inside is going to get built up so your goal is really just to sear it as fast as possible that's the whole point of sort of separating the cooking into two different steps all right so i'm going to take this probe out now um and i'm going to double check my temperature you also want to double check your temperature with an actual um non like not a leave-in probe because a leaving probe can actually transmit heat down its length so it'll give you a sort of false positive high readings um you always want to double check with a handheld thermometer all right we're good we're at 120 627 so we're going to be right around that sort of mid-rare to medium range um which is for a fatty cut like uh ribeye that's the temperature i like to go i like to go a little bit hotter than rare or a little hotter than even sort of the low end of medium rare because you really want to get it warm enough or at least i want to get it warm enough that the fat's going to start to render a little bit all right so we are smoking hot which means we're about ready to start searing looking good so one of one of the reasons you um you start in a low oven like that is because um what happens is if you have a raw steak there's a lot of surface moisture um and it takes a lot of energy to evaporate that surface moisture about takes about 50 times 50 times five more times five times more energy to evaporate a drop of water than it does to take that water all the way from zero degrees to 100 degrees celsius so the the thing that takes the most energy when you're searing steak is surface moisture evaporating surface moisture so by starting in a low oven you end up drying off all that moisture so what you see here is not actually like steak juices what you're seeing there is fat and that's going to help the steak uh sear better all right so just a little bit of oil this is rice bran oil you could use any kind of neutral high temp oil rice bran canola something like that grape seed and i'm gonna weigh this guy down with my chef's presses oh by the way bruce hill the um the inventor of the chef's press who's based here in california based in the bay area um when we did that charity sale um a couple weeks back um through the end of july uh he said it was the the highest selling month ever for the product um and he donated uh somewhere between five and six thousand dollars to um black lives matter and um yeah so thank you all for buying the chef's presses during that time they're still you can still get them at chefspress.com um i don't take any money from them i never take money from uh for sponsorships anything that i recommend i'm doing of my own will no money ever exchanged for recommendations um so i use these all the time they're really great for things like this you see how big the steak is and i can shingle them to really get a nice even sear across the whole surface all right let's see uh let's see how we're doing here good i can go just a little bit longer on that first side so if you were cooking sous-vide um you would do a very similar thing you would cook the cook the steak to whatever temperature you want to serve it at you whatever internal temperature you want so it could be 120 125 130 then you'd in a restaurant setting what you would do is you would leave the steak in the water bath for service and then when someone orders the steak you take it out and sear it that way you can have perfectly cooked steak reliably and be able to serve it quite fast you know the the other nice thing about the reverse sear compared to more traditional cooking methods is that that window of perfect doneness is much wider so when you're cooking in a traditional way with a very hot oven or very hot pan it's very quickly going to rise from say 125 up to 135 it could take you could take a couple minutes maybe even less if you're cooking hot enough so it's a very small window you have to get it precisely done the way you want it what the reverse here does is that it gives you more like probably 10 or 15 or even 20 minutes um before it starts to overcook uh in the oven so you have you have much higher likelihood that you're going to get a steak cooked exactly the way you want it when you do a reverse sear oh yeah look at that look at that brownie all right last last but not least we're going to make sure that we sear this side i'm just gripping it with a towel like this i actually prefer reverse sear even though the technique um originally i developed it to be able to sort of mimic sous vide at home i actually prefer the technique over sous vide um mainly because you get that dry surface when you're reverse searing so you um you can actually sear the meat better than you can a sous-vide steak and moreover it renders the fat a little bit better than than the sous-vide technique does so you end up with um i think just a better better finished better finished product overall all right and we are done all right let me get a board to serve this on should we cut into it shall we see how we did i'm just going to split her kind of open right now just so we can just i can show you that how that temperature gradient works inside there you go look at that beautiful you see that temperature gradient or that lack of temperature gradient that's really uh that is what the suv with the reverse seer gets you this is this steak is big enough to serve at least four people for dinner i'd say for hungry people even look at that perfect perfect come on oh they are in for a treat today should we go here you go buddy all right everyone that is the reverse sear thank you all for watching uh guys gals and non-binary pals and i will see you next time bye you

Channel: J. Kenji López-Alt

Views: 570,898

Rating: 4.8054695 out of 5

Keywords:

Id: pO8TUuSv7HA

Length: 13min 15sec (795 seconds)

Published: Thu Aug 06 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/Cudifying]

Hi Kenji, could you explain the way in which the meat renders differently when reverse searing it compared to using sous vide?

I've been using sous vide ever since I stopped doing it the traditional way of regular searing and kind of skipped reverse searing altogether - mainly because I thought it was virtually identical to sous vide but less accurate.

Thanks!

[u/dakry]

Your reverse sear article was the way I stumbled upon you. I have been cooking steaks that way ever since.

[u/Forgetheriver]

KENJI HAS SPOKEN

[u/not_a_flying_toy_]

does anyone have experience doing this with lamb shoulder chops? They are on sale frequently but kinda tough for grilling or pan cooking, but I feel you lose some of the flavor i like in slow cooking them

[u/bigby2010]

This is the way

[u/[deleted]]

So let it be written, so let it be done.

[u/H-H-H-H-H-H]

Would you get even less gradient by flipping the steak more when searing? Pros? Cons?

[u/sweatyeggroll]

Is there any way to add flavors that you would normally get with basting when using the reverse sear method?

[u/otisdog]

This is glorious