Tilt your pan towards you and allow the melted butter to pool with the aromatics, then use a spoon to bathe the butter over the steak to further flavor and develop the crispy crust. Once you've got a nice crust, lower the heat, and add butter and other flavorings like hardy herbs or whole crushed cloves of garlic. Start with a neutral oil with a high smoke point so you can really get it hot to sear your steak: canola, vegetable, grapeseed will all do fine. When the steak is cooked almost to your liking-we stick to around 125° internal temperature for medium rare-move on to your next step: searing! This allows the steak to cook slowly and evenly, similar to sous vide cooking. This method starts by roasting your steak at a low temperature, 225°, in the oven. Take your steak off the heat and eat.When we cook steak, we're looking primarily for two things: tender, juicy meat, and a flavorful, seared crust. This reverse sear method ensures we can have both! The best part? It's super easy and mostly hands-off.
Step 9īecause the steak has already rested and been cooked almost up to full temp so gently it doesn’t need to be rested again.
It should only take a minute to get a nice crust. Hit your steaks with the dry rub or salt and pepper. Get your cooker/smoker (or a cast iron skillet if you’ve used your oven) as hot as you can get it. Remove and rest for 15 minutes covered with foil in a warm spot. The internal temperature will continue to rise from the searing. Step 5Ĭook/smoke the steak until it reaches an internal temperature of 52✬/125✯ for medium-rare or just under your desired doneness. You can add some smoking wood over the charcoal for extra flavour. Put your steak in the oven or on your cooker/smoker using indirect heat. You can use your oven, but I like to use a Weber kettle.
Preheat your weapon of choice to 135✬/275✯. You’ll need some of your favourite commercial beef rub, or salt and pepper to taste works great. It should be at least one inch thick – the thicker the better. Here’s a rough guide of what you’re looking for.įind yourself a quality piece of steak worthy of the time you’re going to invest in this process. You’ll need a decent meat thermometer that takes the internal temperature to check for doneness. This is the perfect method for cooking a medium-rare or medium steak (or medium-well or well done – but if you have your steak this well cooked we probably can’t be friends) but if you like a rare steak, a hot and hard pan sear is still the way to go.
Then you control the Maillard Reaction – the many small, simultaneous chemical reactions that occur when proteins and sugars in and on your food are transformed by heat on the outside – creating a perfect crust. The method works by slowly and gently cooking your steak to just under medium-rare, so the steak is cooked evenly through the cut. First you cook, or even smoke the meat on a very low indirect heat before searing the outside over high direct heat. Reverse searing is (funnily enough) the reverse of this process. The restaurant method of cooking steak is to sear it over a very high heat, and then finish the cooking in the oven until the desired doneness.
WATCH: How to reverse sear a steak on the barbecue This method will have you cooking steaks better than most steakhouses you’ve eaten at. You’ve probably heard people talking about reverse searing, and it really is the best way to cook a perfect medium-rare steak every time.