today I'm choosing violence because I'm going to challenge the belief that you need ripping hot temperatures to cook a great steak and get a perfect sear in my last video on whether basting works I seemed to have touched a nerve when I said don't believe the kitchen that you need a ripping hot pan to cook a great steak my goal for this video is to go deep into how searing really works and show you a few ways that you can get a great sear on your perfect steak for a great looking flavorful crust with minimal
overcooking beneath it while avoiding greasy Smoky and potentially fiery cooking drama unless you're into that kind of thing in which case stay tuned because we will definitely get into that too but first a word from our sponsor which is me or at least my company combustion Inc we've designed and built this Wireless predictive thermometer that you'll see me using in the rest of this video what makes it special well a bunch of things like eight sensors that find the true core of your food and measure everything going on in and around your food from the
surface to the center so it's physics engine can figure out how your food is cooking and predict exactly when it will be done the way you want you can learn more at our website combustion. in or check out the product links below now let's get back to our video and start with the appearance and flavor of a great crust which is built on the foundation of tastes Aromas and colors created by the Meed reaction up to about 350° F you might also like a bit of Ching on your crust which happens when the surface temperature
exceeds 350° and you go beyond the Meed reaction to pyrolysis and start turning meat into carbon I think this is important to understand you might be cooking in a ripping hot pan or grill but when you sear you want most of the crust to Peak at temperatures at about 350° F or so so that you develop delicious myed flavors rather than turning the crust into bitter tasting Char again if you like Char grilled Flavor in Your crust you want a few spots on the crust to get hotter than 350° but I hope we can all
agree that Charing the entire surface isn't delicious which brings us to the next topic water which is what makes the perfect sear elusive because your steak is pretty much water with some mixed in it hear that Sizzle that's the sound of droplets of water from the steak flashing to steam where the meat Meets Metal high heat rapidly evaporates water and concentrates the proteins amino acids and naturally occurring sugars in a desiccation Zone aka the crust if we get really close we can get a better look at what's actually going on as the surface of the
state dries out its temperature quickly rises above the boiling point of water and the mired reaction accelerates but just beneath the crust the temperature is stalled at the boiling point of water this is the boiling Zone surprisingly no matter how hot your Pan the speed that the steak will cook is limited by the boiling point of water just beneath the crust because this is the temperature the rest of the steak feels as the pan temperature increases water boils faster but not hotter as a result the thickness of the crust in the boiling Zone don't change
much despite the differences in searing temperatures by the time these steaks are cooked through the difference in the amount of overcooking beneath the surface is minimal grilling over charcoal at even higher temperatures isn't different the evenness from edge to edge is similar to the pan roasted steaks it turns out the amount of overcooking beneath the crust is mostly a function of the time the steak spends searing not how hot the sear is and because boiling juices beneath the crust puts the same speed limit on all of these steaks searing hotter doesn't cook any steak faster
than another but it can burn the surface before the inside is cooked through so how do the crust look on these steaks the steak cooking in the 325° pan starts out looking terrible but over the full cooking time its crust develops a uniform mahogany color that looks pretty good to me but if you prefer a shade darker just increase the pan temperature to about 350° meanwhile the steak seared in The Ripping hot pan quickly develops a better looking crust but over the full cooking time that crust becomes overdone and too charred for my taste and
the surface temperatures over hot charcoal are simply too high within a few flips I'd say that this crust is burned and the steak has been ruined this steak really needs needed a two- Zone grilling setup the takeaway is if you're going to pan roast or char grill even a moderately thick steak it's better to cook with a hot but not ripping hot pan or grill the steak Cooks just as fast there's not more or less overcooking beneath the surface and you'll get a nice looking and flavorful crust plus the lower searing temperature won't smoke up
your kitchen or singe all the hair off your arm searing at a relatively low temperature and flipping frequently is probably the simplest method to cook a respectable steak but you can do better by dividing and conquering since searing time and not temperature determines the amount of overcooking beneath the crust why not reverse SE or cook the steak SED first and is one of these techniques better than another for your perfect sear to answer that here are three Stakes one cooked from raw by flipping every 30 seconds in a 350° pan one pre-cook sub weed and
then seared for 1 minute per side and one reverse seared and also seared for 1 minute per side at 350° F all of these steaks have been cooked at the same final medium rare core temperature of 129° f you can clearly see that both the SED and the reverse seared steaks are cooked more evenly from edge to edge which is because these steak spent less time at searing hot temperatures since they were already cooked through and personally I think their crusts look better too at searing temperatures below 500° or so I found that reverse searing
has a slight advantage over subed cooking for a faster searing surface because the surface dries as the steak Heats in the oven while the surface of the SED steak is still quite wet but at really high searing temperatures the heat vaporizes any remaining water at the surface within seconds and on a hot charcoal grill I don't see any difference between the two techniques and in in a blind tasting that I did in another video on subid versus reverse searing I wasn't able to taste the difference either to summarize you can sear a great steak at
a relatively low temperature around 350° unless you want some Char on the surface in which case you should use a hotter pan above 400° or switch to a grill you should cook the steaks using a technique like SED or reverse searing first reverse searing has a bit of an advantage because it leaves less water the surface to slow down the sear but suid makes it trivial to cook the steaks to exactly your preferred dness but either way you should sear by flipping frequently which creates a series of short bursts of heat followed by a bit
of resting that lets steam continue to escape and dry the crust a bit before the next flip plus when pan roasting each flip moves the steak a bit so that the spots that didn't make good contact with the pan get seared on the next flip finally and this is probably the thing that will change how you sear the most cool the steaks before searing letting the steaks cool for 20 or 30 minutes drops the surface temperature enough that it takes more time before searing can overcook it you might worry that the steaks will get cold
in the center but they won't the center can't cool faster than it's heated and after searing you'll be pleasantly surprised to find the steak as warm all the way through this last step of letting your Stakes cool can be impractical in a fastpac professional kitchen but it can make cooking at home a lot more relaxing you just let your cook steaks hang out while you finish preparing the rest of the meal and then when it's time to eat give them a brief sear following these steps will give you a delicious steak with a great crust
and minimal overcooking but is it the best we can do no let's turn this dial to 11 with math stay with me for a moment this is the heat transfer formula get to describes the speed that heat flows into the crust the faster the flow the faster the sear we've mostly been talking about this part of the equation delta T which is the difference in temperature between the surface of the food and whatever is doing the Searing the bigger the difference the faster heat flows into the crust and the shorter the Searing time which means
less overcooking beneath the crust so mathematically it does make sense to crank up the temperature at the extreme is the blowtorch the flame temperature on a propane torch like this is usually a bit hotter than 2,000 de F so it'll vaporize water and sear the steak or your fingers almost instantly this is actually kind of a problem it's so extreme that you can go from tasty Meed flavors to Bitter charred carbon almost instantly you need to move the flame constantly and from a distance so that no spots spend more than a fraction of a second
searing it's almost unavoidable that some spots on the surface will catch fire and burn from the intense heat leaving a Telltale torched flavor personally I don't like the flavor you often get from a torch steak and if you're searing more than a couple of steaks or a big roast the technique quickly becomes impractical but if we look below the crust you can see that there is very little overcooking and I do like that what if what if there was a way we could sear nearly as fast as a blowtorch but without the risk of burning
the crust if we take a second look at the heat transfer equation there's another variable H that represents the heat transfer coefficient a measure of how quickly heat is well transferred it's measured in watts per square meter per degree Kelvin meaning the amount of power flowing across the Stak surface for every degree of temperature difference between the crust and whatever is doing the sear in an oven the heat transfer rate from hot air to the meat is around 50 when pan roasting or grilling it's about 250 to 300 but deep frying deep frying is special
its heat transfer rate is around a th000 that's 20 times more than oven searing and three or four times more than pan roasting or grilling it's capable of putting a heck of a reverse here on this Tomahawk ribeye steak that I've had resting for about 30 minutes and because you don't or at least you shouldn't he deep frying oil much above 400° F you don't risk burning the crust not that deep frying doesn't come without some other risks the handle on this steak is a nice safety [Applause] feature compared to air oil is a dense
liquid that can hold a lot of heat energy when the steak is added to this hot deep frying oil the water at the surface flashes to steam and the surface erupts in bubbles these bubbles do the job of a fan in an oven or air fryer as they rise they stir the oil and carry away the relatively cool steam forcing convection and continuously bringing the hottest oil to the surface of the Stak for an insanely fast and insanely delicious sear you might think this steak will be greasy but no oil and water don't mix and
beneath the crust the steak is still juicy so the frying oil doesn't make it past the crust there's no more oil in this steak than you'd end up with from basting in a pan and you can see how good this crust looks beneath the surface this steak is cooked beautifully from edge to edge so good I think I'm going to have meat sweats later if you're looking for the ultimate sear I think that deep frying is hard to beat maybe it's not an everyday technique like pan roasting or grilling but Perfection is rarely convenient what
do you think though what's your favorite way to sear are you team pan roast or team Char gril let me know in the comments below that's it for today and thank you so much for watching and if you enjoyed this video please be sure to hit that like button and click subscribe subscribers like you help me make videos like this one
