The Best Way to Cook Steak - The Reverse Sear _ Kenji's Cooking Show

Hey , Verus Kenji , uh I'm gonna show you how to reverse sear a big steak .

So the reverse here 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 Cook's Illustrated around 2006 or so .

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 because I'm pretty , it's pretty clear that I'm not .

But at the time , the reverse se was not really a known technique in , in the , in the period since we published that in 2007 , some people have brought it to my attention , mainly meat head over at amazing ribs dot com where you can find a full history of the reverse tier .

Um It was brought to my attention that a guy named Chris Finney 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 of years before I published it and Cooks Illustrated .

Um So 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 publish it and 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 pan to pan your steaks .

Um Anyhow , the process , regardless of the origins of it , um The process is um based on the , the idea behind so vide , which is where um 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 a 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 might be medium rare or whatever temperature you want it .

And then as you get closer to the edges , it gets more and more well done .

So you get this kind of bull's eye pattern .

And what the reverse here 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 and then you let it come up to temp 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 thick , this works especially well with thicke , by the way , it's not really worth it for anything thinner than like an inch and a half .

This is about 2.5 inch thick .

Um , two and a quarter to 2.5 inch thick , uh tomahawk .

So that's a rib steak .

Um , comes from the loin uh with a good chunk of Spinalis 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 .

Um We're going to put it on this rack on a sheet tray .

I'm gonna a temperature probe into it .

Ok ?

You want to go on the side and get it towards the center as close to the center as you can .

I have this temperature probes alarm set at 125 F .

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 F , which is going to be a medium rare .

It should take a steak that thick is probably going to take about two hours 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 , 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 121 125 .

Even up to around 130 is going to be in that medium rare range .

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 , all , I'm only using this big one because that's a Tomahawk steak and it's not going to fit inside a normal pan .

So with a Tomahawk steak like that , you would either do it on something like this , like a flat griddle with a channel or you can finish it on your grill .

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 till it's ripping hot .

So like smoking hot , OK ?

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 it takes , 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 gonna take this probe out now .

Um And I'm gonna double check my temperature .

You also want to double check your temperature with an actual um non , like not a leave in probe because the leaven 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 hand held thermometer .

All right , we're good .

We're at 100 2600 and 27 .

So we're , we're gonna be right around that sort of mid rare to medium range .

Um , which is for a fatty cut , like a rib eye .

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 .

Um , 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 a little bit .

All right .

So we are smoking hot , which means we're about ready to start searing looking good .

So , one of the , one of the reasons you , um , you start in a low oven like that is because , um , what happens is if you have a , a raw steak , there's a lot of surface moisture .

Um , and it takes a lot of energy to evaporate that surface moisture .

About , it 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 , 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 gonna help the steak , uh , sear better .

All right .

So , just a little bit of oil .

This is rice brand oil .

You could use any kind of neutral , high temp oil , rice brand 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 inventor of the chef's press who's based here in California , based in the Bay Area .

When we did that charity sale a couple of weeks back through the end of July , he said it was the , the highest selling month ever for the product .

And he donated somewhere between five and $6000 to Black Lives Matter .

And um , yeah , so thank you all for buying the chefs presses .

During that time .

There's still , you can still get them at chef dot com .

I don't take any money from them .

I never take money from for sponsorships .

Anything that I recommend I'm doing of my own will no money ever exchanged for recommendations .

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 .

Doing good thing .

You go just a little bit longer on that first side .

Oh , so if you were cooking sous vide , you would do a very similar thing .

You would cook the , cook the steak to whatever temperature you want to serve it at , you want whatever internal temperature you want .

So it could be 121 125 130 .

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 , um , 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 a very hot pan , it's very quickly going to rise from say 125 up to 135 .

It could take , it could take a couple of 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 sear does is that it gives you more like probably 10 or 15 or even 20 minutes before it starts to overcook in the oven .

So you have a , you have a 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 gonna make sure that we see this side .

Yeah .

I'm just gripping it with a towel like this .

I actually prefer reverse fear even though the technique originally , I developed it to be able to sort of mimic sous vide at home .

I actually prefer the technique over sous vide mainly because you get that dry surface when you're reverse searing .

So 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 the sous vide technique does .

So you end up with , I think just a better , better finished , better finished product overall .

All right .

And we are , we're done .

All right , we get a board the service 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 so I can show you that how that temperature gradient works inside .

There you go .

Look at that beautiful and see that temperature gradient or the lack of temperature gradient .

That's really uh and that is what the SUV with the reverse here gets you .

This is this , this steak is big enough to serve at least four people for dinner .

I'd say for hungry people even look at that .

Hm .

Perfect .

Perfect shabu .

Come on .

Well , they are in for a treat today .

Should you go ?

And here you go , buddy .

Right .

Everyone that is the reverse here .

Thank you all for watching guys gals and non binary pals and I will see you next time .

Bye bye .