100%. I've done just about everything you can do to a steak, and for the past year or so my bulletproof standard method has simply been "set toaster oven to 250, cook steak for 20 minutes until it's 110-115, then take it out and sear it". It's better than the circulator steaks.
Mostly because you can run experiments on simulation to see "how much does it change if I do..."
The difference between a 5cm thick and a 3cm thick was rather surprising to me that it changed it that much for what a 250°F cooking does for some duration.
It also provides a "cooking for 70 minutes says it should be X in simulation while the oven is providing Y" that something is off between the simulation and (unmeasured) reality and one of the assumptions of either the simulation or reality is off.
I too think that sounds shockingly fast, but maybe I should re-visit my approach for oven temp. I throw steaks into a regular oven at 200F and I might wait 70+ minutes for a ribeye to hit 120F.
Assume a Whole Foods ribeye as the reference steak here. They should not take anything close to 2 hours (you'll note that Kenji's guide agrees). Turn your oven up!
If you have a toaster oven, I strongly recommend the toaster oven. They come up to temp fast, and they have a much tighter band of temperatures than an oven, which is always +15/-15 from your set temperature. Holding a tight, low temperature is all you're asking from the oven, and toaster ovens are built to do that (ironically, they fucking blow at making toast).
What are the reasons traditional ovens have such a wide band here? It seems like with modern technology one ought to be able to cut that down a bit. Is it just physically infeasible based on the size of the space to be heated? Or is it tremendous cost pressure for consumer goods? Or something else?
A variety of things. More space is definitely harder to heat evenly, especially without airflow coming from something like a convection oven, or keeping relative humidity very high, such as in a combi/steam oven, but a lot of it is cost pressure. If you go far enough up market to Miele, Wolf, etc., you can find ovens that will keep a much more consistent temperature.
Amusingly, having not tested it, prior experience would indicate that my oven runs hot. Will throw a probe in there the next time I bake something.
All this being said, other than requiring a bit of extra planning, I have been quite pleased with the results of this slow cook. Maybe try a small temperature increment the next time I do it.
>set toaster oven to 250, cook steak for 20 minutes
That seems really fast, at least compared to the time I get with a regular oven. Either you're using really thin steaks, or your toaster oven's temperature is way off.
I'm cooking to temp, not to time; I pull them when the Thermapen says the steak's near 115. But I set the timer on my toaster oven to 20 minutes (after preheating, starting immediately when the steaks go in) and watch out of the corner of my eye for the display to go blue when the timer expires, which is when I check the steak temp the first time. I guess every once in awhile I end up giving it another 5 minutes, but it's pretty reliable.
Two things:
1. The toaster oven is probably more efficient than your regular oven (put an electronic grill thermometer in your oven and watch the temperature fluctuations; do the same with a toaster oven, compare).
2. I've usually got the convection thingy on in the toaster (I just forget to turn it off).
It doesn't much matter either way, though: the point is, it goes in the oven and comes out when it reads ~115 when I stick it. :)
I'm jonesing to get my hands on a countertop combi oven like the Anova.
You could automate this entire process with much better temperature control and an internal probe to get the timing right. I've done engineering on professional combis and what you can do with those is pretty awesome.
Anova won't be the one to make it in the mass market but eventually one of them will step up to kick off the next air fryer craze (since combis can do that too)
I really enjoy my APO, but honestly, for steaks, between it, reverse sear, and the circulator, I still go for the circulator most of the time. I generally will be juggling a variety of things trying to get them all to finish at the same time, so being able to hold the steaks there if I get behind is nice. The APO could do it too, but it's generally handling something else for the meal that would suffer from being bagged.
I have used the APO's psuedo vide mode for steaks using the probe and it does work very well and is quite quick. It's also killer for bread - way easier and (for me) better results than the dutch oven methods.
Now that the APO has a new tank design it solves the only real complaint I've had it it though, so I do highly recommend it. Between it at my Breville SOA I haven't used my regular oven in years.
I am too, but I assume countertop combis are going to do the same thing circulators did and cost and arm and a leg now and then like 1/3rd as much 2 years from now for much better products.
>It doesn't much matter either way, though: the point is, it goes in the oven and comes out when it reads ~115 when I stick it. :)
But shouldn't the oven temperature matter? The hotter the oven is, the hotter the outside of the meat will get, even if you pull out the steak at 115 exactly. If you want the steak to be as even as possible, you want the oven temperature to be as low as possible.
If you read Kenji's reverse-sear guide, I think you'll see that I'm right in the middle of his suggested temperature range. I've also triangle-tested steaks against circulator cooks; I'm confident I'm getting even cooks. :)
I just double checked, and not only is my temp right, but my timings are just about his timings too. I'm getting his mid-rare result 5 minutes faster than he does, but again, I'm cooking in a convection toaster oven, and I'm guessing he tested in a "real" oven.
Quality convection makes a big difference. Think about the experience of a sub-freezing morning with still air vs. a strong wind and the thermal dynamics become obvious.
I haven't tried reverse-searing yet, but will give it a shot soon. I only recently started getting more into cooking, and bought a sous vide a few months ago.
Out of curiosity, what do you use the sous-vide for? Steak is the "typical" use case but you seem to think it's not as good for that.
Having compared the methods in my own kitchen, I'm also coming around to the idea that the reverse sear is a better method than sous vide, because I seem to get a better crust on the steak (likely because the steak is dryer than what I can remove from the s-v'd steak with paper towels). But, I find this only holds true for really nice cuts like filet mignon. If I want to cook a cheaper steak like a NY strip, I think the sous vide method produces a much more tender piece of meat, probably because I can cook it longer without overcooking it.
I was a professional chef for many years before I got into coding and I very rarely use a sous vide at home.
The practical advantages of it have a lot more to do with timing, prep dynamics, and consistency than they do with final quality.
There are some things that it makes possible or easy that are otherwise nearly inaccessible to home cooks and that is cool if you want to play around with it. Or if I'm cooking 6 steaks for guests or whatever but that's not a problem I've been having recently. But otherwise I don't find too much value in it personally.
Definitely agree with the "cooking 6 steaks for guests". This is my secret trick at barbecues: I pre-cook a bunch of steaks that I keep warn in an ice-chest (with no ice, obviously), then as guest comes and goes, I sear them, which takes a few minutes only. Every group of arriving guest gets to eat a nice perfectly cooked steak, straight out of the fire.
My other secret trick is to sous-vide chicken wings, so I don't have to fear about contamination of my tools, people being like "is it cooked enough? It looks pink". After sous-viding, I leave them on a cold side of the barbecue until they turn golden brown: the meat is soft, moist and almost candied. It's fool proof as they'll never really have a chance to burn and they always come up perfect.
Non-chef but fairly advanced home cook here. When it comes to steaks I agree about the sous vide use. I have yet to be wowed by a sous vide steak I've made versus non sous vide. However when it comes to pork - sous vide is AMAZING. Pork chops come out better than non sous vide. You want a simple/easy/magical enternaining dish? Sous vide a pork tenderloin - your serving windows is 1-4 hours. You can't mess it up. Just put it in the water bath an hour before people arrive then whenever you want to eat - just pull it out, pat it dry and quick sear for a minute on all 4 side and voilla!
Weirdly, while I totally get what people love about circulator steak, I have never had a good circulator pork chop experience. The two tricks to pork chops I've discovered are to dust them with sugar and salt as far ahead of time as possible, and then to treat them precisely as you would a mid-rare steak. There's something about sugar and pork, I don't pretend to understand what it is, but it's pretty miraculous.
The one routine thing I make that the circulator is unimpeachably excellent for is sausage. Bring sausage up to 145-150 or so, and then toaster oven on the broiler setting for like 7 minutes.
Not a chef but I also found sous vide to cause more problems than it solves for cooking steaks. The biggest problem I have with it is that the fatty marbling does not render to the extent it does on a grill, because I can't afford to sear it as long as on the grill to avoid overcooking it. So I end up with a nice brown sear only on the surface, but then as soon as you bite into it you're met with almost raw fat. It's gross :)
There's a very simple fix for this problem, which is just to hold the steak for an hour or so to lower the temp (and give more breathing room for the sear) before you sear it off --- which also dries the exterior of the steak and improves the sear.
That's an interesting idea, thanks. I can see continuing to SV for cuts of meat that really need it, e.g. a whole tenderloin. Otherwise I still find it more work for less result than a charcoal grill.
Speaking of which it's annoying to reverse sear on a grill because covering it first for 10 or so minutes cools it down enough that the sear is not as nice as when it's done on the higher heat achieved without a cover.
A strip is not a "cheaper" steak than a filet. Filet mignon is a fine cut, it's low in flavor but very tender which means that it tastes better when it's extra rare. Well marbled cuts of steak are usually better at mid-rare b/c the fat melts a little.
I do like sous vide for very thick steaks with some marbling—so a strip is a pretty decent one for the dip. However, I've found ribeyes come out spongey when you sous vide them and are better off being reverse seared.
Edit: if you're shopping in the supermarket, filets will usually be more expensive. If you're buying prime dry aged from a butcher, it's a different story, mostly because filets aren't usually dry aged. Check Pat's steaks for reference: https://shop.lafrieda.com/collections/dry-aged-beef
You are missing out on some truly excellent steaks: the hanger is like a cross between the ribeye and the skirt; the skirt is no slouch either! and if you've got some Activa RM handy, you can make a triple-thickness skirt, which is incredibly good; the spider steak (compare to the "oyster" of a chicken leg) is maybe the world's greatest sandwich steak; the tri-tip, which takes a marinade far better than any of the expensive steaks, and which the circulator will make just as tender as a fillet; and the picanha, which is the single greatest grill steak --- I would trade 2 ribeyes for 1 picanha if I was planning to grill.
Another fun rather obscure cut is the Newport steak, which is a different cut of the tri-tip. It's a cheap steak, but surprisingly good. NY butchers tend to have them for pretty cheap, 8-12 bucks.
I went to Costco a couple days ago with the intent of getting some ribeyes, but they were even more expensive than filets if I'm remembering correctly. Probably one of the first times in my post-college life I've balked at the price of a grocery store item. I got a package of tri-tip steaks twice as large for a bit less, and they were delicious.
Supermarket steaks sure, but a good (dry aged) steak is expensive and they don't often dry age filets. Check the price differential for Pat's dry aged vs prime:
>Filets absolutely can be and are dry aged. They're again just even more expensive than a dry aged strip steak.
Even as someone that has a dedicated dry aging unit, I don't know that I would recommend dry aging filet. I don't count the pellicle as waste, since I make use of all of it, but you do have to cut off a decent chunk - it's too tough to eat on the steak itself. The end result is that you just don't have a whole lot of steak left over.
You might see "dry aged" stuff for 2-3 weeks, and there's significantly less pellicle, but it's not nearly the same thing as something that goes for 60+ days.
If the pellicle has the type of bacteria or mold on it that would prevent you from eating it, you should also generally not eat the rest of the meat. Not all mold can be told apart by appearance, so please do not take this comment as gospel on what is a "safe" mold, but the general consensus is that white mold is usually OK. In this case, I would not reuse the parts that were moldy, however.
I have a dedicated dry aging setup that I truss my subprimals up in, and then it recirculates air, including through a UVC light. I've never had any mold form, even on 120+ day dry ages. I haven't gone much higher than 120 days, though - I enjoy 240 day dry ages, but not in large quantities, and I also lack the patience, so you might see more going to that length. But in the 60 to 120 day range, however, I have never had mold form in any quantities large enough for me to notice.
Oh that's fascinating, I've only read a seriouseats article that uses a minifridge and fan. But UV sounds like a good idea for doing this, is your setup based on amazingribs or can you recommend another resource to look into?
Strips and ribeyes are much more forgiving than filets because filets have very little intramuscular fat. Strips are ribeyes also taste much better than filets because filets have very little intramuscular fat. Don't buy filets. :)
I've done the same tests with ribeyes and strips and, in a triangle test, you can't tell the difference between a circulator cook to 54c and a toaster oven reverse-sear cook to 45c (both followed by a hard sear). I really can't see much reason to circulate steaks anymore; there isn't even really a convenience win to it.
I fail to see how a circulator is more convenient or effortless. For starters you need to prep a bag and a pot of water if you're using a circulator. On the other hand with reverse sear all you need to do is stick a thermometer in, throw it on a pan/rack and put it in an oven. After you're done with the circulator you have to wrangle with a wet bag full of beef liquid and dry off the steak (otherwise your sear will be impaired). With reverse sear you can take it directly from the oven to the pan. During the sear stage, the timing you need is minimal for both. You only need to get the pan as hot as you can get it, and sear both sides until it's charred to your liking.
I don't really understand how you can "fail" to see the convenience. The convenience comes from the ease of getting it right. I consistently over-cooked steaks with the reverse sear method. Maybe half the time. With sous vide, I never---literally never---overcook a steak.
That's the convenience. I don't have to worry about the temperature. I drop it in the bath and I take it out at my convenience.
I'm interested in what tended to go wrong for you with the reverse sear. One tricky thing is that the temperature increases nonlinearly, so if you take a couple readings and get a mental trajectory of when it's going to hit 115, you're likely to be wrong. The flip side though is that cooking at 250 (or, sheesh, 200, as they're doing across the thread) gives you a _real big bulls-eye_ to hit.
Nobody's gonna say that a circulator steak is bad. It's the second-best way to cook a steak. :)
>so if you take a couple readings and get a mental trajectory of when it's going to hit 115, you're likely to be wrong
I just keep a thermometer in for the entire duration of the bake time. Someone in this thread posted a screenshot of them doing the same thing with some sort of bluetooth thermometer.
If you buy whole or fractional cow, the butcher will typically hand you boxes of separately vac-sealed cuts. At that point, it's really hard to beat the convenience of "grab one, throw it in the circulator". You don't even need to defrost it.
For me, the convenience is that you can prep the bag and pot long before doing anything else. It’s not necessarily less work, just better distributed IMO
Not really. You have the same problem either way, because you've gotta sear both steaks. If you're going to need to hold the cooked reverse-sear steaks, bring them up to 120-124 (your final target temp is 128-132) instead of 115.
I get what you're saying (I've got like 4 different circulators here, I'm not against them!) but the reverse sear is forgiving and flexible enough that I don't really even get a convenience win from it.
(For calibration: my modal steak is a Whole Foods ribeye or strip, unmodified except for being salted ahead of time).
For me the convenience factor has to do with the fact that I can vacuum seal and freeze a bunch of meat at once, then it's just a matter of tossing the vacuum sealed bag in the circulator a few hours before dinner. Then I just need to pull it out, hit it with the torch, and we're ready to eat. I suspect the longer cooking time to account for the meant being frozen helps with fat rendering.
We buy half a beef every six months or so (split with my parents, so I guess it's technically 5/7th's of a half? 5/14th's of a cow?). For a few hours on a weekend doing some prep/portioning, I can dramatically reduce the workload for several week's worth of meals.
Obviously there's other tradeoffs involved and different personal circumstances to consider, but for me the circulator wins out from a convenience perspective.
Likewise, I’m 100% not against a pure reverse sear. I just prefer to focus on getting the sides prepped and done, knowing that whenever they’re ready, the meat’s only a few minutes out.
I agree with you, and I’m not entirely sure why, because I think it involves more than just the crust. It has something to do with the interior of the meat as well.
I own a small Breville oven, and since it’s PID controlled, I set it at a very low temperature like 160 F and then put a separate probe in the meat to pull it at just the right temperature (takes a few hours). I end up with edge to edge evenness and a nice crust as well. It beats the Joule every time I’ve tried it.
I will say that I haven’t found anything that beats sous vide for chicken and duck though.
Yep yep yep. And I’ll also echo don’t use much smoke - I went way overboard with some mesquite to see what it would be like, and it was fine but definitely detracted. A light smoke then a char is chef’s kiss though.
That's what I do (but I got it from the first episode of "Good Eats Reloaded"), except that I go until the temperature near the center is the temperature I want for the final temperature rather than the 15℉ below that which is what that article recommends. I'm using a 200℉ oven (well, that is what it is set to...I don't know how accurate that is), and found it heats the steak gently enough that the center temperature doesn't really rise much after it is taken out.
The searing is on the hottest my stovetop can make my pan, which is about 500℉. I do 45 seconds on each side. That doesn't seem to be long enough to have much effect other than near the surface.
Here's some graphs of temperature changes during sears (also bearing in mind that the steak keeps increasing in temperature for a couple minutes after you pull it from the oven).
Taking it up to 115 also gives you some wiggle room if you want a really intense sear, or if you want to baste (I usually throw a handful of thyme in the butter while I sear).
While we're (or, ok, I'm) nerding out on this stuff, let me put a word in for the idea that this is how you should cook a pork chop too. Like, exactly like a steak; maybe the only difference is that a pork chop likes a little big of sugar with the salt you apply an hour before cooking.
Maybe take a chop to mid-rare instead of Pittsburgh blue rare, but otherwise: just like a steak. Kind of a revelation the first time you do it.
For me one of the biggest revelations for cooking damn near everything was "of COURSE moisture ruins the ability to get a good sear, how did I not realize that before"
So many things come packaged wet, or at least moist, and then I'd get a pan ripping hot... and still have a mediocre sear.
It's something I learned for cooking steaks but has been pretty universally applicable.
That doesn’t seem very useful for day-to-day cooking. How often do you cook steaks that are so thick? A typical home meal will be more around half an inch.
My favorite method (and no guy tasting my steaks has ever said anything but "hmmmmm"): use salt on both sides the day before (to remove moisture), keep the steak in the fridge until the last moment (to keep its temperature low and limit the risk of overcooking the inside), meanwhile put a decent amount of vegetable oil in a pan, wait until its viscosity is reduce to that of water (this indicate high temp, that will remove any further concerns with moisture), put the steak in (careful with the oil projections) until it gets brown on one site, cut the heat (the oil temperature is sufficient to finish the cooking), turn it over to sear it on the other side - done!
It takes about 5 minutes or less depending on your stove, it will get you the rare meat inside, yet the delicious outside - just like the picture in the article, except it's way easier and faster.
It will work best on "cheap cuts" as fat fried this way tastes perfect.
For keto followers, serve with Otorogi mustard. No extra salt is needed as even if you try to remove the salt you used the day before, enough will remain to give a great taste.
Try it both ways, yours and the reverse sear. Don't just do a subjective taste test, but rather take a cross section of both steaks. You should find that your pan-grilled steaks have a much bigger band of grey meat --- a much more fluid gradation from gray/seared to pink/rare --- than the reverse-seared steak.
That's the point of the reverse sear (which is the opposite of what you're doing); "cook" the steak (bringing it up to almost its desired final temperature) very slowly at low heat, so the whole steak cooks consistently and evenly (almost the same color edge-to-center) and then sear it. You also get a better sear, because the cooked steak is drier than the one you pulled out of the fridge.
(Salting ahead of time probably doesn't remove moisture; the steak reabsorbs the liquid it sweats out).
Having said all that: some people just prefer steak that isn't edge-to-center the same doneness, so your method might just suit your tastes better.
> You should find that your pan-grilled steaks have a much bigger band of grey meat --- a much more fluid gradation from gray/seared to pink/rare --- than the reverse-seared steak
I like meat rare, so the grey band has been one of my concerns. But if the oil reaches a high enough temperature while the steak comes directly from the fridge, the coldness of the meat is often enough to prevent the grey band.
My method depends on a very high temperature gradient, and in my experience is indistinguishable from the reverse sear, while only taking a fraction of the time
> (Salting ahead of time probably doesn't remove moisture; the steak reabsorbs the liquid it sweats out).
Very possible; it's likely that leaving the steak in the fridge uncovered is what removes a lot of moisture.
It sounds like you're going for black-and-blue, char on the outside but still mooing in the center. It works for lean cuts like filet but if you try it with fatty cuts like ribeye (my particular favorite) then the fat doesn't render and the overall effect is less juicy and flavorful.
That seems like a silly prohibition. The taste is kind of the whole point; if one prefers the taste of "sear then cook" over "cook then sear", then great. Whatever floats your boat. So what if the presentation doesn't meet some arbitrary standard? Unless you're cooking for Gordon Ramsay or something like that, hardly anyone's gonna care, 'cause steak is steak and - barring being burnt to a crisp - will be delicious all the same.
Like the above comment I also usually get cheap supermarket cuts which tend to be quite thin.
The couple times I tried reverse searing a 1/2" supermarket steak, I ended up overcooking. But I might try it again with a lower oven temperature, or refrigerating before searing.
Meanwhile, traditionally pansearing a thin steak works, I just flip and scoot it around until there's some crust, then let it rest. I think that's what they were talking about, simple method that works.
Hah. Try ordering a steak any temperature above medium or up at some NYC steak houses and they'll give you a charred hockey puck because they're assuming you're going to drown it in ketchup and can't taste the difference anyway. It's not always about meat quality or whatever stick the chef has up his butt about serving it barely warmed over. For some of us uncooked / undercooked bloody and gelatinous steak is downright disgusting. It's a texture thing: I don't want rubbery meat in my mouth.
At least for me, I love it when a place serves steak on a hot metal plate. They usually sear it and go under a little, assuming it'll be cooked further just from the plate during delivery. I can cut my steak into little pieces and push it the rest of the way myself. The chef doesn't try to substitute strip for filet because he's a pretentious snob and I don't have to eat gelatinous, bloody steak for the same reason. Not every wants beef sashimi.
Do you like your steak well done or more rare? Overcooked is rubbery. If you're eating rarer steak that's turning out rubbery, it's a shitty cut of meat.
That doesn't make sense, because the major difference between a properly cooked steak and a "charred hockey puck" is texture, not flavor, and ketchup isn't going to mask that.
Trust me when the meat's so burnt and dried out that you have trouble getting a knife through it, you don't want any part of the flavor that's left behind. I haven't set foot in Bobby Van's on Park Avenue in a decade after that fiasco.
Have you tried just ordering your steaks medium rare? That's what I do, and I've never had the type of trouble you speak of ordering at steak houses in NYC.
Plus, some chefs respond to “well done” with a lesser cut of steak, figuring the recipient isn’t respecting the ingredient.
This is also a myth (it comes from Kitchen Confidential, I think?). What's really happening is that you're probably getting a thinner cut of steak (same weight, different shape) so your entree finishes at the grill station at roughly the same time as everyone else at your table's does.
Why buy an expensive and tasty meat and put some sugary sauce on it? No offence intended, it's just that this baffles me. The only thing I would put on a steak besides salt is black pepper if I feel feisty.
Bearnaise, hollandaise, red wine reduction, roquefort cream, lemon + olive oil, salsa verde, green peppercorn, garlic butter, bordelaise, au poivre --- not saucing a steak is a wasted opportunity for deploying some of the world's great sauces.
What's beautiful about a steak is that it transcends the collective human culinary craft. It's like this pure thing that prove god exists. All of those sauces, those creations of men, are more for making poorer quality steaks more palatable than elevating the best steaks. There is a reason restaurants that specialize in serving high quality steaks generally forgo the sauce.
Go pull up a list of the top steak houses in NYC, or in Chicago, or in Los Angeles, and find me the steak house that doesn't have a steak au poivre, or a bunch of other sauce options. What you're saying about steak restaurants is just not true at all.
Also, the best steaks that you're getting in steak houses are honestly pretty boring (at least, until you dry age them halfway to the point of rot) and if you think that a prime ribeye is the acme of cuisine, I really recommend you go out and find yourself some birria.
Minor nit about an offhand comment, but, to be fair, a proper dry aging setup really has minimal to no risk of actual rot. Sanitary conditions and good air circulation will let you go pretty much indefinitely without worry, though from what I've seen of 400-700 day dry ages, you're really not getting much left that's usable as steak.
I am tired of people acting like their bang average pub steak has any semblance of an exquisite culinary experience. Yeah, don't sauce your A5 Wagyu or beauty marbled meat from a cow that lived like a queen. But, the 20$ filled mignon that grew up without getting shoulder massages is as mundane as any other 'decent cut of an animal'.
That's not to say that I don't like a good simple steak, but there is nothing extraordinary about a grocery store cut of meat to warrant eating it with just salt and pepper all the time. Hell, at least goat, elk or salt water fish are gamey enough to have enough complex flavors going on by themselves. Steak is honestly, a little one dimensional.
IMO, a medium rare, dry brined and cast iron seared fatty steak with some chimichurri on top is admittedly excellent. Also, complaining about a welldone steak not being as juicy as a medium rare steak is ridiculous. But if thats what they like, then making fun of people's culinary tastes because you have a specific classist hangup about your food is snooty and stupid.
Agreed. However, effectively saying "I don't care about the meat, just drown it in sauce" is a different matter. The article is intended for those who do care about grilling good and flavorful steaks.
With pork ribs I actually agree: I drown them in BBQ sauce and pretty much only care that they are tender.
With steak and cow cuts... hey, I'm Argentinian, we care about our grilled meat [1], the thought of just not bothering about how much it's cooked personally offends me!
[1] though not most restaurants. Given the importance beef cuts have in our diet, it's surprising most restaurants just don't care. They will either serve you meat so bloody the cow might as well still be alive, or something that is hard, chewy and not tender at all ("the sole of a shoe"). Honorable exceptions exist and tourists seem happy even in the worst restaurants, so what do I know?
As a child, my grandfather would serve filet mingnon at family holidays, and I would drown it in A1. It is only as an adult that I truly understand the severity of my sin.
That's not much of a sin; there isn't much flavor in a filet to cover up. It's more a textural experience.
But also just this idea that a steak is a pure thing meant to be enjoyed without a powerful sauce --- some of the best sauces in cooking were invented for steaks. Deglaze a steak pan, cook down some shallots, hit it with some cream and maybe a shot of whiskey, and break up some Roquefort in it while the sauce reduces. It's an overwhelmingly flavorful sauce --- invented for steaks. Steaks are delicious. Sauces are delicious. Steaks and sauces are synergistically delicious.
Myth #3 (Bone-in steak has more flavor than boneless) seems a bit of a strawman, the version they disprove is "the bone somehow imparts flavour onto the meat", but they then go on to say that:
> I personally find the tiny bits of connective tissue-rich meat, fat, and gristle stuck to the bone to be the tastiest part of the steak
So yeah, unless you can get the bone out perfectly you'll get more flavoursome meat if you leave it in.
Also it's not entirely insane to believe bones impart flavour, since marrow is incredibly flavoursome, though you probably won't be able to cook bones enough to get the marrow out.
The marrow you're getting out of a marrow bone (ie: the marrow you're getting when you order a dish at a restaurant that has "bone marrow" in it, or features marrow) is also not the same kind of marrow as is in the thin/small bones you're getting in a steak. No, I don't think marrow is making bone-in steak taste better.
(Marrow, though, would make a steak taste better! Order a marrow bone, cook the marrow, and then baste your steak with it when you sear it.)
> Also it's not entirely insane to believe bones impart flavour
Brown stock is made from roasted bones, among other things, so I too feel somewhat skeptical about the claim that bones cannot import at least some sort of flavor.
With brown stock, you're eating bits of the bone. With a bone in steak, you're eating bits of meat that have been near the bone.
It's not impossible that it would have an impact, but there's no obvious mechanism either. (And as the author points out, there's no particular reason why, even if flavour transfer was happening, it'd go the direction you want either.)
He tested this, for whatever it's worth to you: bone in, bone off, and bone detached and re-attached with a foil shield between the bone and the meat. Indistinguishable.
I understand that, and fully share his view that "tiny bits of connective tissue-rich meat, fat, and gristle stuck to the bone to be the tastiest part of the steak".
I can also easily admit that it's possible that the "bone-in steak has more flavor" argument might actually just be a consequence of the above: people leaving the bone on may mistake the flavors of said meat and fat for flavor imparted by the bone, rather than being innate.
However, I'm trying to weigh the one source here calling this a myth against plenty of reputable Chefs who subscribe to this myth - not just with steak, but also with poultry. It's quite possible that these Chefs are fooling themselves (they frequently do; I've seen enough contradictions), but it nevertheless is an extraordinary claim.
This question, as I just learned from Google, has an interesting answer: modern steak knives have their current shape because they're derived a specific letter opener.
Pure conjecture: steak knives are sharpened knives. It is easy to grind an edge that terminates in a point than a flat. Compare the detail of the blade near the handle to the point, the point is much more precise. I think it also helps symbolically since kitchen knives are sharp and have points. You won't mistake the steak knife for a butter knife.
This author is such a treasure. Even if every one of the recipes was awful, it would still be a great site/book just for trying all these things and confirming or debunking them.
Kenji is an absolute legend in the culinary world. I highly suggest you checkout his youtube channel, his wealth of knowledge (backed by his own experiments) is simply unmatched.
In the home cook world I guess? In professional circles he's respected within his niche (making advanced technique accessible to home cooks) but not particularly influential beyond that.
IDK if he made techniques accessible. I found his content interesting but pretty over the top. His stuff feels more like myth busters for cooking. Entertaining possibly educational but idk how its always practical. He has some thing about tonkotsu ramen, that it needs to be this big two day boil event. Emphasis on need. I threw some pork bones in a pressure cooker and it was just as good.
Almost all the myths busted in this article I have seen busted in other places and for good reasons. There are one points on which I disagree: The "poke test" is not trivially easy, but it is easier than most people think. Squishy is too raw. The moment after it stops being squishy is just right. If you can grok that, you can do the poke test.
Secondarily, while it is true that letting meat come up to room temperature does not make a difference by itself, the article does point out that one effective option for seasoning meat is to do it at least 45 minutes before cooking. You might as well let it come up to room temperature in that time, too.
> Myth #6b: "If you cut it open to check doneness, it will lose all its juices."
> The Reality: Again, the amount of juice lost by a single slit-and-peek is completely inconsequential in comparison to the whole piece of meat.
I think this one might depend a lot on how sharp your knives are. And most people that I know have dull knives. Thus, when cutting a steak to peek, they end up pressing it, which releases juices. So this wouldn't be a myth for most people I know.
This isn't a guess. This is something that applies to most people I know. That means that this "myth" is true around me. I've cut steak open a lot, and I can see easily that more juices flow out when I use a dull knife compared to when I use a sharp knife. A simple thought experiment: do you think cutting open a steak with a razor blade will make the same amount of juice flow than with a butter knife? I know for a fact that the razor blade will spill almost no juice, and the butter knife will spill a lot, by pressing the steak.
The question is now: Do most people have dull knives? Or do they have sharp knives? Most people around me have dull knives, except for chefs. I've seen lots of cooking videos, and chefs often tend to have good and sharp knives. So my guess here would be that chefs have sharper knives than most people. Meaning that a chef can't properly test this myth unless they take this factor into account.
I haven't been able to find any data on knife spending, or average sharpness of knives depending on if people are chef or not. Here's an experiment we could try: have people evaluate the sharpness of a single knife, and see if non-chef tend to evaluate it as better than chefs.
I'll finish this by saying I have a huge respect for J. Kenji López-Alt. I only raise that point because here, I believe being a chef can introduce bias.
> I know for a fact that the razor blade will spill almost no juice, and the butter knife will spill a lot, by pressing the steak.
> The question is now: Do most people have dull knives?
I would say the question is: Does cutting a steak with a dull knife cause enough juice loss that it's actually going to be noticeable in the finished steak?
Even the author admits that you lose just by cutting it open. But he says that it isn't enough for anyone to notice. So the question isn't whether or not the dull knife causes more juice loss, it whether it's even perceptible. And you're going to have a hard time convincing me that you actually know the answer to that question off hand.
That's a good point, I forgot the important part: are people going to notice the difference? I think they would, for people around me, but this would be hard to extend to other places. The reason I think that is that where I live, in France, steaks tend to be much smaller than what I see when people talk about "steak" online. I'd say the most common size would be something like ~150g. They're also relatively thing, often less than an inch. At that size, cutting with a dull knife would lead to a lot of juice loss compared to all the juice in the steak.
So that's a new variable to take into account with knife sharpness: steak size.
I think it’s a more general “eating meat is manly” that I’ve heard more often. I get it kinda, eating meat feels more “predatory” and fruits and vegetables are “health food” — only women care about that something something Dr. Pepper 10.
The whole “soyboi” thing has got to be one of the funniest but also saddest things I’ve ever seen. Pour one out for the men who eat nothing but carbs, meat, salt, and dairy. You’re all keeping the blood pressure medication business alive.
> The whole “soyboi” thing has got to be one of the funniest but also saddest things I’ve ever seen. Pour one out for the men who eat nothing but carbs, meat, salt, and dairy.
But isn’t the whole soy thing about US supermarket foods which overwhelmingly contain soy, whereas someone eating a whole foods diet would be unlikely to consume much soy unless they were specifically seeking it out?
The “soyboi” thing is indeed terribly sad, you can just go to any American supermarket to witness the hordes of disgusting fatties rolling around on their mobility scooters, collecting their daily doses of HOT POCKETS®. What a tragedy.
Of course, soy itself isn’t the actual problem. (correlation, not causation)
There's a reason why Myth #1 is so persistent: the action itself works, just not for the reason advertised.
Most cooks who advocate for Myth #1 will salt and pepper the steak, then let it rest for 20-30 minutes. The salt draws out some of the moisture from the surface of the steak and leaves it behind on the resting surface. The less moisture that enters the pan means better browning.
>The salt draws out some of the moisture from the surface of the steak and leaves it behind on the resting surface
Unless you're using paper towels to blot the steak dry, the amount of water left on the plate is absolutely negligible. If anything salting that late is worse. For one, you don't get as good penetration of the salt, so it will taste salty on the outside but bland on the inside. Plus, drawing out the moisture to the surface means there's more water to drive off when you're searing, which means a worse sear. Taking all of that into account, I think you're better off salting hours in advance (eg. in the morning or overnight), and letting it sit in the fridge to dry off.
Sorry, I wasn't clear: I'm not advocating for any particular method. I was just trying to explain why Myth #1 remained so persistent for so long.
Method 1: salt and pepper, then cook immediately
Method 2: salt and pepper, let rest, then cook
Method 3: salting hours in advance, let it sit in the fridge, then cook
Obviously 3 > 2 > 1, but Method 3 wasn't done historically (by most cooks). Cooks either went with Method 1 or Method 2, and Method 2 "won" out in the end because people consistently noticed that it produced better results. Myth #1 was an incorrect explanation as to why Method 2 is better than Method 1.
Most of this sounds right. I think the 'bone in' myth is a little more subtle and I'm not convinced that poking my steak 4 times just to flip it is worthwhile (it's gonna release juice, that's gonna cool the pan down and create steam).
Otherwise, yep.
I will add that by far the number one thing you can do to up your steak game is to just buy better steaks. There's a massive difference between a good cut and an ok cut.
Personally, I find that if you buy American or Australian Wagyu in bulk you can get absolutely incredible cuts for a pretty good price. I buy mine at wagyushop.com .
For the wagyu served as a steak, have you tried A5 like you had at the sushi places? I've never had much luck in finding American or Australian wagyu that is a significant enough step up over regular Prime to make it worth the price, but real A5 or BMS9+ I've absolutely found to be special.
I haven't found the price difference on Kobe to be worth it over Kagoshima or Miyazaki, though.
Edit: I see this is answered in another comment :)
Are you referring to American/Australian wagyu as "wagyu" ? Did you get it at a restaurant or make it yourself?
I find that American/Australian wagyu is not like Japanese wagyu, but it is still extremely good - it's just a really really good 'regular' steak. It's going to be beefier than a Japanese wagyu with less marbling.
I'd be really surprised to hear that you can't tell the difference between a 'regular' steak and Japanese A5 though. They're really, really different - the marbling is extreme by comparison.
Oh gotcha, yeah I don't really know. I've only ever prepared it myself and I've only eaten A4 (once) or A5. Wagyu is definitely broader and therefor a more abusable term, but I haven't had issues since I order it directly and prepare it personally.
I do, however, definitely eat whole ribeyes of A5 lol
I think he's misunderstanding the point of the poke test (myth #7). It's not intended to precisely gauge doneness regardless of cut, it's intended to help absolute beginners tell the difference between blue-rare, well-done, and somewhere in the middle. If you're buying a meat thermometer that starts at $83USD and your job is writing for a cooking website, you don't need to compare your steak to the fleshy bits of your hand to tell if it's done, but it's helpful if you just started cooking for yourself.
I get the impression he understands that and is arguing that the wide variation in people's hands makes it useless even to tell the difference between rare and well done. I'm sure you could figure out doneness relative to your own flesh with enough trial and error, but cooking a nice steak is already stressful enough for a beginner cook (at least in my experience). just get the thermapen. it only takes four or five overcooked steaks to break even on $83.
My instant-read thermometer was $20 at Target. Even so, my crotchety father-in-law is amazed how everything I grill is always “perfectly done”. He spent 50 years as a purveyor to the best Chicago steak packers.
We use that $20 instant-read for everything including baking, and it works great after 15 years.
The point of covering something in the fridge is so that you don’t accidentally drop or drip something else into it, and so that they dry more slowly. For example, you’ve got a pot of left–over spaghetti in the fridge, then you bring home some fresh chicken for tomorrow. You wouldn’t want any of the fresh chicken juice to drip into the spaghetti accidentally, so you make sure it is covered, or at least higher up than the chicken. You’ve got some limes in there too, but their rind keeps them from drying out. The one you cut in half will start to dry out quickly unless you wrap it in something. Best not to get the chicken juice on the limes either. The rind will protect the part of the limes that you will eat only until you cut them.
> Can someone clarify what they mean by resting uncovered on the fridge?
From the article:
"Or better yet, salt them and let them rest uncovered on a rack in the fridge for a night or two, so that their surface moisture can evaporate. You'll get much more efficient browning that way." (emphasis mine)
>I remember being told once that food should always be stored covered in the fridge. Is that another myth?
The goal of resting uncovered in the fridge is to evaporate the surface moisture which lets you get a better sear since less energy is spent evaporating water on/near the surface of the steak.
You usually want to store food covered the fridge so that this exact thing doesn't happen, and so that odors don't transfer between foods. Or at least that's what I think.
The only thing I disagree with is I like to pull my steaks out the fridge a few hours before I cook them so they're at room temp when they go on the barbecue. They just seem to cook more evenly (medium rare).
Are you salting them right when you pull them out of the fridge? Bringing them closer to room temperature doesn't do anything to improve them, but salting them a few hours before you start cooking will make a very large difference in quality.
Always thought I got a better crust without overcooking because I’d brought them up to room temperature. But I was salting them straight away so maybe it was that!
The Pittsburgh style is a very hard sear but rare or blue on the inside. It’s said, perhaps apocryphally, to have been developed at steel mills where the steaks were seared on the extremely hot plant piping.
You can add tira de asado, bife de chorizo, ojo de bife, bife angosto, matambre (also matambre a la pizza), entraña, vacio, cuadril, chorizo, morcilla, salchicha parrillera, lomo, roast beef (that is very tasty and cheap), chinchulines trenzados, riñones, tripa rellena..
you can add those to your repertory, but picanha is nice too.
Well played, friend. My counter-troll was deflected.
I'm less interested in how Argentina cooks steaks than I am in how they cut them. South American beef butchery is super interesting. I'm in Chicago, and there are a couple butchers here that are really into Brazilian and Argentine cuts.
We don't really burn our steaks here, but one very fair knock on American steaks is that they are super boring. Ribeye strip ribeye ribeye filet ribeye "sirloin". Bleh.
Generally speaking, the quality of beef in Argentina is very good, the price (subject to the economy which is always a factor) has historically been low and the culture is very carnivorous - these are the things that give Argentina its fame for beef along with a strong export industry. Nobody really rates the Argentines as cooks, though, and the parrilla is just a basic adjustable-height open flame grill.
search Locos x el asado on youtube. Or read Francis Mallman books, or look for Christian Petersen videos.
Good quality meat, be with friends, more time cooking and NO fire (please, no fire). Use hard wood to burn ember and cook with it. Try not to use charcoal, do not use a fork with the meat NEVER, use kitchen clamps... just let the meat to rest on the grill.., use salmuera sometimes (water, salt, pepper and bay leaves..) to not let the meat dry..., and be with friends.
Isn't steak boring? They're huge and the huger they are the more masculine you are for eating them, but every bite tastes the same and there's no need to experience it past the first few.
> They're huge and the huger they are the more masculine you are for eating them
I dry age steaks at home, so between trimming off the pellicle (which I then use for mixing in when grinding burger meat or turn into stock/demi-glace) and the water loss from evaporation, my steaks aren't particularly large, and I certainly don't do it because of any sort of masculinity.
>but every bite tastes the same and there's no need to experience it past the first few.
I'm not really sure what this argument is. If you find something delicious, why would you decide you should stop after a couple of bites?
I've seen this opinion from an actual professional chef recently; don't remember where, but I think it was the author of this article.
> and I certainly don't do it because of any sort of masculinity.
Good for you. Giant porterhouses at steakhouses is definitely associated with power businessmen and boomers in the finance industry though; it goes with the whisky and cigars. (But Alexander's in Silicon Valley seems to be leaning into very expensive wagyu.)
> If you find something delicious, why would you decide you should stop after a couple of bites?
Having a short attention span is my foolproof diet tip and has never failed me. Plus, desire is the root of suffering and all that.
If the consumer had to grow the cow in complete unconsciousness without antibotics and with enough room to avoid close contact with other wild and domestic animals to prevent superbug evolution, slaughter it, cook it, and pay for all of the GHG offsets of the entire supply chain necessary to support it, then it would be fine. Or, it's not, and it's an indulgence worse and different than heroin because its widespread acceptance of its production is its primary problem.
No, but at least I didn't give consent to it through my silence or was on the wrong side of history, nearly as important as slavery, since it's an existential threat to all of us.
What would be an appropriate moderate approach? Because for anyone completely shut off to the idea, any approach is too extreme. And for anyone remotely interested with be intrigued enough to learn more on their own.
My protip for life is to ignore the people who think they can forecast existential threats, because they'll inevitably logic themselves into becoming EAs who are terrified of a future robot god torturing them in a way that is definitely 100% rational and not the same thing as going to Hell.
I hate to break it to you ecc, but you can spend your entire life in perfect stoic harmony with nature. Wearing twigs and leaves, living off grubs, and ultimately dying from an infected tooth while curled up under some boulder in the canyon lands and it's not going to change the mean global temperature even a trillionth of a degree. My advice would be to learn to live a little, because a little life is all you've got.
The animals don't like it. The environment does not like it. Eating animals is not a "live and let live" situation because you are denying others the right to live.
The PeTA argument of kindness rarely works because most people are meat addicts and fine with unkindness so long as they don't have to see it.
Also, rational self-preservation doesn't work because it's not a freight train about to run them over and most people don't make decisions rationally. There are plenty of existential risks involved in meat ag:
1. Pandemic evolution through a combination of antibiotic resistances (to speed meat production), wildlife-domestic animal interactions, animal crowding (Petri dish like dorm overcrowding spreading meningococcal meningitis), and human-animal interactions.
2. Climate change - 12% of anthropogenic GHGs and growing. Already at 417 ppm CO2 and climbing.
3. Irreparable rainforest loses due to clear-cutting for CAFOs and feed grain farms affecting the local climate of other equatorial ecosystems.
Accelerating intensity of storms, variability of weather, and rising sea levels will lead to famines, resource wars, and retrofitting vs. relocation of major coastal cities. But because something hasn't happened yet, it's "crying wolf."
They will bicker, complain, take potshots, and rationalize kicking-and-screaming until told they can't have it anymore because they're addicts. The sooner there are sustainable alternatives, widespread lifestyle changes, and externality luxury taxes, the better.
there are plenty of nervous-system-like responses from plants that are undergoing destruction, why not just admit that the reason behind these complaints is a selfish human-empowering reason rather than the emotional appeal of "what about the animals?" ?
Won't anyone think of the plants?
"...you are denying others the right to live."
Isn't this basically just a condition of humanity? If it isn't a base principal can you point to a human that doesn't live that way?
There are plenty of animals that don't nurse their young. That's a peculiarity of mammals.
And the scientific evidence suggests that plants do likely feel something akin to what could be called pain.
Their inability to scream with sounds detectable by human ears isn't evidence they don't feel anything.
It's not absurd. It's what science tells us -- that plants emit chemicals to communicate to other plants about infestations of insects so they can take action to protect themselves and when injured they may give off a "pulse", aka a type of scream.
If you are concerned about the plants, you will be happy to learn that a plant-based diet kills far fewer plants than a meat eating diet. It takes a lot of plants to grow animals, and we only get a fraction of the total calories the animal consumes.
HN readers are generally pretty privileged. This is slightly inconvenient change they can make to their lives. If they’re not willing to do something this small and easy, what hope does humanity have for “success” overcoming climate change?
150 years from now, people will wish all they have to do is limit steak consumption. It’s far below the very least we can today, but it’s something.
Important note: I never said “go vegan today” or anything close to that. I said, limit steak consumption to a few times a year.
And considerably smaller carbon footprint than industrial emission and cars. The vegetables and grains grown 5000 miles away are being brought via land and sea thanks to petrol right to the vegan store one goes to shop at with their SUV.
But yes, let's demonise the food we've evolved to thrive on. It's mental that this has become a controversial idea worth censoring.
We still need cars, but we don't need meat. And there are people working on reducing transportation and energy emissions because that is a hard problem. Buying beans instead of meat at the grocery store is not a hard problem, and one any of us can immediately do.
And if you are worried about plant matter and all the land used for it and transportation emissions around it, what do you think the major of animals eat? They are confined to sheds, not green pastures. They eat plants shipped to the farms, and they eat a hell of a lot more than humans do. Eating the animal means we take a fraction of the total calories the animal consumes. It is completely inefficient. More here: https://ourworldindata.org/food-choice-vs-eating-local
No one denies we evolved eating meat. But that is the pasted. We can do better in the future. "Tradition" is a word worth censoring.
You're saying, we should change the way we eat so we can keep our cars?
> Buying beans instead of meat at the grocery store is not a hard problem, and one any of us can immediately do.
Buying beans and then buying supplements also because you can't live only on beans, or plants. You need to supplement minerals and nutrients that you can't get from plants.
Or you can eat a balanced diet that includes meat, eggs or dairy along with mostly plants and not expose yourself to the danger of malnutrition.
I understand the point you're trying to make, but transportation cost is not really a relevant point here.
Food of any variety can be locally produced, or it can be sourced through industrial supply chains. Animal and plant products can both have an embedded cost in terms of carbon emissions, water, and usage of arable land. That is to say, a cow, a chicken, and a bunch of potatoes can all be locally sourced, and the costs of production for the cow are going to be much higher.
Moreover, the food we "evolved to thrive on," was likely primarily nuts, seeds, fruits, insects, rodents, and occasionally larger animals like antelope (which would have been eaten nose-to-tail), not fatty steaks from domesticated animals.
> Moreover, the food we "evolved to thrive on," was likely primarily nuts, seeds, fruits, insects, rodents, and occasionally larger animals like antelope (which would have been eaten nose-to-tail), not fatty steaks from domesticated animals.
Citation needed. My sources mention the fact that we've evolved bigger brains when we've moved from low-density foods such as vegetables to high-density fatty foods, which is what distinguishes our diet from what primates eat. Meat is fatty, vegetables are not. In fact, vegetables are "fatty" for ruminants, as they have specialised bacteria that convert plant matter to fatty acids. We do not.
Just a couple articles from a 30 second Google search. The fat == bad, or worse, meat == bad is a modern argument that has nothing to do with our evolution or our physiology.
Here's the thing no one wants to admit: modern meat is bad for the planet, and we humans thrive on meat. We don't know how to reconcile the two, so we keep promoting and pushing towards worse and worse diets. Sorry, a vegan diet for everybody isn't the answer. There is no simple answer.
Nobody in this thread is suggesting a vegan diet, or suggesting that our ancestors were vegan. I actually didn't mention vegetables at all in my comment. If you look at what I wrote, I suggested that ancient humans were primarily eating high-fat, high-protein, foods like seeds, nuts, insects, and small game.
Moreover, this makes sense. Hunter-gatherer life was not easy, and ancient humans scraped by on what they could get. This likely entailed eating a lot of fat and protein sources that today are considered distasteful, like insects, rodents, lizards, and organ meats.
There's a lot of keto/paleo/primal bro-science floating around that people use as a post-hoc justification for a diet that is destroying the planet. But if you really want to live like our ancestors, you should be eating grubs, rats, roots, seeds, and tripe in addition to the occasional steak.
> Sorry, a vegan diet for everybody isn't the answer
0% of people in this thread suggested a vegan diet for everybody other than you.
I specifically said reduce steak consumption to a few times per year — it’s less than the least you should do, but if you can’t do that, then will you actually do anything?
Hope the people 3 generations from now like eating bugs!
If the goal is reduction, the target is total reduction, no? Going vegetarian and consuming eggs and cheese still makes use of these darned animals that keep polluting our atmosphere. The suggestion of vegan diet is implied in this context.
Personally I hope insect protein becomes more widespread, makes more sense to me nutritionally than completely avoiding animal nutrients for chemical vegetable pastes people want to promote as meat substitute these days.
> If the goal is reduction, the target is total reduction, no
I like to wear shorts more than I like to wear pants. So I wear shorts on the weekend because I can’t wear shorts to work. My goal is pants reduction because total pants reduction is infeasible.
So no, reduction of meat consumption today isn’t implying that total veganism is the goal.
Also, are you eating much insect protein yourself or are you more hoping other people will do it one day?
> Also, are you eating much insect protein yourself or are you more hoping other people will do it one day?
The latter. The only insect protein I can find for human consumption is far more expensive than the pasture-raised organic meat I primarily eat. Sadly, I'm too used to modern Western cuisine to stomach eating an insect that hasn't been ground down to fine powder, but I will definitely buy some if/when prices are more reasonable.
Transportation overall is a huge emitter. Transportation of most food is only a very small part of that food’s emissions, from what I understand:
“GHG emissions from transportation make up a very small amount of the emissions from food and what you eat is far more important than where your food traveled from.”
Unfortunately, the myth about cooking steak that will be going away is that it can be done widely, at scale, into the future... beef production requires a lot of water and feed, so also a lot more land, than poultry, and still more than non-meat food. Livestock is part of the motivation for clear-cutting forested areas in South America. And of course there is the direct contribution to greenhouse gases...
Sorry for being the downer, but it's going to happen. And I like steak as much as the next guy :-(
None of those are reasons we've stopped doing anything else why would we stop eating beef.
Not that I'm endorsing this stance, but dodging large-scale consequences for our indulgences are one of the privileges of being well paid professionals in the imperial core. I don't think people here will be particularly affected by this shift.
Some scientists have managed to make carbohydrates from CO2, several times more efficiently than plants. If it could be scaled up, that could drastically shrink the amount of land required for cattle feed.
"Males are best turned into gluttons with the help of their vanity. They ought to be made to think themselves very knowing about food, to pique themselves on having found the only restaurant in the town where steaks are really “properly” cooked. What begins as vanity can then be gradually turned into habit. But, however you approach it, the great thing is to bring him into the state in which the denial of any one indulgence—it matters not which, champagne or tea, sole colbert or cigarettes—“puts him out”, for then his charity, justice, and obedience are all at your mercy."
I think scientific cooking completely misses the point about cooking and about
eating food. You should cook your food the way your senses tell you is right.
You should cook your food so that your senses tell you it's right. You're
going to taste the food with your mouth and smell it with your nose. You're not
going to taste it with a thermometer or whatever else silly probe of irrelevance
anyone might think of sticking into it.
The same goes about following arbitrary rules about how food "should" be cooked.
It's your tongue and nose that will experience your cooking. Not Julia Child's.
Cook food using your senses and cook food so that you like it. Cook as thou
likest. That shall be the whole of the law.
I'm not sure you even clicked the link your point is so orthogonal.
> Cook some identical roasts or steaks. Cook one bone-in, cook one with the bone removed but tied back on, and cook a third with the bone removed and tied back on with a layer of impermeable aluminum foil in between. Then cut them all up and taste them (preferably with a large group of people in a blind setting). You'll find that they all taste pretty much identical.
This "scientific cooking" is all about the taste that results. People aren't applying these myths because they've tried it both ways and their senses tell them one is better than the other, that's the whole point of making an article like this.
I have a good friend who works in that space, and is pretty open that it's not practical at the very high end. It's interesting to find that putting a bottle of wine in a blender has the same result as airing things out in an expensive decanter, but you don't need a high end blender to enjoy wine.
The high end of "scientific cooking" is figuring out what and why things taste good, or how to do it. Unfortunately it also becomes a catalog for people buying useless expensive crap because it's "healthy" or something. See: juicero.
Well, sure, if you like your food some certain way, then cook it for yourself that way.
But a lot of the "scientific cooking" is about repeatability. I know I like my steaks rare, edge to edge, with a hard sear. I know that the easiest way for me to accomplish that is using an immersion circulator, combi oven, or reverse sear, drying it (and if I have time, cooling it down briefly), and then either searing/basting it in cast iron or finishing it off on my kamado grill with the temperature ramped up to inferno.
I've cooked hundreds of steaks just on a grill, or just in a pan. I can nail a rare or medium rare steak on the grill, and adjust for temp, etc. But there are inherent limitations to those methods - it might be rare in the center, but simply because of the physics at play, more of the meat than just the surface is going to be well done.
And as for the myths in the article... a lot of these are just things that are patently untrue. It's not about "scientific cooking" vs. cooking to personal taste, people just believe a lot of things that are just flat out wrong.
Or: the myth the whole of humanity needs to eat expensive, inefficiently-produced, rainforest clearing, climate change-inducing, antibiotics-immune superbug-breeding, unhealthy animal protein grown on CAFOs.
Roughly 12% of GHGs are attributed to meat agriculture.
Since few people decide anything rationally since they want their steaks and Big Macs, I challenge anyone to visit Greeley CO, Tar Heel NC or North Platte NE and see if they still want to have a steak, pork chops, or their sense of smell.
Isn't the rainforest clearing caused by local consumption in South America, and not actually part of US supply chains?
Climate change is another thing that will be very bad (about as bad as WW2), but mostly to other people and not us, and ending society is a tail risk but not the median prediction. So using it to get Americans to stop doing things either isn't very convincing or requires you to lie. The most important thing by far is to get people to drive less.
> Roughly 12% of GHGs are attributed to meat agriculture.
The cause of anthropogenic climate change is the burning of fossil fuels, not
the raising of animals for food. Burning fossil fuels releases carbon at a rate
and in amounts that are too high for the natural mechanisms in the environment,
that normally bind carbon, to cope with.
The carbon gasses released by cows and other ruminants are part of the planetary
carbon cycle that circulates carbon gasses between the atmosphere and the
biosphere:
Plants bind carbon from the air, cows eat plants, bacteria in cows' stomachs
ferment plants, fermentation releases the carbon bound by plants back into the
air, plants bind carbon from the air. This cycle is stable, it's been going on
for millions of years, and it has never caused climate change, not of the scale
we see today.
Climate change started with the Industrial Revolution, when fossil fuels began
to be dug up and burned for power. Today, power production is responsible for
almost 75% of all carbon emissions. The vast majority of this power production
is from burning fossil fuels:
If you're concerned about climate change and you want to raise the alarm, then
raise the alarm about the continued burning of fossil fuels and the
misinformation spread by the fossil fuel industry. Misinformation that seems to
be very successfully co-opting the animal rights movement, I might add. You want
to be "on the right side of history" as you say in another comment? Don't side
with the fossil fuel industry by directing attention away from their role in
climate change.
i know there has been a lot of pushback because of the individualist nature of exxon et al's carbon footprint red herring.
but reduction of emissions is a project every single individual, corporation, and government must be part of.
we are are deeply intertwined, all terrestrials, all earth bound. and the anti-individualist shove-off of responsibility onto corporations is going to get us equally nowhere.
I don't understand. "we are are deeply intertwined, all terrestrials, all earth bound"? What does that have to do with my comment?
What do you disagree with in what I wrote above? That anthropogenic climate change is caused by burning fossil fuels? That it's the fossil fuel industry that is responsible for that? What?
food, land use and agriculture makes up 24% emissions. energy use is 25%. see the graphic I linked.
to say "we should be primarily focused on energy" is ignoring an equally large factor. fossil fuels enabled the food and agriculture industry to grow in the climate destroying behemoth it is now.
we need to restructure our diet and address food waste and production.
we are all earthbound means that we all need to act, individual and corporation alike, because all our fates are tied to the reaction of the earth.
That graphic also doesn't list any numbers. The numbers you quote, 24% and 25%
come from a different graphic, titled "Emission Sources & Natural Sinks", found
in the main page of the Drawdown Framework website, here:
In that graphic, 24% is listed as the proportion of CO₂ emissions from "Food,
agriculture and land use" and 25% is from "Electricity production". The graphic
also lists 21% for "Industry", 14% for "Transportation", 6% for "Buildings", and
10% for "Other Energy-Related Emissions".
I think you took the figure for "Electricity production" to stand for the
emissions from burning fossil fuels for all power production, which is not
right. Industry, transportation, heating buildings etc all need power that is
generated by burning fossil fuels. So it's not 25% but 76% that goes to
generating power. The ourworldindata.org chart I linked lists pretty much the
same figure and breaks it down in the same categories, also.
The dradown.org graphic shows that 59% of the CO₂ released remains in the
atmosphere, which is roughly consistent with the amount attributed to power
production from burning fossil fuels. The rest of the CO₂ is bound in carbon
sinks in the environment. The arcs of the graph that end in the legend "Current
sinks" add up to 24 + 17 = 41%, which is plenty to cover our food production
needs (given the 24% figure listed in the same graphic for all food
production).
That's what I say above in my comment: climate change is caused by excess carbon
released into the environment by the burning of fossil fuels, not by farming.
The environment can handle farming, even at the industrial scales we practice it
today (which I agree is excessive and needs urgent reform). What the environment
can't cope with is burning fossil fuels that release in days carbon stored over
millions of years.
Given all of the above, do you still disagree with my initial comment? If so,
can you explain how you disagree?
I disagree with not taking a multipronged approach to tackling life restoring processes.
if we shut off all fossil fuel burning tomorrow, sure maybe we would be able to make up for destructive practices of agriculture. but that won't happen and we need a broad approach.
diet maintenance and it's downstream effects is a clear, easy goal that individuals can take on. meanwhile governments can tackle whatever industrial legal changes need to happen.
negating diet and food waste as a meaningful goal is harmful at best, and deliberate sabotage at worst.
you said [emphasis mine]
> If you're concerned about climate change and you want to raise the alarm, then raise the alarm about the continued burning of fossil fuels and the misinformation spread by the fossil fuel industry. Misinformation that seems to be very successfully co-opting the animal rights movement, I might add. You want to be "on the right side of history" as you say in another comment? Don't side with the fossil fuel industry by directing attention away from their role in climate change.
my disagreement is that the fossil fuel industry somehow coopted the animal rights movement. certainly capital has embraced the plant-based diet as demand has risen, but to say that was driven by fossil fuels is absolutely bonkers to me.
we can do both. be loud about fossil fuels (we are. at least, some of us are), and also embrace a low waste, plant based (or low meat/no beef, I don't care) diet.
I wear a mask, get vaxxed, and I vote for leaders who affirm public health.
> I disagree with not taking a multipronged approach to tackling life restoring
processes.
Thanks for making it clear.
> if we shut off all fossil fuel burning tomorrow, sure maybe we would be able to
make up for destructive practices of agriculture.
That's not right. Burning fossil fuels is the cause of climate change. To stop
burning fossil fuels is not to "make up" for agriculture emissions, it's to
remove the cause of climate change.
Agriculture is not causing climate change, burning fossil fuels causes climate
change. The emissions from agriculture are only of concern because of the
climate change that is already underway caused by the emissions from burning
fossil fuels. Without the emissions from burning fossil fuels there would be no
climate change and there would be nothing to "make up" for because emissions
from agriculture alone are not capable of causing climate change (again, because
the environment can deal with them).
You say that "diet maintenance" is a "clear, easy goal that individuals can take
on". It's much more than that. It's a fine excuse for people to not do anything
substantial to help stop climate change. They eat a bean burger once a week and
then go home happy that they did their bit for the environment, because their
favorite influencer told them so. And they do nothing to challenge the fuel
industry that keeps doing business as usual. Because their influencers don't
tell them to.
In order to stop climate change (we can't reverse it, but we can stop it
developing further) people must understand its causes. Farming is not the cause.
Burning fossil fuels is the cause. That's what we need to address.
But I think there's a misunderstanding. I made a comment about the
misinformation spread by the fossil fuel industry, and you seem to have taken it
as a comment in a debate about individual vs collective action, to which I never
intended to contribute. I agree that personal action is necessary to stop
climate change. My point is that eating a vegan diet is not the right action
because farming is not the cause of climate change. Burning fossil fuels is the
cause of climate change and the goal of any personal action must be to stop
burning fossil fuels.
> my disagreement is that the fossil fuel industry somehow coopted the animal
rights movement.
Maybe "co-opted" is a strong word, but the industry can't be very unhappy with
the current state of affairs, where everybody's having a food fight on social
media about what to eat and lets the industry off the hook.
"Go vegan" is the popular message on social media because it's the easy answer.
But, the answer to what? The hard question is how we reconfigure our
civilisation to stop burning fossil fuels and causing climate change as a
result. Going vegan doesn't begin to address that question. What you eat is
irrelevant to how we generate power.
ultimately I think we are in agreement and I apologize for coming across so strongly in my original post.
I am also so frustrated at all the propaganda being disseminated by oil companies and bought out YouTubers alike, about doing only the smallest amount possible. and I completely agree the anthropocene epoch is clearly driven by fossil fuel.
I think people feel (and are in actuality) powerless to change the fossil fuel question. which is why the biggest contribution individuals can start today along side advocating policy change, is to halt wasting food, cut out or reduce meat (mainly beef) consumption to a tiny fraction of what is currently culturally normalized.
however in all honesty I live in pure horror of this whole thing every single day.
I'm worried too and I live in a place that will be hard hit by climate change. In fact, this year the house was flooded to an extent that was really unprecedented (we've had flooding before but not like that) and I wonder if that's just the sign of things to come. Who knows.
To reword Upton Sinclair: It is difficult to get an anti-intellectual to understand something when their instant-gratification poor habits depend upon their not understanding its existential threats: pandemics, antibiotic resistances, and climate change. It's too easy to say "FU, gimme my supersized Big Mac and I don't care how it's made, Bill Nye." This is what a drug addict says out of willful ignorance while participating in long-term omnicide and ecocide because they're hooked and too weak to make the necessary changes themselves.
https://www.seriouseats.com/reverse-seared-steak-recipe