The Solution

The ultimate result of cooking by heat is a temperature gradient inside the ingredients. Part of the cook’s job is to control the temperature profile by manipulating heat flow. Knowing that doesn’t make you a good cook (far from it), but it is the basic framework for thinking about temperature and heat in cooking, so you can begin to ask the right questions.

Sous vide is so popular with professional chefs because it’s a consistent way to precisely control the temperature of ingredients. We can cook the steak sous vide first, so the whole piece of meat is at exactly the right temperature. We can then sear the surface to get our desired crust and the flavor from Maillard reactions. Modernist Cuisine’s steak recipe directs you to dip the steak in liquid nitrogen after it has been cooked sous vide and before you sear it. I will leave it as an exercise for you to figure out the benefit of the liquid nitrogen dipping step.

The analysis above points to another interesting possibility: what if you cook the steak straight out of the freezer? Now, for the heat to propagate inside, not only will it run into the boiling zone plateau, but it will also run into a melting zone plateau. Water and ice act as natural insulators. You can take your time to sear the exterior without worrying about overcooking the interior. When you are satisfied with the crust, you can then transfer the steak to a low oven. It turns out America’s Test Kitchen has a recipe that does exactly that.

By the way, how do the pros do it? Line cooks at famous steakhouses certainly are not in the habit of touching your steak with their fingers before serving it. They cook so many steaks every day, and they have such consistent control of their meat and oven, that they have developed pretty good intuition about what’s happening inside a steak. In other words, they just know. Almost all problems with home cooks can be reduced to this: you simply don’t have enough experience to know what is happening and what will happen to the food.