YSK: You should dry off beef before cooking. Doing so promotes the Maillard Reaction, which will make the meat taste and look better.

We call that the dryducken method

Ever since I learned this tip I've been cooking perfect steaks. Makes a huge difference.

And you can leave it uncovered in the fridge (use a rack and a drip pan) and the airflow will dry the outside. This gives a better sear overall.

This has virtually no impact. Salt is more important.

Letting it reach room temp contributes little to nothing, in comparison with patting it dry, because of a few details:

• Maillard reaction happens around ~150°C, so above the boiling point of water (100°C)
• If there's liquid water, it'll snip all available heat from the surroundings, when boiling, before the temperature rises up again. This means no Maillard until the water is gone.
• It takes 1cal to raise the temperature of 1g of water by 1°C. It's a relatively small amount of heat, even for something like 25°C room temp vs. 5°C fridge temp.
• It takes 540cal to transform 1g of 100°C liquid water into 1g of 100°C steam. It's a lot.

So if you don't wait until your beef reaches room temperature before cooking it, you're losing, like, 20cal per gram of beef to unnecessarily raise its temperature. However if you don't pat your beef dry, each gram of water soaking there will be stealing 75cal to rise its own temperature to 100°C, plus 540cal to steam off. And since browning is a surface reaction and the offending water is mostly on the outside the difference is fairly big, as you aren't comparing the whole chunk of beef with the outside water - you're only comparing the surface beef with the water.

(I hope that this is clear, I'm damn convoluted to explain stuff.)

Rest it for 2 hours at room temp with salt on salt on it

I've never seen a comparative experiment that confirms this habit and I don't see how that would make a difference. Especially not if you use a thermometer.

Empirical evidence suggests that it takes many hours for the center of the steak, the part that matters for doneness, to rise any appreciable amount.

Drying the outside of your steak is good advice because your can see the results. The same with brining because you can taste it.

If your technique is otherwise good whether that's low/slow or hot/fast then "letting it warm up" is just bunk advice.

Another note is that if your cooking set up can't crank up high enough to get a good sear fast then you may benefit from the center being cold to start with to give you more time to develop the crust.

For the ultra lazy, typically me but I do love cooking some good steaks so it’s worth the effort, I’m assuming this is it: https://www.seriouseats.com/how-to-dry-brine

I buy lousy steaks, will this technique elevate a lousy steak to a mediocre steak?

My time is literally not worth as much as buying a better cut of meat.

You only want the surface dry.

Dear God

They can't stop you from ordering a steak and a glass of water!

Hello, I am people

Every day, that list of people grows: https://xkcd.com/1053

The wife is not a fan of my forking methods of tenderization.

I mean, I don't cook it sopping wet, but I am lazy....

Yes, lots of people don't dry off the marinade when cooking marinated meat. Which shouldn't be an issue with a steak but just as an example.

Then sometimes people don't dry off meat well enough after washing it. Just a quick dab with some paper towel is often not enough.

But yes, the title isn't the best and the Article itself uses a different one and goes more into detail. It suggest air drying your steak for hours in the fridge. That's definitely not something everyone does. It also goes more into detail about the Maillard Reaction.

Sometimes people don't dry meat after washing it. Which is fine for some dishes. Or if they dry it they don't do it well enough. But ye, the title isn't that well chosen.

The article talks about letting meat air dry for several hours in your fridge. And goes further into the Maillard Reaction.

there are people who do not know that baking soda is a wonderful tenderizer.

Whaaaaaaaaaat

I really need to get a kitchen torch huh

How often is your ground beef wet? Regardless I feel like most applications of ground beef you typically wouldn’t have to worry about it, you’re always cooking it well done for the most part so it will brown, like ground beef in a pan for tacos or hamburger helper type stuff.

If it’s for burgers and it’s wet for some reason, then yeah a paper towel pat down would be fine, but idk typically when I’m handling ground beef even forming my own patties I wouldn’t really ever describe it as all that ”wet”.

I'd use cloth or you may leave bits.

Putting any piece of meat on the grill at 700° is going to leave good marks.

Meat is murder y'all/s I prefer soy

You can and should actually salt your steak several hours before cooking, leaving them uncovered in the fridge. Water will be drawn out, and then reabsorbed along with the salt. Dry the surface and salt again if desired right before cooking.

Come on, we all know milk steak is superior to water steak.

To dry the beef you just use a paper towel to pat dry the beef.

It's not the same as aged steak. OP's post is simply about patting your meat dry with a paper towel or similar prior to cooking.

Paper towels or constant air flow over a few minutes. Usually paper towels.

I just grab some paper towels and start blotting the surface. The goal is to get as much of the liquid off the surface as possible.

A good amount of liquid is going to come out of beef regardless. That's why it's good to have a smoking hot pan or grate to start with.

Generally no. Ground beef doesn't have a "surface" the same way a cut off meat does. As meat cooks fibers (can't remember if it's the muscle of the protein fibers specifically) contract and squeeze out water. In ground beef the water will be escaping every which way. In a cut of meat more of that water has a better chance of staying within the piece.

Sort of. If you're doing burgers, you don't usually need to pat it dry, but you also don't salt it until just before you put it on the pan/grill. Salt still draws out moisture and changes the protein structure especially in ground beef.

No Hamburger is a special kind of beef.

To a degree yes. Moisture in general will limit browning. Fresh ground beef is usually dry enough. Frozen and defrosted ground beefwill have ice/water. Patting it dry with a paper towel takes care of this.

Ground turkey in particular is super wet all the way through so paper towels won't really be able to get it all. To brown ground turkey, you put a big patty on the grill and don't break it up, then wait for several minutes. This allows the surface to evaporate the water and then begin browning. If you break it open it will release the water inside the big ball of meat and it'll take forever to evaporate enough for browning to start. You break it open later on after you've browned top and bottom.

Was this written by GPT?

To be perfectly honest, I do my best cooking when my feet aren't wet. I wonder if there's a connection?

So is driving. Vegetables are bad for you too, they quite literally have built defenses to prevent being eaten and we still eat them. To much and they're actually legitimately bad for us. Plants also make connections and trees use mycelial networks to communicate and are able to tell apart individual trees, are able to hear distress calls and can respond and even send nutrients to that specific tree.

Animal consciousness is hardly known and people use that as a metric for plants when they've been around for much longer. Just because we don't understand something and have yet to uncover how it works doesn't mean it isn't happening on a daily basis.

And yet you know what? I'm here today because I have survived life by consuming other plants and animals. I have lived my life doing good deeds and done my best to help those around me, working for non-profit performing arts and events. I rescued a dog whose owners were just going to abandon her in the woods with a bag of food, and she lives a happy life now giving me snuggles every morning. And if continuing that means I get to enjoy bacon and beef in a moderate omnivorous way, that's what life and being human is. If I starve or deprive myself of the series of joys that help keep me positive and the cost of that is an animal that feeds multiple people like myself then that is a worthy sacrifice for the animal. The fact that vegans have such a high risk of nutrient deficiencies is pretty telling as to how we use multiple sources to collect what we need. Also the fact that like, a majority of the animals on the planet are omnivorous. Deer will eat chicks. Happily.

I don't agree with factory farming. I don't agree with wood harvesting (it's pretty devastating to the ecosystems in Oregon that have had these forests for hundreds of years before settlers started clearings). I don't agree with driving. And yet, I recognize that all of these are byproducts of what society has deemed as necessary. I don't agree with factory farming, but hundreds of thousands more people would be starving without it - local farms just cannot take the meat demand nor the crop demand when meat inevitably falls and plant consumption rises. This is why it's good to look into full spectrum reduction. People using local farms more, sometimes supplementing lab-grown and vegetarian options to reduce factory farming in hopes to minimize its need as much as possible. I don't agree with wood harvesting, but hundreds of thousands of people would be without shelter, fire, and transportation maintenance (mostly for railways, already something that is greatly suffering). I don't agree with driving, but I recognize that as a result of our work culture it is essentially a necessity again because without me getting to my job I do not survive. Personally, I don't have my drivers license and mostly bus and walk. I think we should be looking into road grids, alternative tires, and pushing more for automated driving. The overall cost of energy can be supplemented and is less toxic than 200 million tires a year wearing rubber into the air. Bonus: automated grids also would reduce gas consumption. Of course, lobbyists exist and that's why this is a pipe dream.

Hopefully you see my point in this. You can do everything in your power to control what you want, but we can only control how we help the people around us. Being condescending about the omnivorous human eating meat is a net negative to the world because you are only pushing people away from being in the reductive mindset, while simultaneously missing the mindset of who you're trying to make a point to. People who eat meat either genuinely do not believe they have certain capacities and that makes it ok. Again, what you say is not effective to these people. The other people are people who do believe that animals have more capacities than we realize, and still make the choice for a variety of reasons. It could be food aversions and meat is their primary thing. It could be something related to what I've already explained. It could even be that there are people who have the capacity to eat something they love. Something that humans have historically done. Cattle made you rich, you wanted those cows alive and you love those cows. And yet, when it's that cows time because you and your family are hungry and need to sell its meat. The only difference between an animal and a plant is that you're the one humanizing only the animal - apparently plants don't make the cut for your respect? Cause you are just as much of a murderer as the rest of us in that regard.

Ysk I'm having steak tonight.

For all the downvotes you are objectively correct. Meat consumption is one of the biggest voluntary climate impacts in a Western person's lifestyle.

And I say that as someone who loves eating meat, I wish I had it in me to transition away.

There is no ethical consumption. Eat what you want, just don't pretend you're better than someone else because you have some magical diet.

To all the downvoters, just know that I'm comfortable each day of my life knowing that I'm not the problem.

Don't tell me what to do.

It's bad for the animals? Which ones, the ones we eat? Yes dying is quite bad for you. Meat is not bad for us, I guess it is bad for the planet but that is more of a overpopulation problem than meat problem.

User name is sus

YSK: Meat is bad for you, the planet and the animals.

We already know but choose to ignore it, cuz we don't really care about all of the above. 🤷‍♂️

OK? That's irrelevant to the thread.