The steak is good. Overcooked steak is not so good. To avoid ending up with a filet or T-bone that tastes like a glove, you’ll need a system for knowing when the beef is ready to cook. You can cut it to see, but that lets the precious juices run out. A meat thermometer is a better way to judge whether your steak is rare, medium rare, or some other temperature, but if none are found, your hand and a few fingers can tell you all you need to know about the doneness of yours. favorite cuts of steak of beef.

To get the lowdown on how professional chefs measure the doneness of the cost, strip, or flank, we spoke with Joe Flamm, chef-partner and culinary director of Chicago’s BLVD Steakhouse. “Ready preference is such a preference and everyone has their own,” he said. “For something as simple as steak, cooked with just salt and fire, you want it just the way you want it.”

We like to use a meat probe to check the temperature on larger cuts of meat, chicken, and other foods, but this gadget-free method works on steaks and burgers and saves you from having to pull out the thermometer. Here we unpack a simple trick to test the doneness of your steak using just your hands, so you can nail it every time.

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Practice makes perfect

The degree of doneness in steak is often associated with color, as the steak goes from bright red when rare, through various stages of pink, until it is well-done and has the pink cooked all the way through it. (RIP, ribeye.) It’s difficult to gauge color without cutting into the steak, which you don’t want to do until it’s off the heat and has had a moment to rest. Otherwise, the juices will spill out of it, leading to a drier and tougher result, especially if you put it back on the heat for additional cooking. It’s even more important not to do this prematurely if your preference leans towards medium well or well done; you want as much juice as possible to remain in the meat.

The doneness is also related to temperature, with the internal temperature of the meat typically grading between 120 and 160 degrees Fahrenheit as you go from rare to well done. This can be accomplished with a meat thermometerbut there is another method frequently applied by chefs that does not require any gadgets.

With larger cuts, such as a whole rib-eye steak that will be sliced ​​after cooking, “a thermometer is very useful for consistency and accuracy,” says Flamm, but “for smaller cuts and speed, many cooks can check by feel,” he says. “If you cook 100 fillets a night, every night, it starts to fall apart.”

Understanding how done your steak is and why overcooking is bad

What’s a home cook to do who isn’t in the habit of cooking dozens of steaks repeatedly, many times a week? Before we get to the shortcut trick to help you learn this, it’s important to understand the transformation your steak undergoes as it cooks at higher and higher temperatures.

In basic terms, the longer a steak is cooked, the firmer the meat becomes, which has to do with the chemical process the meat is put through. “Whenever you cook a steak for a longer period of time, there’s a tipping point where the fat and muscle break down,” explains Flamm, “and you just dry out the steak and lose the moisture, which gives the steak a tougher texture.” This increasingly firm or tough texture is the key to being able to check the doneness of your steak without relying on a thermometer.

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The technique of testing the degree of baking

Learning to check for doneness by feel doesn’t necessarily require hundreds of dollars of raw materials to get the necessary practice. Nor is it based on any particular gadget. It’s not exactly a one-handed method, but the method involves only using your hands.

Whether or not you have the means or the mindset to quit your job and go to culinary school, here’s a culinary school trick to understanding the doneness of meat by using the meaty base of your thumb as a point of comparison for the doneness of the steak when it’s pricked. .

Here it is: With one hand, gently touch your thumb and forefinger together, keeping the rest of your fingers relaxed, in a half “A-OK” signal. You don’t want to press your thumb and forefinger together – just make light contact between them. With the index finger of the opposite hand, gently push the fleshy base of the thumb.

You don’t press here, you just give it a quick hit. This is about the level of resistance you should feel for a medium-rare steak when similarly stabbed into the center of the meat. (Leave clean and/or gloved hands aside here. Also, the steak will be hot on the outside, yes, but again, a quick pat is all it takes.)

Afterwards, as you move your thumb to lightly touch your middle finger, the tension at the base of your thumb increases, and this is how a medium-cooked steak should feel. As you extend your thumb to reach your ring finger, you are now in a state of well-being, and the tension in the thumb when touched with the little finger reveals well-done.

No matter how you like your steak cooked and how you personally define it, you now have a consistent point of comparison at all times to practice with, whether you cook steak once a week or once a year.

What is the best way to cook steak?

So what’s the best way to cook a steak? Opinions abound on direct versus indirect heat, searing versus reverse searing, and even cooking steak in a air fryer. Flamm recommends a traditional method: “For me, it’s browning the steak hard and then using indirect heat to slowly let it cook and come up to the temperature where you want it to be,” he says, finishing it seared. roast in the oven.

You can refer to various recipes for time and temperature recommendations with the indirect heat method, just make sure the steak will continue to cook while you rest and take your steak out and give it a good drink every now and then.

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