Cooking Meats – Let it Rest!

How many times have you experienced this scenario?

That big, beautiful porterhouse steak has just come off the grill.  It’s perfectly cooked – nice grill marks, a slight char around the edges - and the smell – it’s like heaven.  Your eyes roll in anticipation of that first bite.  Without hesitation, you dive right in and slice off a mouthwatering portion – and in seconds, that masterpiece is now a dry hunk of flavorless bulk, lying in a gigantic puddle of juice that has wandered all around your plate, wreaking havoc on your neighboring baked potato.

Sound familiar?  It’s an all too common occurrence for many cooks.

The culprit and solution to this problem is a simple one.

Resting time.

There’s a whole lot of science going on during the cooking process.  Basically, when a piece of meat is heated on a grill, in an oven, or on a stovetop, the muscle fibers within the food contract, forcing liquid out of the spaces between them.  The only thing now keeping this liquid in place is the outside of the steak or roast itself.  If you attempt to cut into the meat immediately after cooking, you’ve just provided an escape route for all of those wonderful juices.  They haven’t had a chance to be re-absorbed back into the muscle fibers (as the food slowly cools).  The result?  Your meat is now dry and flavorless, but your plate looks like a drainage ditch after a sudden thunderstorm.

 

Unrested meat (below left) vs. rested meat (below right)

                              (Image Credit – amazingribs.com)

Secondly, just because you take the meat away from the heat source does not mean it has completed cooking.  Residual heat stored in the muscle will continue the cooking process for a few minutes, so if your steak was a perfect medium-rare on the grill then guess what?  You’ll be eating a medium to medium-well steak after the meat has had a chance to rest.

Resting time after cooking takes care of both of these issues.  It allows those delicious juices to reabsorb and redistribute back through the muscle fibers, and the meat itself will finish cooking (and reach the desired degree of doneness) without any heat at all.  This also means that you should take your meat out of the oven or off of the grill slightly before you think it’s done.

How long should you allow the meat to rest?  Well, for steaks, the Four State Food Critic recommends around 10 minutes, depending on the thickness of the cut.  Roasts should rest longer.  The FSFC also uses this method on chicken and pork for the same reasons.

So the next time you are preparing a steak or roast, get it off the heat and let it rest before carving or serving.  Use that time to finish setting the table or work on your side dishes.  You won’t believe the difference those few minutes make on your end results.