About 6 or 7 months ago, I grew disenchanted with the Reverse Sear Method. Rarely could I manage to get a well seared piece of meat and still hit my target doneness temp. Trying to get the sear I wanted so often led to meat that I considered to be overcooked. Certainly edible, but overcooked to my eye and taste. I also noticed that a number of very good YouTube cooks were experiencing similar results.
Then, quite by an accident that I've posted about previously in "Darn, that's cold.", I started to cook frozen meat pre-seared. This allowed me to use the tremendous heat from flare-ups that I created using an accelerant. When I first started, I used butter, but then later, graduated to peanut oil that was thrown, a teaspoonful at a time, about every 20 seconds or so, onto coals that were as close to the meat as I could get them. With the adjustable coal grate height on my LSG Adjustable Grill, this is very easy to accomplish. The resulting inferno is just the heat needed to thoroughly sear the meat. With frozen meat, sear time was 6-8 minutes whereupon I'd take the meat off the grill, season it, and then put it back on the cool side to finish cooking. The result was, to my mind, fairly spectacular, a very dark exterior bark with the inside looking like it just came out of a sous vide bath - edge to edge even medium rare color. Using this method, I could see no discernable carry-over, and temp you cooked to was the temp you got on the plate.
Since I cook on my pit pretty much every day, and I'm cooking mostly for myself, I have a lot of opportunity to experiment. One day I decided to try cooking like a normal person and prepped a thawed steak with rub. Using the same accelerant technique, it took less than 3 minutes to get the dark sear I wanted. Again, I put the meat on the cool side to come up to temp, and again the interior was edge to edge medium rare. Except for a little carry-over, I could find no down side to doing this. The meat both sears and cooks in less time, and often, good things happen to the taste of whatever rub is used on the meat when it's seared too.
From an article on Maillard Reaction: According to Meathead Goldwyn, the real signifier of well-cooked meat is a solid brown crust formed by the Maillard Reaction, which is why many steakhouses use broilers instead of grills. Per Goldwyn: "The flames are above the meat, that way they can get brown all over. That’s why grill marks don’t make me salivate"— I want brown all over.â€
This tri-tip was about 1 3/4" thick.
This was a very small steak barely a finger depth thick.
Works on pork too.
Then, quite by an accident that I've posted about previously in "Darn, that's cold.", I started to cook frozen meat pre-seared. This allowed me to use the tremendous heat from flare-ups that I created using an accelerant. When I first started, I used butter, but then later, graduated to peanut oil that was thrown, a teaspoonful at a time, about every 20 seconds or so, onto coals that were as close to the meat as I could get them. With the adjustable coal grate height on my LSG Adjustable Grill, this is very easy to accomplish. The resulting inferno is just the heat needed to thoroughly sear the meat. With frozen meat, sear time was 6-8 minutes whereupon I'd take the meat off the grill, season it, and then put it back on the cool side to finish cooking. The result was, to my mind, fairly spectacular, a very dark exterior bark with the inside looking like it just came out of a sous vide bath - edge to edge even medium rare color. Using this method, I could see no discernable carry-over, and temp you cooked to was the temp you got on the plate.
Since I cook on my pit pretty much every day, and I'm cooking mostly for myself, I have a lot of opportunity to experiment. One day I decided to try cooking like a normal person and prepped a thawed steak with rub. Using the same accelerant technique, it took less than 3 minutes to get the dark sear I wanted. Again, I put the meat on the cool side to come up to temp, and again the interior was edge to edge medium rare. Except for a little carry-over, I could find no down side to doing this. The meat both sears and cooks in less time, and often, good things happen to the taste of whatever rub is used on the meat when it's seared too.
From an article on Maillard Reaction: According to Meathead Goldwyn, the real signifier of well-cooked meat is a solid brown crust formed by the Maillard Reaction, which is why many steakhouses use broilers instead of grills. Per Goldwyn: "The flames are above the meat, that way they can get brown all over. That’s why grill marks don’t make me salivate"— I want brown all over.â€
This tri-tip was about 1 3/4" thick.
This was a very small steak barely a finger depth thick.
Works on pork too.
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