Cooking Tips

A New Way to Melt Steaks (Without the Smoke and Splattery Mess)

The result: perfectly seared, beautifully crusted steaks—and a clean countertop.

LIMITED-Fourth dimension OFFER! Become total access to all of our recipes, reviews, tips, and videos for simply $1. No paywalls, just better cooking. Get started right now.

The way I've learned to cook steaks involves turning things upwardly to eleven.

I adopt rib eye, a cut of beef with maximum marbling. I give information technology a generous dash or iii of seasoning salt. So I stick my cast-iron skillet in a 550-degree oven to become it rip-roaring hot and transfer information technology to the stovetop with a high flame underneath. The outcome? A gorgeous charred steak with a flavorful crust and a rosy medium-rare interior.

This is a beautiful manner of cooking steaks, except for one problem.

When the steaks go in the skillet (a tablespoon of vegetable oil goes in offset), it instantaneously smokes out my kitchen. At that place's a crazy amount of oil splatter, turning my stovetop surface and knobs into a greasy mess. The steak comes out delicious, only cleanup becomes a real hurting.

Fortunately, there's a style to solve this upshot.

In the latest episode of America's Test Kitchen , nosotros teach a new, unorthodox, foolproof style of pan-searing strip steaks. The hush-hush: Placing the steaks in a cold nonstick skillet with no oil . This counterintuitive technique was developed by one-time Melt's Illustrated staffer Andrew Janjigian, who discovered a well-marbled cut doesn't need extra oil; enough fat comes out during cooking to help brown the beef.

Andrew offers a few rules for his technique:

  • Use a nonstick or carbon-steel skillet, non stainless steel. (That's right, a nonstick is OK for this!)
  • Don't add together oil.
  • Start in a cold pan (no need to preheat).
  • Flip the steaks every ii minutes.
  • Outset with high heat, then after a few flips, plough it down to medium.
  • Cook until the exterior is well browned and the interior registers 120 degrees Fahrenheit (for medium-rare).

Andrew goes into more detail here, or you tin can as well watch Bridget demonstrate the technique below.