← Wiki

Resting Meat

technique

Also: rest meat, resting, rest the meat, let it rest, carryover cooking

From your cookbook

The practice of allowing cooked meat to sit off the heat for a few minutes before cutting. A short pause that measurably changes the plate.

Why it works

Muscle fibres contract under heat. During cooking, the fibres tighten and squeeze juice outward toward the hot surface. If the meat is cut immediately after cooking, those displaced juices run onto the board. Given five or ten minutes off the heat, the fibres relax, reabsorb some of that juice, and the meat settles into an evenly moist state that the knife releases cleanly. The effect is most visible with thick cuts — a ribeye, a rack of lamb, a whole chicken — and barely noticeable with thin fillets. (McGee, On Food and Cooking, 2nd ed., pp. 150–151.)

There is a second, less-discussed effect. Meat carries over after it leaves the heat: the residual energy in the surface layers continues to cook the interior by conduction. A steak pulled from the pan at 52°C will rise to 55-57°C during the rest. Overshoot this and the rest period is itself a cooking stage that needs planning for.

Resting is not the same as keeping the meat warm. A resting steak loses heat, and is meant to — the goal is not to hold it at serving temperature, but to let the fibre contraction reverse.

How to use it

  • Rest small cuts for 5 minutes; larger cuts proportionally longer. A steak: five. A chicken: fifteen. A rib of beef: thirty.
  • Pull meat off the heat below target temperature. Account for carryover — usually 3-5°C for a steak, 5-8°C for a roast.
  • Cover loosely with foil or a lid, not tightly. Loose cover retains some warmth without sealing in steam that will soften the crust.
  • Rest on a warm plate, not a cold one. A cold board or plate accelerates surface cooling.

Common mistakes

  • Cutting immediately. The juices that should have stayed in the meat end up on the board.
  • Over-resting. After 15-20 minutes, a steak has cooled past serving temperature.
  • Wrapping tightly in foil. The trapped steam collapses the crust and continues to cook the meat.
  • Skipping the rest for thin cuts "because it doesn't matter." Two minutes is free.

See also

Examples

(auto-appended as the user logs cooks that touch this concept)

Sources

  • McGee, Harold. On Food and Cooking: The Science and Lore of the Kitchen, 2nd ed. Scribner, 2004. pp. 150–151.
  • Myhrvold, Nathan et al. Modernist Cuisine: The Art and Science of Cooking, vol. 2. Cooking Lab, 2011. pp. 148–150.