I was always under the impression that if you pull your meat at let's say 128, resting it will bring the internal temperature up, finishing at like 132-134. Is this wrong?
Another important effect during cooking is the breakdown of collagen fibres (present in tough connective tissues which make some cuts of meat very tough to chew). This occurs in the presence of moisture at temperatures above 170F. When collagen breaks down the meat tenderizes and the collagen itself turns into gelatine which absorbs moisture and retains it within the meat. A gelatine-rich cut of slow-cooked meat (such as oxtail) can be very sticky and packed with flavour. This is one case where food can taste juicier with longer cooking times.
Kenji’s original tests seem to confound this as well: every 2.5min of slicing produces steadily less juice, despite the fact that the steak’s internal temp should be rising for some of that time.
So the average pressure will decrease.
(Yes, for an ideal cavity, pressure is equal everywhere, but for meat which contains highly tortured paths and a three-phase state mixture for the vapors to escape from - there can be different pressures in different areas especially once there’s any flow at all)
Please state units. In en_GB (at least) "pulling your meat" is ... ambiguous.
That's ~2.1Hz - Pretty normal. Perhaps get some soothing balm on hand, just in case 8)
I cook til 125F, take it off, let it rest, cut. I have a probe that measures it in multiple points, allowing it to more accurately estimate core and surface temperature.
There are so many cases like this in cooking because no one bothered to actually test validate science as long as it produced claimed results (i.e. juicy steak in this case)
1. finish temperature (as mentioned in this article) 2. peak temperature
In these tests, the finish temperature and peak temperature were the same - he sliced while carryover cooking was still climbing. However, when resting, most people achieve a peak temperature (due to carryover cooking), then roll down the other side of the curve to a lowered temperature.
As you imply, a longer rest - in conjunction with protein pulled at just the right time - can likely result with both the perfect (to taste) peak temperature, and a lower (and more juicy) slicing temperature
And when you achieve that was-lower-then-higher-but-now-lower-again temperature, it should be more juicy
I always thought the whole point of resting is to do with temperature rather than time.
See the chart halfway down here:
https://blog.thermoworks.com/coming-heat-effects-muscle-fibe...
As a counterexample: let's say the only things I care about are juiciness of the center of the cut of meat and the time it takes me to make it. By the conventional wisdom I'd have to rest the meat, adding time, but now we know that I could simply keep cooking the meat for longer, since that will raise the center temp faster, and then cut it immediately after cooking.
Or another scenario: if I know the precise internal temperature for my preferred level of juiciness, I know exactly what temperature to set a sous vide to.
But when you remove your unrealistic constraints, it is absolutely realistic. There is a wide temperature band where a cut of meat will reach a given center temp faster than carryover cooking with a difference to edge temperature that is trivial enough that someone is unlikely to notice.
I disagree that the edge temperature difference would be trivial. The difference between the last 20 degrees in the middle coming out of the edges while they also lose heat to their surroundings versus making the edges even hotter as you continue cooking is quite a lot.
> now we know that I could simply keep cooking the meat for longer
Cooking longer at the same temperature is also pretty much exactly what the experiment in the article was, which found no statistically significant correlation between testing and juiciness.
The experimental group pork chops took less time from when they were put on the skillet to when they were cut (and when they would have been consumed if they were cooked by someone making a meal for themselves).
You're welcome to disagree, but the facts disagree with your stance.
I meant cooking significantly longer is outside the scope, since that implies different temperature (or a rubber brick).
Yes, cooking different times at the same temperature is exactly what I was responding to. The outside will be a lot hotter if you do that.
If the juice loss is the same, there's a missing factor here, why does only the middle temperature matter and not the edge temperature?
Sous vide steak, as mentioned by your parent post, is similar.
First, at the end of the article he does a taste test. In the taste test no one was able to tell whether the meat had been rested or not, so that's a reason you might not want to bother resting meat.
Second, yes he devotes a lot of the article to the discovery that juice retention is happening for different reasons than we thought. To quote him directly, he thinks this is important because "Food and recipe writers like myself have been dispensing inaccurate meat-resting time and temperature guidance for ages." If you choose to continue resting your meat, as many will, these insights provide you with better guidance in terms of how you should do it.
As a home cook, the taste test is convincing enough to me that if I'm making food for myself, I should probably skip the resting stage, focus on other taste factors, and see how it goes, as I'm always happy to save 10 minutes and taste is rather subjective anyway. A professional or commercial chef will likely have a very different but no less useful takeaway from this article.
All this to say, it was a great article and the headline's not clickbait.
Retaining the juices in the meat has to do with the temperature at which the meat is cut. Resting allows the temperature to drop, which creates less pressure, so the juices aren't forced out of the meat nearly as strongly.
The title is click-bait. The major rule is correct, not wrong. But, now we know a little bit more about why this rule works.
> As the meat rests (and therefore cools) that vapor pressure decreases, and so does the juice loss. It's not about reabsorption or thickening as the juices cool, which is another common explanation that's been offered over the years. It's simply about pressure. Control for final internal temperature, and—rested or not—the juice loss is the same.