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Meat is often the most expensive dish on the table and the main focus of the meal, and so cooking it can feel high stakes (or should I say high steaks?). It can be intimidating and expensive to play around and practice with. Over the course of my kitchen career, I have had the opportunity to hone my meat cooking skills on over a million dollars of product. I have found that all meat cookery can be broken down into two primary methods. What I call “High Heat – Low Temp Cooking,” covered in this post, and “Low Heat – High Temp Cooking,” which I cover in How to Cook Meat, Part 2.

I hope that this How-To Guide will make it easier to understand and shorten the learning curve for my Home Cooks readers. There are no recipes in this post. This is an in-depth guide that you can apply to any dish you make.

Part 1: High Heat – Low Temp Cooking. An overview.

Grilling, Roasting, Sautéing, Frying and The Reverse Sear

High Heat – Low Temp Cooking is what we use to achieve a steak cooked medium-rare, chicken breast cooked to juicy perfection, a moist and flavorful hamburger.

The cuts used for this method are lean, tender cuts. The methods used for this type of cooking tend to be high-heat methods: grilling, frying, sautéing, and roasting. What defines this type of cooking, though, is not the method or the cut but the goal: the goal of reaching a specific target temperature between 120 F and 165 F.

The high heat methods of cooking cause the meat to brown on the outside (the Maillard effect) and develop characteristic meaty aromas, and then we aim to stop the cooking at the ideal temperature for your specific cut of meat and your personal preferences. Cooking the perfect steak or Thanksgiving Roast Turkey requires mastery over many variables, including preparation, the size of cut, cooking temperature, resting time, and carryover cooking. Over time and practice this becomes intuitive.

Let’s get started with the first step, Meat Preparation.

Step 1: Prepare your meat

The first step to a perfectly cooked piece of meat is proper preparation, which includes selecting the right cut, seasoning, drying, and tempering. The High Heat methods are best for lean, tender cuts. Here’s a list of cuts best suited for this style of meat cookery.

• chicken breast
• duck breast
• steaks
• pork loin roast
• pork chops
• all seafood
• sausages
• hamburgers
• Roast turkey
• Roast whole chicken
• Ribeye Roast
• Striploin Roast

I do not recommend rinsing meat off. This adds moisture, which prevents browning, and it splashes and spreads raw meat bacteria around your sink and kitchen.

Season your meat and let the seasoning sit on it awhile. Longer for larger pieces. Salt seeks equilibrium through a process called osmosis. This means that it will travel from salty areas (the exterior of your meat) to less salty areas (the interior), carrying with it any other seasonings you have mixed in. The bigger the piece of meat, the longer it should sit with the salt and other spices on it. For individual steaks, 1 hour is good, but I often season those just before I cook them. For a whole chicken, a pork loin roast, or a beef roast, 5-24 hours is ideal. Leave whole chickens or roasts uncovered on a rack over a sheet pan in the refrigerator. This helps dry the outside and encourages browning.

How much salt should you use? 2-4 grams (or 1/2-1 heaping teaspoon of Diamond Crystal Salt) per pound will result in perfectly seasoned meat. In addition to the salt, other spices can be added at this time. Whatever you like. A couple of my go-to spice blends for beef are:

• rosemary powder
• garlic powder
• black pepper
• mustard powder

OR

• cumin
• ancho powder
• garlic powder

For chicken or pork:

• herbs de provence
• honey
• black pepper
• garlic (fresh or powder)

Just before cooking, pat your meat dry with a piece of paper towel. Don’t rub all the seasoning off; just gently pat any excess liquid.

Marinades

A marinade is a flavorful liquid that the meat is submerged in to tenderize it and add seasoning. They typically contain acidic ingredients like vinegar, wine, citrus juice, or buttermilk, which tenderize the meat; oil to carry flavor; and salt and seasonings. I don’t tend to use marinades often, especially for beef because I find that it takes away from the natural meaty flavors while leaving the exterior overly tangy. Besides, we are cooking tender cuts here that don’t need tenderizing. I do make an exception for buttermilk-marinated fried chicken, which I love! Marinades add moisture and flavor to the meat but reduce browning.

Brining

A brine is a heavily salted liquid that the meat is submerged in for a period of time. Through osmosis, salt from the brine penetrates the meat, flavors it, and draws extra water into it as well. A standard brine formula is:

• 1/2 – 1 Tablespoon of Diamond Crystal Salt
• 1/2 Tablespoon Sugar or Brown Sugar (to round out the harshness of salt)
• 1 Cup of Water
• Any other aromatics you want (peppercorns, garlic cloves, herbs, etc)

I have done a lot of brining in the commercial kitchen, especially for large cuts like whole pork loin, hams, and whole turkeys. It works great for distributing flavor all the way through the roast and results in a juicy finished product. I do not like brining at home, though. Without the large bins and adequate fridge space of a commercial kitchen, I find brining to be messy and clumbsy, especially for larger pieces like a whole chicken. If you brine smaller cuts like pork chops, it’s easy to overdo it and end up with unpalatably salty meat. I find I am able to get very similar results from dry salting (also called “dry-brining”), and because I rub it with the total amount of salt I want in the finished product, it will never end up oversalted no matter how long it sits.

Tempering

“To temper” meat means to remove it from the refrigerator and let it come up to room temperature prior to cooking it. You’ll probably find a lot of blogs and chefs that suggest pulling steak or turkeys out of the fridge 30 minutes before cooking it. Well, 30 minutes doesn’t cut it for a piece of meat of any size. It takes a surprisingly long time to change the internal temperature of a piece of meat at ambient room temperature. I don’t bother to temper small cuts and steaks. However, I always temper large roasts like turkeys and beef roasts, not for 30 minutes but for 3- 6 hours (with salt on them, of course). Intuitively, it makes sense to me to raise the internal temperature for a more even cook. I’ve cooked a lot of good roasts this way, and it’s now a habit for me.

That being said, Kenji Lopez of Serious Eats makes a compelling argument against tempering meat in his post 7 Myths About Cooking Steak That Need To Go Away. So, it’s your call on whether or not to temper your meat.

*If you are thinking “doesn’t leaving meat out for 3-6 hours increase the growth of foodborne pathogens?” the answer is yes and no. It takes much of that time for the surface temperature of the meat to cross over 45 F and after that, yes, bacteria present on the meat will grow very slowly on the surface for the last hour or so. But then you are going to cook it, and the surface of the meat will be exposed to temperatures of 200-500 F or more for the duration of the cooking time, so any bacteria would be destroyed during cooking. The biggest danger is cross-contamination of your work surfaces, so make sure you let your meat temper on a pan or in a container to prevent the juices from running all over your counter or cutting board.

Step 2: Know your target temperatures

Everyone has heard that chicken and turkey should be cooked to 165 (this is actually not true; read on). You may not have thought about temperature, though, when cooking hamburgers and sausages on the grill. But there is an ideal temperature for these, and it’s 155-165. You know it when you’ve passed it because your sausages split open, spraying their flavorful juices all over your grill, and your burgers end up dry and crumbly. The first step in cooking a great piece of meat is knowing your target internal temperature.

FDA Guidelines

(If you pull your meat off the grill at these temperatures, you will end up with dry, overcooked meat)

• Poultry 165 F
• Ground Meat (non-poultry). Hamburgers/ Sausages/ Meatloaf/ 160 F
• Beef, Veal, Lamb, Pork 145 F (3 min)
• Fish 145 F

Home Cooks Guide Meat Cooking Guidelines (Finished temps, including carryover cooking)

• Poultry (breast) 155-165 F (hold for at least 1 minute, this happens without trying)**
• Poultry (thigh) 175-200 F
• Ground Meat (not poultry) 155-160 F (hold for 3 minute, this happens without trying if using a high heat cooking method)
• Beef, Veal, Lamb (not ground) 115 very rare- 140 F medium well
• Fish 120-140 F
• Pork Loin or Chops 145 F

*Making food safe by controlling for Salmonella (which in turn controls for most other foodborne pathogens) is a function of temperature AND time AND fat content. The higher the fat content, the longer the time at a given temperature to kill salmonella. At the highest fat content for poultry 12% (most poultry is lower in fat, making these numbers the safest/most conservative), you can control for salmonella by holding chicken or duck at:

• 145 F for 14 minutes
• 150 F for 4.5 minutes
• 155 F for 55 seconds
• 160 F for 17 seconds

That’s right, you can cook poultry to only 145 F, and as long as you hold it there for a while, you are all good! That “holding time” is generally accomplished during “carry-over” cooking, which I’ll discuss in the next section. Or if you are cooking a Whole Turkey, it happens in the oven as it passes from 145-160F. Which means by the time it reaches 160, it has already spent the necessary amount of time above 145 to kill Salmonella. Now, if this just blew your mind or if you think I’m crazy to suggest cooking chicken to a temperature less than 165 F, or if you just want to geek out on the science of heat and foodborne pathogens, check out these other sources:

Thermal Tips: Simple Roasted Chicken—Cooking Chicken to the Correct Temperature

TIME-TEMPERATURE TABLES FOR COOKING READY-TO-EAT
POULTRY PRODUCTS (page 16)

All that being said, most people will not enjoy the texture of poultry chicken cooked to 145 F. It is still nearly transparent and somehow squishy and crunchy at the same time. But a chicken breast cooked to a finished temperature (after accounting for carryover cooking) of 155-160 F is truly perfect. Chicken or turkey thighs, however, are still bloody at this temperature and are best cooked to 175 or above. This presents special challenges when cooking a whole bird.

While I’m talking about poultry I want to make a note about duck. Duck breasts behave more like a red meat when cooking them and so a lot of chefs, including myself, opt to cook these to a more medium temperature, around 130-140 F. The theory is that the salmonella would be on the outside of the muscle and would be killed during the cooking process. That being said, there is some risk involved in doing this, on par with eating raw egg in aioli or caesar salad dressing or a really rare steak. I tend to take risks with my food choices and life in general… more than average. It is important to assess your own risk tolerance when cooking and choosing what to eat and if you are pregnant or have a compromised immune system it is recommended that you air on the side of caution.

Step 3: Plan for Carry-Over Cooking

One essential concept to understand in order to cook the perfect chicken, turkey, roast, or steak is “carry-over” cooking. When you pull a steak off the grill or your turkey out of the oven, it does not immediately start cooling off. The internal temperature continues to increase for an amount of time, while the exterior begins to cool off. This cooking, which happens after the meat is removed from the heat, is called “Carry-Over” cooking.

The amount of time and the change in temperature that you will get from carry-over cooking depends on 2 things: how big the piece of meat is, and how hot your cooking temperature is. The bigger the piece of meat, the longer it will cook after being removed from the heat. The hotter you cook it, the greater the temperature change will be. After years of cooking, this becomes instinctual. But you don’t have to rely on instincts; you can rely on a leave-in probe thermometer. I still use a probe thermometer for large roasts.

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Chef Trick

If you don’t have a thermometer, here’s a nifty chef trick to gauge doneness. Rare feels like the pad of your thumb with an open hand – soft and relaxed muscle. Medium Rare feels like the pad of your thumb when you touch your thumb and index finger together – still soft and relaxed but a little less so. Well Done feels like the pad of your thumb when you touch your thumb and pinky finger together – very firm. This works better with cuts of meat where the muscle fibers are cut as cross sections – like most steaks. It’s a little harder to gauge when the muscle fibers are longitudinal, like on a whole tri-tip or a whole pork tenderloin.

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You learned above that you can pull chicken at 150 F, provided it remains at that temperature or higher for about 5 minutes. Carry-over cooking for a roast chicken is about 10 minutes which means that if you pull it at 150 F it will remain above 150 F for 10 minutes (plenty safe) and will likely max out around 155-165 F depending on how hot your oven is. On the other hand, if you followed the FDA Guidelines and pulled the chicken out at 165 F, it would remain above 165 F for 10 minutes and end up at a final cook temperature of approximately 175 F after carry-over cooking. This is a dry overcooked bird! So plan for that carry-over cooking.

Steaks on a hot grill or skillet will also continue to cook after pulling them off, but for a much shorter amount of time than a large roast because it is a smaller cut of meat. If you cook a steak in a hot skillet, it will continue to cook for about 3 minutes after you pull it off, and its internal temperature will increase by about 5 degrees. Therefore, if you want a rare steak, with a target temperature of 125 F, you should pull it when it is at 120 F and let carry-over cooking finish it off.

Step 4: Choose your cooking method

If you want a piece of meat that is evenly cooked, use lower heat (250-350 F). If you want a piece of meat that is seared on the outside and rare on the inside, you want to use high heat (400-500 F) and make sure your grill or pan is preheated before adding your meat. As a general rule of thumb, the larger the roast, the lower the heat should be for an evenly cooked piece of meat.

Roast

Like the grill, this is another dry-heat method that is done in the oven. Roasting happens at temperatures above 375 F and anything under that is considered baking, but a lot of the time, the terms are used interchangeably. I use the oven only for larger roasts like a whole turkey, chicken, or Rib Roast, and for braising, which I’ll cover in Part 2. I would also use this method if I were cooking chicken breasts for, say, 20 people on a sheet pan.

Many ovens have a Convection setting. I recommend using it for everything except cakes. Convection speeds up cooking and ensures more even heat distribution by circulating air in the oven. Keep in mind that if you are following a recipe, convection is like adding 25 F to the cooking temperature. So if a recipe calls for baking at 350 F, you would adjust that to 325 F if using convection or plan to shorten the time. My recipes are always on convection unless I specify otherwise.

Always preheat the oven first. Use a leave-in probe thermometer so you can avoid opening the oven door to check on your roast. You can cook steaks, pork chops, and chicken breasts in the oven, but I rarely do. I would rather grill or pan fry these cuts.

Some Special Attention For Whole Roast Turkey and Chicken

The challenge to cooking the perfect whole bird is that the breasts want to be cooked to a drastically different temperature (155-165F) than the thighs and legs (185 F). Really, the legs would benefit from the low-heat methods of Part 2, while the breasts are more of a target-temperature type of cut. This gets progressively more challenging the larger the bird. You are better off cooking 2 8lb turkeys than cooking 1 16lb turkey (that being said, I’m going for a giant bird this year- cause… I like the challenge!).

So what do you do about this conundrum?

This is how I cook my whole birds

Place it directly in a preheated cast-iron skillet or sheet pan, NOT on a rack in a high-sided roasting pan. Get rid of those roasting pans too while you’re at it; you don’t need them for anything. This way the heated metal from the sheet pan or skillet will be in direct contact with the thighs, greatly speeding up their cooking time. The high sides of the roasting pan, with the rack, actually insulate the lower part of the bird, aka the thighs, and slows the cooking down for that part.

If the bird is large, I might cover the breast with foil for the first hour or so. I cook large birds at 200-250 for the bulk of the cooking and then will remove the bird from the oven when the breast is around 120-130 F, turn the oven up to 400 or so, place the bird back in the oven and cook for 20-30 more until the breast is 150 F and the skin is golden. Once the breast temps at 150 F and the thighs should be at 175 F or higher, make sure to let the bird rest for a good 20 minutes.

For smaller birds like whole chickens, I simply cook them directly in a cast iron skillet or in my brazier at 400 F until the breast reaches 150 F and then I remove and rest for 10-15 minutes so the finish temp is around 160 F. Perfection.

Another method that works great for whole birds is smoking them. I have smoked many turkeys on my Traeger. Because the temperatures are low and the heat source is on the bottom, the thighs always cook much faster than the breast. It’s perfect.

Sauté

Sautéeing is a great method for most seafood and thin cuts of meat like butterflied chicken breast. Other ingredients like garlic, mushrooms, peppers, etc are often added to the sauté pan along with liquid to finish off the dish with a pan sauce; check out my Chicken Marsala recipe for an example of this process.

To sauté, first, preheat your pan. Get it really hot. Then add 1-2 T oil right before adding your meat. When the pan is hot enough, the oil will immediately start dancing around. Add your seasoned-dry meat to the pan and give it a quick swirl around. This will help with sticking. Let it sit for a couple of minutes without moving it, then flip it, cook for a couple of minutes longer on the other side until the desired doneness. If your meat sticks to the pan, turn the heat off and leave it alone. It will release on its own in a couple of minutes.

For most things (except eggs) you really don’t need a non-stick pan. But if you are going to use one, I recommend a ceramic coating, a well-seasoned cast iron or carbon steel pan. These will not flake off forever chemicals into your food.

Fry/ Pan Fry

Frying is when you heat oil to 300-375 F and submerge a piece of meat in it. The larger the piece of meat, the lower the oil temperature you’ll want and the longer it will take. A bone-in chicken breast will take around 15-20 minutes. Fried shrimp will take less than 5 minutes. Though I love, love, love fried chicken, I almost never use this method at home. It’s messy and uses a ton of oil, which I don’t have in mass quantity in my pantry. You can strain and reuse fry oil a couple of times, which helps with costs but adds to the mess and hassle. If you are going to fry at home, I recommend a large cast-iron pot for even heating.

Pan-frying is the offspring of sautéing and Deep Frying. You use less oil than deep frying but more than sautéing; about 1/8″ or 1/4″ deep in the pan. The meat is not fully submerged; it needs to be flipped in order to fry both sides. This method is definitely more manageable at home than deep frying. This is a great method for fish, steaks, pork chops, and breaded chicken or pork cutlets.

Grill

Preheat your grill. Once your grill grate is piping hot, set your seasoned meat on it. If you are cooking a fatty piece of meat like a hamburger, you may want to turn off the burner directly below the meat or push the coals to the other side, as fat drippings will cause the flame to flare up. Leave the meat undisturbed for a couple of minutes, then flip it over and repeat until it reaches your desired doneness.

Covering the grill will cause your meat to cook faster and more evenly, and is best for meat about 1 inch thick or thicker. For flank steak, or shrimp, or a similarly thin cut, there is no need to cover the grill, but you can if you want to, knowing it will speed up cooking.

Sausages on the grill should be cooked at a low temperature so the inside and outside are evenly cooked, but not overly cooked. Check out this in-depth post about How To Cook Sausage.

Reverse Sear

This is hands-down my favorite method for thick steaks and roasts. The reverse sear results in perfectly cooked meat all the way through with a nice, thick, flavorful crust.

Traditionally, steaks and roasts would be seared and then thrown in the oven, or grilled until done. The idea was that searing first “locked in the juices.” We now know that searing does not lock in the juices. It does taste really good, though, thanks to the Maillard Reaction – the browning that occurs when proteins and sugars are exposed to high temperatures.

When you cook steaks and roasts the traditional way, searing first, you often end up with a thick grayish-overcooked ring of meat just under the seared crust. Oftentimes, 50% of the steak or roast is actually overcooked.

With the reverse sear, you start the steak or roast in the oven or (smoker) at a temperature around 200 F. When the steak is about 20 degrees under your target temperature (use the probe thermometer), you pull it out and sear it in a hot pan. This results in perfectly cooked steak (without the overdone ring) and a really nice crust.

Cooking first at a low temperature not only ensures even cooking all the way through, but it dries the surface of the steak, making it much faster and easier to brown. Make sure your cast iron pan or frying pan is very hot when you add the steak.

I use this method a ton for catering and entertaining because I can do the bulk of the cooking ahead of time, put the roast in a hot box (basically a cooler used only for hot items), let it rest in there for hours, and then sear it off on-site just before serving! I have served thousands of people perfectly cooked, perfectly crusty sliced beef using the reverse sear method.

Step 5: Give it a rest

One of the biggest mistakes people make when cooking meat is serving it immediately after cooking it. Meat should rest for at least a couple of minutes after carry-over cooking is complete. The larger the roast, the longer it should rest. A turkey or rib roast should rest for 20-30 minutes after coming out of the oven. As meat cooks, the muscle fibers tighten and squeeze the juices out. If you cut into the meat at this point in the process, the juices will quickly run out, and your meat will be drier and tougher than it should be. Once cooking is complete, the muscle fibers start to relax and reabsorb the juices.

High Heat-Low Temp Recap

You made it to the end. You now know everything I know about cooking meat! Here’s a quick recap to tie it all together for you.

For High Heat – Low Temp Cooking, you are using high heat methods to reach a specific, relatively low, internal temperature of the meat between 120-165. Here are the steps:

• Select tender, relatively lean pieces of meat.
• Season your meat ahead of time. Leave uncovered before cooking to dry.
• Pat the meat dry before cooking.
• Always preheat your oven, grill or skillet.
• Use a probe thermometer, especially for large roasts.
• Factor in Carry-Over Cooking
• Let the meat rest before serving it.

Now, go forth and cook great meat!