How Michelin Chefs Cook Steak (From Blue to Well Done)

I trained in Michelin star restaurant and this is a three star method for cooking every different variety of quison stick with me and I'll show you how to do it and what I'm going to do today is cook every sort of generic quison of steak at the same time so we can see the difference and I can show you exactly how in restaurants we do it these are six fillets fillets are the best Stak to show the qu on because they're the leanest so there's very little fat running through them so it makes them perfect

to show for this sort of control test I would save my big fatties so really nice length but like a little bit thinner medium rares because there you can show the best qu on and this one that's a little bit you know potentially portioned maybe a little bit badly got some jaggedy edges that is my well done no offense well done eaters but I'm not going to try and choose the nicest fatest steak the nice is they're the same weight so you're still getting the same amount of steak but it's a very different thickness and

if you ordering a well done steak it sort of tends to mean that you're not really interested in The Quon this is a grill but the same principles will apply exactly to just cooking in a pan so I've just turned the steaks once that's to get the nice cross hatch on each steak there we go that's the flavor that's the myad reaction so you want as much of this as possible um without affecting the qu on or importantly giving the steak a gray line so a gray line occurs when too much heat goes into the

meat at the beginning and you don't turn your steak enough so hon famously says that you should turn a riy steak every 30 seconds so this has been about 35 seconds 40 seconds and now I'm going to turn there is an sort of ongoing myth about never turning the stake and that's to do with the myard reaction so you want to develop that crust really really nicely and really slowly but if you never turn your steak you can get an uneven cook on each sides so sirloin RI eyes fillets all slightly different the guiding principle

being fillet has the least amount of fat so it's very lean it means that you have to treat it a little bit more delicately than any other steak most chefs like a ribeye cuz it it's got more fat and it's means more flavor so in the in your in your cast iron pan if you're doing this at home really really easy you're just doing this with par tongs importantly my blue straight into rest so that's been cooking for 3 and 1/2 minutes so that goes straight into the draw something with a blue steak is actually

magic whatever temperature you take it off the grill if you put it into a good 40 um degree resting drawer it will always come up if you don't have a resting drawer flip over a lid of a plate and leave it under there exactly the same at home I've got my steaks now they've got a nice crust on them what I'm going to start doing in the restaurant I would leave these on this top grill to cook for medium rare but because I'm trying to show you how you could do this at home I'm going

to choose my fatter steaks and I've got my blue in the drawer that is going to be my rare medium rare uh medium medium well well done and I'm going to show you how I take the temperature out and what time I will take them out so once they're in there I'm going to settle 2 minute timer and every single 2 minutes we're going to flip those steaks okay so the time has gone that's 2 minutes in the oven the oven is on 180° rare steak it's going to come out okay so medium rare is

coming out to rest rare blue all feeling good one more flip that's going to be our medium medium well well done I'm just going to start using a probe now probes are a fairly contentious thing in the chef Community because a lot of people think that it's uh I don't know it's like an impressive badge of honor that you can probe or you meet just us in your fingers and to be honest I've got mixed feelings about it when I first started cooking I used a probe religiously cuz I just didn't want to get it

wrong and then over the course of using the probe it got to the point where when I touched a piece of meat I would know exactly what temperature it was before using the probe and then the probe was more just a sort of uh reaffirming what I already knew and checking that it was on the right temperature rather than telling me exactly how I needed to cook the steak it's much more consistent way I've checking and temping your meat so these are definitely starting to feel now exactly how I want them to feel so that's

my medium and then medium well and well done go back in the oven two more minutes above 56° meat starts to lose the the cell walls of the of meat starts to break and that's essentially what you're doing over anything that's medium doesn't mean that you should have a bad que on on a medium well steak so medium well still should be pink all the way through but just lightly blushed with pink and it can still have an e even crease on just cuz it's medium well doesn't mean you need to crucify on the grill

well done kind of you can kind of get away with uh you know a little bit of mistreatment two more minutes have gone that's definitely ready so that's going to go in for my medium well am I well done okay so my blue is on 36 degrees that's been that's come up that 5 minutes from the last over the last 6 and 1 half minutes my my rare is on 36° my medium rare is is basically on temp my medium is on 51 that's going to come up another bit and that is almost up to

60° so perfect there's a little bit of Mystique around resting and how it all works the uh the the detail that people Miss is when you rest your steak so you only rest your steak when it's on temp that means that all of these Stakes that are in my drawer right now they've not even started resting yet because they're still coming up to Temp and once they come up to Temp then they basically sit there and all of the heat it resting is a process of making sure that the heat is evenly dispersed and distributed

for each cell of that meat so you've got the absolute perfect qu on these are all still cooking so they're not even ready to rest yet and that's the common misconception about resting people people like oh you know chefs often say rest the meat for twice as long it's actually not that so you want to the more heat you give it at this stage the more likely you are to get a gray line so you want to balance getting a crust with getting a Gray Line especially with a filet where there's not enough fat to

sort of uh to create a barrier so in terms of this one I know that basically in the next two minutes all of those stakes in there will be ready to rest and then I'm going to set a 10-minute timer this is basically H Hon's training on how to cook a steak so just for a well done you can see that's on 71° 69° I'm going to take that out so well done are different because the drawer or anywhere you're resting your meat isn't on 70° so it means that the heat is going to dissipate

and whereas all of these will climb in temperature this will actually slowly drop in temp for all restaurants the most even with this methodology the most complaints any restaurant will ever get is about cooking of the meat because some people don't ultimately don't know their quison so at least us following the systems knows that we know that we're happy with what we produced and hon over the course of two years work with Harold McGee and food scientists to test the dness of steak the age of steak how it affects it for for a long long

time to come up with this methodology and this is the this is the methodology they still use on most of our meat cooking in uh the fat duck and it's what I trained um on it's how I trained at dinner uh for a year and a half on a josper every time you took a steak down to the pass at dinner they H you had to probe it live so it meant that when it went to the restaurant it had to be 48° and that's how you knew that you were serving the perfect State um

and that means that every piece of meat would have been probed at least four to five times before it ever got to a customer I think I think Michelin star is is a is an assur it's it's an assurance standard it's like if you're buying premium bonds you know it's basically it's AAA rated and it literally does mean that okay so these are our stakes and you can see in gradient blue rare medium rare medium medium well well done and you can see how smaller and how much more moisture the well done as lost so

I'm just going to expose the quison on each stake so carbon with the grain so this is 38° blue 38° rare 44 46° that's our medium rare 48° that's the most common and most popular medium you can see it started to get all the way cooked consistently all the way through that's a perfect medium steak medium well should just be an extension of that so pink Still Still pink but no loose blood in there well done still quite hot to serve there we go same with all Stakes we finish with little bit of be fat

and there we go that is my definitive guide to qu on Blue 38° rare 44 to 46° medium rare 48° medium 50 to 52° medium well 56° well done 70° don't know about you but that's my favorite straight down the middle 48° medium rare perfect perfect mix of nicely seared cooked meat and really nice beautiful consistency in the middle never go well done because you can see the size difference first of all you've lost all of the moisture out of those cell walls of that meat and then blue for me is just a little bit

too under I actually can eat a blue steak quite comfortably but for me you don't get the nice texture and the nice chew that you would with a rare or medium rare