Grilled Rib Eye Steak: Reverse Sear and Thermal Principles

Author: Kim Allison

If there were a President of Steaks, it’d be the rib eye. There’s something special about the cut, with tender, well-marbled meat that smells somehow better than any other steak. It’s a great way to celebrate anything: Father’s Day, Independence Day…Dinner. In today’s post, we’ll be showing you how you can get the best results when grilling this amazing cut, and we’ll also talk about one of the best ways to top it: homemade compound butter.

This rather expensive steak is one you really don’t want to mess up by overcooking. To eliminate any chance of that cardinal food sin, you should cook your steak by the reverse sear method.

What is the reverse sear method?

A traditional sear is an old trick for cooking steaks, whereby you’d sear the steak in a hot pan or on a hot grill and finish it in the oven at a lower temperature. This helped prevent overcooking—in part—but also created a delicious crust. The reverse sear is the opposite of that: you cook the steak in a low-temp environment first until it is about 15°F (8°C) below your target pull temperature. Then you sear the steak to give it that tasty crust and to finish the cooking.

Why reverse sear?

By cooking the steak evenly throughout, you can be assured that you are getting just the doneness that you want. The gentle early cook gives you greater control over meat temp because the temperature gradients from exterior to interior remain relatively mild throughout. If you sear first, you’re setting up a steep temperature curve through the thickness of the meat that can push you into doneness range with unexpected rapidity. Getting your meat close to done and then pushing the surface to a crust just gives you more control over the finish, the perfect pink that you are looking for.

Put another way, by grill-roasting a rib eye—or other—steak in a 220°F (104°C) environment, the thermal gradients within the meat are kept broader, meaning the center temp is much closer to the surface temp. When the steak reaches 110°F (43°C) internal temperature, the outside region is still much cooler than it would have been if you had seared it first. If you then sear the steak quickly over high heat, you get a great Maillard-browned crust but little to no grey-ring in the steak.

Reverse sear is the best way to get edge-to-edge even doneness on a thick steak without a thick band of battleship gray meat just under the crust. —The Science of Great BBQ and Grilling, by Meathead Goldwyn

(Incidentally, when the pink pigment myoglobin heats beyond 140°F (60°C) degrees, it denatures and turns brown. And while this change from pink to brown is not what makes a piece of beef well done, it is indicative of the kind of heat that does cook meat to well.)

How to set up your grill for reverse searing steak

set up for indirect cooking on a gas grill

To grill a steak by the reverse-sear method, you need two zones: a direct and an indirect cooking zone. For gas grills, that means turning one side of your grill to high while leaving the other side off. For charcoal or wood grills, that means banking your coals to one side while either leaving the other side empty or even putting a pan of water in the space.

Using the air probe on the indirect side—where it’s safe from high heat and from flare-ups—monitor the temperature and adjust your lid or vents to keep it in the neighborhood of 220°F (104°C). Setting up your grill in this way will give you the two zones you need to gently grill-roast your steak and then sear it.

Thermal Images of Ribeye — These images were taken with a thermal imaging camera. Note how the heat moves from the outside in while grill-roasting, distributes evenly while resting before the sear, and then how the center of the steak is the coolest part (shown in green) after the sear.

What thermometer?

For grilling, we usually do not recommend a leave-in probe thermometer. Though our probes are rated for high heat, the flare-ups that accompany standard grilling can reach temperatures as high as 1200°F (649°C), enough to fry the sensor or the cable on your probe. However, with indirect grilling things are different. By keeping the meat—and the air and meat probes—from directly above any flame or heat source, the probe is also protected from the jets of fire that will unavoidably happen. We recommend a Smoke^TM dual-channel thermometer, which can monitor the air temp as well as the meat temperature at the same time.

Once your steak has reached a temperature that is about 15°F (8°C)lower than your preferred doneness (130-135°F [54-57°C] for medium-rare or 135–140°F [57–60°C] for medium), remove the probe and move the steak to the hot side of the grill for searing. A few minutes per side should give it the Maillard browning and crust that you want. For the searing, use a Thermapen^{^®} to check the temperature throughout the sear. As soon as the lowest temperature you see is 5–7°F (3-4°C) below your target temp, pull the steak. Carryover will bring it the rest of the way up.

Note: feel free to let the steak rest between the grill-roasting and the searing for as long as an hour. The equilibration and cooling of the gradients in the meat will give you a little extra room to really sear both sides well before you reach your internal target temp.

Rest your grilled steak

As the steak has been cooking, especially during the sear, its protein fibers have been constricting, squeezing out stored water. Allowing the steak a resting period will help those fibers relax some, pulling the water back in like a sponge. Without this resting period, all that water will drain out as soon as you cut into it. So tent the steak with foil for 5-10 minutes before cutting in and enjoying yourself.

Once that meat has cooled slightly, its structure relaxes—the muscle fibers widen up slightly again, and it’s this small change in shape that makes all the difference. —The Importance of Resting Meat, by Kenji Lopez-Alt of SeriousEats.com

Illustration of cross-section of a muscle fiber reabsorbing some water while resting.

In addition to giving your steak the chance to stay juicy, the resting period also gives you a chance to get that delicious compound butter melting on the top!

Compound butter

Compound butter is a term for butter that has flavorful ingredients mixed in with it. Compound butters are easy to prepare and delicious, plus, their ability to be frozen for a long time makes them a great make-ahead item that you can bring out at a moment’s notice to add a gourmet touch to any meal.

To make a compound butter, simply choose your flavorings and place them with your butter into a stand mixer. Use the paddle attachment to mix them together until softened and well combined. Form the butter into a loose cylinder and wrap it in parchment or wax paper. You can store it in the refrigerator for 3-4 days or in the freezer for months.

Flavoring the butter is up to you. The most famous compound butter is Maître d’Hôtel butter, which is flavored with lemon juice, parsley, salt, and pepper. For this cook, we made two butters, one with herbs and lemon zest, the other with Stilton blue cheese. But let your imagination run wild! Add herbs or spices, your favorite BBQ rub, or even sweet ingredients like brown sugar and cinnamon—though maybe not for steak!

Beef Temperature Chart

Beef Doneness	Final Doneness Temperature
Rare	120–130°F (49–54°C)
Medium Rare	130–135°F (54–57°C)
Medium	135–140°F (57–60°C)
Medium Well	145–155°F (63–68°C)
Well Done	155°F (68°C) and up

You can accompany this dish with golden, crispy french fries for an authentic bistro presentation, but no matter how you serve it, temperature and thermal principles really are necessary to cook a steak properly. By using thermometers to actually watch the temperature and a two-stage process that ends with searing, you can get edge-to-edge perfect doneness. If you’re going to get good quality steaks for Father’s Day or any other occasion, they deserve nothing less.